Neoclassical and Romantic Writing Essay

Neoclassical and Romantic movements cover the period of 1750 to 1850. Neoclassicism showed life to be more rational than it really was. The Romantics favored an interest in nature, picturesque, violent, and the sublime. Unlike Neoclassicism, which stood for the order, reason, tradition, society, intellect, and formal diction, Romanticism allowed people to get away from the rational views of life and concentrate on an emotional and sentimental side of humanity. In this movement the emphasis was on emotion, passion, imagination, individual, and natural diction. Resulting in part from the liberation and egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution, the Romantic Movement had in common only a revolt against the rules of classicism. Neoclassicism was an artistic and intellectual movement, beginning in the mid-17th century in England, both progressive and traditional in its goal of rivaling the literary and artistic accomplishments of Augustus Caesar’s day and the classical period in general. This movement could be characterized as a â€Å"religion of the head. † Neoclassical writers imitated great poems of the past because of the belief that men had agreed on certain fixed ways of writing across the centuries. Rules for pastoral poetry, the satire and the epic were respectfully followed Romanticism was an artistic and intellectual movement that spread across Europe in the late 18th and early 19th century. This movement was a reaction in direct opposition to the Age of Reason in its understanding of human happiness and the means to achieve it. This literary revolution could be characterized as a â€Å"religion of the heart. † Romantics, in direct opposition to the previous age, believed in the guiding forces of nature. They believed that nature held all truth, and didn’t search for such in science and mathematics as the neoclassicists did. They were impassioned and fond of beauty, as well as myth.