The Romantic Movement
(c. 1750-1860)
I must Create a System or be enslav'd by another Man's.
I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create.
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible. . . is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience.
(Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1756)
You could not enter a Gothic church without feeling a kind of awe and a vague sentiment of the Divinity. You were all at once carried back to those times when a fraternity of cenobites, after having meditated in the woods of their monasteries, met to prostrate themselves before the altar and to chant the praises of the Lord, amid the tranquility and the silence of the night. . .
Everything in a Gothic church reminds you of the labyrinths of a wood; everything excites a feeling of religious awe, of mystery, and of the Divinity.
(The Genius of Christianity, 1802)
all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings
When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I try to do is this, to forget that I have ever seen a picture.
We here allude particularly to Turner, the ablest landscape-painter now living, whose pictures are however too much abstractions or aerial perspective, and representations not properly of the objects of nature as of the medium through which they are seen. . . They are pictures of the elements of air, earth and water. The artist delights to go back to the first chaos of the world. . . All is without form and void. . .(1816)