He cult of childhood

Another important element in Romanticism was the cult of childhood. The neoclassicists believed that children had savage instincts that needed to be civilized. It was only through social training that children could become sophisticated adults and contribute to society. The Romantics, on the contrary, saw the child as pure and uncorrupted. They believed that children were close to God and had powerful creative imaginations. Wordsworth called the child «The father of the Man” (My Heart Leaps Up)

Ndividualism: the Romantic Hero.

Through the greater part of the eighteenth century, men and women had for the most part been viewed as limited beings in a strictly ordered and unchanging world. The Romantic Period, on the contrary, was an age of radical individualism. Where their predecessors saw man as a social animal in his daily relations with his fellows, the Romantics saw him in his solitary state, self-communing. Where the Augustan emphasized those features that men have in common, the interests that bring them together, the Romantics asserted the importance of the individual and emphasized the special qualities of each individual’s mind.

The passions and aspirations of a Romantic hero often go far beyond an average person’s. A recurrent theme in English literature of the day was infinite longing (a desire of a moth for a star – Shelley). “Less than everything cannot satisfy a man” – Blake. Byron’s Manfred has a hero whose “aspirations were beyond the dwellers of the earth”. This view is epitomized by Goethe’s Faust.

Romanticism created its own literary types: the outcast (Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner; Byron’s Cain), the heaven-storming rebel (Shelley’s Prometheus). The characters either reject the society or are rejected by it. Sometimes this nonconformist hero is also a great sinner. Writers of that time were fascinated with the great outlaws of myth, legend or history – Cain, Satan, Faust, The Wandering Jew, and the great, flawed and contradictory figure of Napoleon.

A specifically Romantic type is artist-as-hero. Their favored literary form was a long poem about the formation of the self presented in a radical metaphor of an interior journey in quest of one’s true identity and destined spiritual home: Blake’s Milton, Wordsworth’s Prelude. Confessional prose narratives, such as De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium-Eater, as well as disguised autobiographical verse narratives such as Byron’s Childe Harold are related phenomena.

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