Reason During The Enlightenment Period

During the seventeenth century the Enlightenment period believed in the importance of reason. The philosophers and writers during this time focused on what exactly it meant to be a human. The Enlightenment saw the universe has a machine that runs on its own and has set laws. They believed the universe was knowable through reason and it could be controllable. There are three main actions that pushed the period from Enlightenment to Romanticism. First, was Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher can arguably be the first person to start the Romantic Revolution. Second, the French Revolution, this revolt contended on governmental decree established by reason, not monarchist heredity. Third, the Enlightenment thinkers pursued reason to much, which

According to Shannon Heath in her article Romantic Politics, she says, “It is in this confrontation to monarchy, religion, and social difference that Enlightenment ideals of equality, citizenship, and human rights were manifested. These beliefs had profound influence on the Romantic poets.” The Revolution affected the Romantics in different ways. One way was writers such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge originally pitied with the rational and civil values of the Revolution. Wordsworth and Coleridge interpreted the Revolution’s highlights people being equal into the way of the average man and little topic material found in Lyrical Ballads. Heath continues in her article, “Wordsworth’s everyday language and subject choices look like a literary revolution that mirrors the historical revolution by breaking down the boundaries that separated poetry with its elevated characters, plots, and diction from ordinary representation.” On the other hand, whoever, poets such as Lord Byron and Percy Shelley believed the Revolution’s values were on a supplementary uncompromising basis. The Romantics, to carry out the revolutionary idea had serval results. It started a time in English literature, after the Revolution, in which the writings were a sort of bend towards independence and unconventionality. According to an article Literary Theory and Criticism

These people were very optimistic, believing that everything happens for a reason, and good will work out in the end. According to an article titled Romanticism Versus Enlightenment the author states, “At the end of this period, mass movements in America and France, and the Industrial Revolution in England, changed the world forever, making people realize that society in the 19th century was the first that could conceive itself to be radically different from the past.” This directed to a sense of discouragement and separation began to spread, and the Romantic period ascended out of the ashes. Romanticist thinkers believed that the developments made by the Enlightenment thinkers were forming a tyrannical, and orthodox culture. They also believed that science and reason could not fully understand the universe and humankind. They thought, unlike the Enlightenment, that everything did not happen for a reason, and some of the stuff that happens is not ultimately good. The Romantic thinkers and writers focused on the beauty of nature, and the self. They sought to understand what truly made humankind