Ilse’s Reviews > Romanticism and Its Discontents > Status Update

Romanticism succeeded in literature for far longer than it did in painting. Literary Romanticism is capable of many mutations because it does not rely on standard imagery. For Baudelaire,Romanticism represented the kingship of the imagination, as it did for Delacroix. The final phase of the Baudelairian attitude implies that the cult of images signifies consolation, compensation for the ills of contemporary life.

At one stage Romantic meant anything capable of being described in a novel ’dans un roman’. Even within the limits of this definition, one is legitimately aware of the fact that the Romantic Movement in France leans towards forms of literature: predominantly pastoral or pantheistic in England, predominantly revivalist and nationalist in Germany, Romanticism is consistently literary or theatrical in France.