This document summarizes the key differences between Romanticism and Classicism in literature. Classicism emphasizes form, simplicity, and restrained emotion, drawing inspiration from ancient Greek and Roman works. It values reason and believes nature can be understood rationally. Romanticism values emotion, individuality, and experimentation as a reaction against Classicism. Romantics saw nature as mysterious rather than rational and focused on rural life rather than urban society. While both have strengths, each carried to an extreme can damage literature. The best works balance these tendencies with moderation.

1. Romanticism and Classicism

2. CLASSICISM
“Classicism is aesthetic attitudes based on culture, art
and literature of ancient Rome and Greece characterized
by emphasis on form, simplicity and restrained emotion.”

3. Classicism
 Romantic period was followed by the classical period dominated by Dryden, pope,
Addison, swift and Dr. Johnson.
 Advocates of classicism value tradition, regularity, order and simplicity of form.
 Classicism followed the three unities of time, place and action.
 Nature and human nature could be understood by reason and thought.
 According to the classicists, it was literature function to show everyday values of
humanity.
 Classicism uses strict, rigid and logical diction and theme.
 Classicists believed that nature was a self contained machine like a watch whose laws
of operation could be rationally understood.

4. “It a movement in literature that drew inspiration from the
classical age.”
Neo classicism
John Milton, Alexander pope, john Dryden, Jonathan swift
Neoclassicism was based on classical themes and forms.
(1660-1798)
Reaction against renaissance

5. Romanticism
Break away from traditions and conventions and make way
for individuality and experimentation.
(Reaction against neo classicism)
The romantic spirit is an ever an enduring principle, in the artistic temperament.
The essential elements of romantic spirit are curiosity and the love of beauty.

6. Romanticism(1798-1832)
 Elizabethan period was the first romantic period dominated by Marlowe,
Shakespeare, Spenser etc.
 The later part of the 18th century and the early part of 19th century is called Romantic
period whose prominent poets were wordsworth, John Keats, Byron Shelley.
 Romanticism only follows the unity of action, but doesn’t follow the unities of time and
place.
 Romanticism uses simple diction of common men.
 The romanticists thought of the world as a place to express their ideas and beliefs.
 Romanticists viewed nature as mysterious and ever changing.
 Romantics stressed the human potential for social progress and spiritual growth.

7. Belief in reason
Interest in urban society
Impersonal objectivity
Generic abstraction
Realistic recognition of things
Classicism
Romanticism
Discovery of beauty
Attachment to
concrete particulars
Belief in feelings
subjectivism
Interest in rural
solitude
Emphasize on ideal of
intensity
Emphasize on ideal of order

8. Point of differences
 Classicists are makers they use diction to produce literature guided by their
rational minds while romantics are guided by heart and imagination.
 The treatment of emotion is one of the primary ways in which both are differ.
The romantics placed a higher value on he expression of strong emotion while
classicists didn’t shy away from describing emotional charged scenes
 Classicism put mankind in restrains of philosophy, regional, moral values, on
the other hand, romantics broke away from all these chain playing havocs
with imagination and fantasy.
 Classicism stressed on reason while romanticism on imagination.

9. When both tendencies carried to the extremes do much damage to genuine literature.
Classical tendency
degenerates into rigid
formalism and slavish
obedience to rules which
suppress the originality of
writer.
Romantic tendency turns
itself into license and lack
of restraint which leads to
chaos
The best type of literature follows the phrase “nothing too much”

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