Leopold von Ranke

Romanticism was a movement in the 1770s that focused on the primacy of the individual, inspiration, subjectivity, and the belief in the supernatural. Transcendentalism began in the late 1820s and was influenced by other movements such as Romanticism. Romanticism and Transcendentalism can be seen throughout the poems Thanatopsis, written by William Cullen Bryant, and Song of Myself, written by Walt Whitman, respectively. The tenets of Romanticism can be seen be analyzing Thanatopsis,…

“There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action” (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe). Ignorance encompasses humans of today's society. Whether coming in the form of racism or simply not having a clue as to what events are taking place around the world, many seem to not care. Technology, although imperative in our society, generates a great deal of the ignorance in our society. Imagine if humans gained the ability to obtain this technology with just a chip in the brain. A portrait of this…

Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey written by Williams Wordsworth is a very well known poem. Being a Generation one poet Wordsworth is also compared with Robert Burns and William Blake, all of whom were extremely acknowledge as brilliant men in their writings. Just as Robert Burns does in his poetry William Wordsworth's takes simple ideas and moves to more complex ideas. In the introduction to Tintern Abbey Wordsworth is traveling to an old medieval church that he had visited five…

Hans Urs von Balthasar was a Swiss theologian born in Lucerne to a well-established family. Von Balthasar joined the Society of Jesus in 1929 upon the completion of his dissertation. At the leading of Henri de Lubac, von Balthasar studied Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor where he discovered a hope for the salvation of the world. During his time as a chaplain in Basle, von Balthasar met the protestant theologian Karl Barth, who would go on to become close friend and major…

with some of you that I am sure will last a lifetime. “If you treat an individual as he is, he will stay as he is, but if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be”. ~Johann Wolfgang Von…

In the late eighteenth century, a breakthrough in literature came about, romanticism. Romanticism freed the author to write however they pleased, whether it be with emotion, passion, etc. Readers all over craved it; it excited their imaginations and toyed with their emotions like no other work could do. In a sense, romanticism was an escape from reality for these everyday folk. Not all were in love with the romanticism works, though. Some people, such as realists, opposed the idea of romanticism…

Romanticism, a literary and cultural movement from the early 19th century, rebelled against its predecessor, the Enlightenment, which stressed logic over emotion. By valuing nature, the unknown, and the supernatural, Romanticism was based in emotion over logic. This was especially seen in literature, when authors would use nature to reflect mood, as is evident in Mary Shelley’s, Frankenstein. Shelley cleverly uses nature to not only reflect the mood of her characters, but to also represent the…

Johan Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, having been written in the 19th century, was heavily influenced by the Romantic movement, as seen through three recurring romantic elements. The first of these three is the rejection of neoclassicism, and an emphasis of individual creativity and thought over logic and order. This element is best exemplified through Faust’s inability to ascertain the information he so seeks through logical methods, resulting in his attempts to use magic and subsequent blood-pact…

German Romanticism is a movement in both the arts and literature that originated in the late 18th century. Goethe’s Erlkönig, and ETA Hoffman’s The Sandman are both German Romantic pieces of literature. The creators of each of these pieces would view Shakespeare’s Macbeth as a German Romantic play even though it predated the movement. This is because Shakespeare’s Macbeth implements many of the same techniques which Goethe and ETA Hoffman employ throughout their works and which were…

Commencing in the early eighteenth century, the Romantic era sought not only to transform the essence of human experience through challenging the unyielding and judicious constraints in the social and political realms of neoclassicism but also to introduce revolutionarily eccentric ways of thinking, whilst provoking the ideals and notions of the period through movements in arts and literature. Mary Wollstonecraft’s earliest work of feminist philosophy “A Vindication in the Rights of Women”…