cism was, in the most general terms, a reaction against the classical, or neo-classical, approach that had dominated culture since the early Enlightenment. Though most of the elements of art and thought that play a role in Romanticism were already present in most types of art, the Romantic is marked by a radical shift in emphasis. In the broadest terms Romanticism "represents the period of an apparent domination of instinct over reason, of imagination over form, of heart over head." The rationalism of the Enlightenment was not, the Romantics claimed, taking into account significant portions of human experience. The Romantic theorists turned from the dominant notion of order as the source of beauty in art to the fragmentary, the fleeting, the sudden, individual inspiration, and even the irrational. Nature replaced the order of the urban environment as a source of inspiration and there was "a turn from the rational and the explicable towards the mystic and supernatural" in religion (e.g., conversions to Roman Catholicism in the Protestant nations) and in the "merely spooky" (e.g., ghosts and other terrifying manifestations). Other important strains in Romanticism were the interest in the Medieval past and a new interest in the notion of national cultures. The essence of Romanticism lay in the "interplay between the plenitude of its diverse elements--ranging from the picturesque, exotic, historicist, and archaic to the poetic, imaginative, symbolic, unique, and expressive--and their underlying unity."
It was only by means of the individual's creative powers, however, that this unity found expression. The singular focus of Romantic theory on the individual's expression of his feelings derived from Immanuel Kant's philosophy. Kant held that "the source of human knowledge could be traced back to certain purely subjective a priori premises of the faculty of mind." It was commonly thought that this meant, in brief, that what is...