The Enlightenment versus Romanticism

Enlightenment writers valued thought, reason, and common sense.		Romantic writers valued emotions, imagination, and individual experience.
In the Enlightenment, literature was the artful turning of real-life happenings into a literary composition portraying a fictional character.		In Romanticism, literature expressed the personal feelings of the author, as they were spontaneous, and not the man in action in the composition.
Enlightenment writers paid attention to the poetic "eye," where the reader sees the other person through the author's eye.		The Romantics paid attention to the poetic "I," meaning the reader sees the author in the protagonist.
For Enlightenment writers, human beings were an important part of the social organization, and were the main subject of literature.		Romantic writers appreciated nature in their literature; the individual's relationship to nature was paramount.
To Enlightenment writers, formal rules, diction, vocabulary, and grammar were very important.		The Romantics saw formal rules, diction, vocabulary, and grammar as less important; they focused on using "the language of the common man."
Enlightenment writers believed in order in all things.		Romantic writers believed in the spontaneity of thought and action.
Enlightenment writers wrote about objective issues that concerned society as a whole, such as politics and religion.		Romantics writers wrote about the subjective experiences of the individual, such as one's desires, hopes, and dreams.
Enlightenment writers strictly maintained traditional standardsin form and genre.		Romantic writers believed in experimentation in form and genre.
Enlightenment writers exercised controlled wit.		Romantic writers celebrated strong passion and vision.
Enlightenment writers focused mainly on adult concerns, primarily those of the ruling class.		Romantic writers reflected on the experiences of childhood, primitive societies, and the common man.

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Characteristic	Enlightenment	Romanticism	Realism	Modernism
Valued Qualities in Literature	Decorum, concision, restraint, balance, reason, regularity, wit	Emotion, introspection, passion, sublimity, beauty, spontaneity, irregularity, picturesque	Realistic, clear, precise, serious, truthful, accurate	Abstract, strange, fragmented, innovative, disconnected, surreal, absurd, collage-like
Subjects	manners, politics, social concerns -- “The proper study of mankind is Man.” – Alexander Pope	Humankind, nature, the soul, individuality, women, children, animals, flowers, rural, common people	The current time, facts of an individual’s life, housewives, business / commerce, social conditions, everyday occurrences	The human mind, violence, war, death, hyperreality, jazz, mass media, social feminism, the self as confused, political change, loneliness, human anxiety, the outcast
Social Values	absolute, public, rational	private, spiritual (but not organized religion), universal spirit in nature and humankind	objectivity, moral behavior, money, life doesn’t always have happy endings	abandonment of past social, religious, and artistic traditions; the New, uncertainty, ambiguity; “profound truth” is relative; “God is dead.” Nietzche
The Writer	Witty, gentlemanly, moral, incisive, rational, capable of moral outrage	Solitary, reflective, inspired, a person of imagination, visionary	Detached observers, recorder of facts, deemphasizing the writer’s importance	Remote, detached, angry, emotionally withdrawn, alienated, ironic
Settings	The urban; rural settings are ignorant and unmannerly	Rural, the countryside, city is the seat of corruption and greed	The city, the factory, inside the house	“city consciousness,” masses isolated within the city, the internal minds of characters, symbolic settings: jungle, wasteland, desert
Allusion / History	Biblical, Classical Greece and Rome	The mythic, medieval, gothic, but not Classical references	Contemporary events—here and now	Quantum physics, myth, Bible, foreign languages, street life, personal, psychology, sociology, agonized recollection of the past
Language	Dressed up language, formal, full of allusions, didactic	Beautiful, colloquial, creative	Technical, clinical, detailed, realistic	Experimental, self-conscious, without punctuation or capitalization, breakdown of rational thought, improvisational, mixture of styles
Genres	Satire, epistle, epic, sonnet	Lyric, ode	Novel, drama, newspaper	Mass communication (radio, TV, film), stream of consciousness, mixed forms (prose poems)
Form	Formal, regular meter, regular rhyme scheme	Less formal, may have irregular meter and rhyme	Natural, realistic, not contrived	Free verse, experimental (often as important as the meaning), riddle, puzzle, game between author and reader, non-chronological
Ideas about Nature	The order of things, harmony, rationality, the real world as we experience it is divinely ordered	External world is beautiful, nature is creative and moral, nature inspires human imagination	Described in clinical detail, biology influenced view of nature (genetics, natural selection)	World as a wasteland, decaying, can be manipulated by humanity, writers can change the way readers view nature, nature is radically different than it used to be (bomb)