Romanticism Quotes
I don't like the definition 'war correspondent'. It is history, not journalism, that has condemned the Middle East to war. I think 'war correspondent' smells a bit, reeks of false romanticism: it has too much of the whiff of Victorian reporters who would view battles from hilltops in the company of ladies, immune to suffering, only occasionally glancing towards the distant pop-pop of cannon fire.
Robert Fisk
"Modern” poetry is, essentially, an extension of romanticism; it is what romantic poetry wishes or finds it necessary to become. It is the end product of romanticism, all past and no future; it is impossible to go further by any extrapolation of the process by which we have arrived, and certainly it is impossible to remain where we are-who could endure a century of transition?
Randall Jarrell
Imagism was a reductio ad absurdum of one or two tendencies of romanticism, such a beautifully and finally absurd one that it is hard to believe it existed as anything but a logical construction; and what imagist found it possible to go on writing imagist poetry? A number of poets have stopped writing entirely; others, like recurring decimals, repeat the novelties they commeced with, each time less valuably than before. And there are surrealist poetry, and political poetry, and all the othe refuges of the indigent.
Randall Jarrell
I have had a long talk with Renoir. He admitted that the whole crowd – Durand and his former admirers – were shouting at him, deploring his attempt to abandon his 'Romantic' period. He seems very sensitive to what we think of his exhibition. I told him that as far as we were concerned, the search for unity should be the aim of every intelligent artist. – that even in spite of serious faults, it was more intelligent and artistic than wallowing in romanticism.
Camille Pissarro
The truth lies somewhere between these two aesthetics [static Cubism and dynamic Futurism]. The 'pure form' of w:Ingres led inevitably to a life-less Platonism; the lyricism and Romanticism of Eugène Delacroix no longer tailed with our cerebral and geometric age.... as in all great ages, today's artwork must be the synthesis of these two things.
Gino Severini
Is not just a faded echo of the feeble voice of decadent romanticism but an authentic Indian English utterance exquisitely tuned to the composite to Indian ethos, bringing home to the unbiased reader all the opulence, pageantry and charm of Indian life, and the spenders of Indian scene.
Sarojini Naidu
Romanticism, like the Rousseauist Swinging Sixties, misunderstands the Dionysian as the pleasure principle, when it is in fact the gross continuum of pleasure-pain. Worshiping nature and seeking political and sexual freedom, Romanticism ends in imaginative entrammelment of every kind. Perfect freedom is intolerable and therefore impossible.
Camille Paglia
Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities; and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a chance and you will het Progress. One can define the classical quite clearly as the exact opposite to this. Man is an extraordinary fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organization that anything decent can be got out of him.
T. E. Hulme
In the old romanticism the poem was an uncommon effect of common experience on the poet. All interest in the poem centred in this mysterious capacity of the poet for overfeeling, for being overaffected. In Poe the old romanticism ended and the new romanticism began. That is, the interest was broadened to include the reader: the end of the poem was pushed ahead a stage, from the poet to the reader. The uncommon effect of experience on the poet became merely incidental to the uncommon effect which he might have on the reader. Mystery was replaced by science; inspiration by psychology.
Laura Riding
