Quote Originally Posted by Fynn View Post
And Carny, in most definitions of Dionysian periods, pessimism is indeed one of their traits. We had the whole Memento Mori with the Medieval period, with Baroque later coming back to it, and then Romanticism was all about uprisings and fighting oppressors which can't be done before you acknowledge that there is an oppressor and that's bad. Romanticism especially, when I think about it, with the people's romanticizing (hehe) of the past, because everything now is bad, escapism to the realm of fantasy, again, for the same reason. Romanticism is all about that pessimism and nostalgia. Of course that doesn't mean all art from that period is that - far from it. But it's a general trend.
Well, me being an English Lit student, the first thing that pops into my mind when we're talking about Romanticism are the Romantic poets of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. That's who I'm talking about when I say "I beg to differ". The Romanticism of the Romantic poets is "my" Romanticism, so that's what I'm defending as not being pessimistic or nostalgic. I understand that you might be using a broader definition, but it's not one that fits with "my" Romanticism.

To categorise the writings of the Romantic poets as being mainly pessimistic is a gross misreading. Yes, there's lot about breaking free of the chains of oppressors and oppressive dogmas, but that's not pessimistic: acknowledging the existence of oppression isn't pessimism. What's more, they believed in the possibility of a more free future, which they could help to create through their writing. Hardly a pessimistic position.

As for nostalgic, that's another misreading. Yes, the Romantic poets often evoked the notion of a past "Golden Age", but they used it primarily as a literary device to highlight the oppressive power structures of the present, not because they believed the past was actually better. The "Golden Age" was used as a symbol of what the world could be, and so in reality is more of a projection of a better future than of the past.