ABSTRACT
Contemporary with the rise and growth of idealism and liberalism, and often in the same individuals, was the birth and expansion of romanticism; a simultaneity that is not a mere juxtaposition, but a relation or a multiplicity of relations, as it will be advisable to make clear and to keep in mind. Theoretic and speculative romanticism is the revolt, the criticism, and the attack against literary academicism and philosophic intellectualism, which had dominated in the illuminist age. It awakened the feeling for genuine and great poetry, and set forth the doctrine thereof in the new science of the imagination called aesthetics. Rather than to the separation from the traditional faith, this malady was related to the difficulty of truly appropriating and living the new, which required, if it were to be lived and carried out, courage and manliness, and the renunciation of certain outworn motives now grown impossible, flattering and comfortable though they might be.
