Featured Works of Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic movement that validated the experience of intense emotion—with a particular emphasize on nature and the sublime. (From examining excerpts from The Sublime and The Beautiful, a work by Edmund Burke, one can define the sublime as excitement, pain, fear, horror, or terror). Artists of the Romantic Movement were obligated to encourage or help the reader experience and feel all emotions. Both Goethe and Edgar Allen Poe successfully do so by utilizing Romantic elements to evoke or arouse intense emotions.

Edgar Allen’s Poe story “The Black Cat” is a macabre tale that utilizes the sublime to evoke the emotions of horror and fear in readers. The narrator goes into gruesome detail about how he murders his wife. He says, “I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She laid dead upon the spot without a groan” (Poe 228). The narrator explains that he was overcome by rage. The murder of his wife was an expression of rage carried out, and in acting on these emotions, the narrator is expressing perversity. The narrator states that perverseness, “is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man” (Poe 225). This notion of perversity that the narrator speaks of is an irrational tendency of man. It suggests that human action is deeply rooted in the heart, the focal point of feelings and deep emotion. This idea is Romantic because it suggests that human actions are an impulse of the heart and cannot be controlled.

Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther is a novel that captures the misery of Werther. Goethe uses themes such as happiness, nature, and suicide as part of Romanticism. In regards to hap...

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...haracter, and artist who loves passionately and feels deeply. Goethe uses elements from nature in his work to better illustrate this flux of emotion, whereas, Poe uses subliminal elements to convey a sense of horror and terror in his work. After reading The Sorrows of Young Werther, the reader is left feeling sad for Werther and reminiscent of a time when a love was lost; after reading “The Black Cat,” one experiences a sense of terror at the fact that a man would be mad enough to murder his wife. Despite the overall differences, what makes these works Romantic is their ability to arouse intense emotions in the reader.

Works Cited

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von, and William Rose. The Sorrows of Young Werther. London: Scholartis, 1929. Print.

Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Black Cat." The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Vintage, 1975. 223-30. Print.