Contrasts between the Romantic Syndrome and the Enlightenment Syndrome: Metaphysics

Abstract

So far, we have drawn our examples of romantic taste exclusively from verse. Our conceptual scheme will certainly be far from useless even if it provides no more than a relatively precise and operational definition of romanticism in poetry. It will be still more useful, however, if we can show that the same pattern of romantic properties — soft-focus, dynamism, continuity, etc. — show up in many other media as well, for we will then have at our disposal a set of concepts with a very wide range of applicability and therefore capable of analyzing a culture as a whole.