/lit/ - Literature

>However, though it is by no means clear what romanticism stood for, it is quite evident what it was against: the middle. Whatever its content, it was an extremist creed. Romantic artists or thinkers in the narrower sense are found on the extreme left, like the poet Shelley, on the extreme right, like Chateaubriand and Novalis, leaping from left to right like Wordsworth, Coleridge and numerous disappointed supporters of the French Revolution, leaping from royalism to the extreme left like Victor Hugo, but hardly ever among the moderates or whig-liberals in the rationalist centre, which indeed was the strong- hold of 'classicism'. 'I have no respect for the Whigs,' said the old Tory Wordsworth, 'but I have a great deal of the Chartist in me'.6 It would be too much to call it an anti-bourgeois creed, for the revolutionary and conquistador element in young classes still about to storm heaven fascinated the romantics also. Napoleon became one of their myth- heroes, like Satan, Shakespeare, the Wandering Jew and other tres- passers beyond the ordinary limits of life. The demonic element in capitalist accumulation, the limitless and uninterrupted pursuit ofmore, beyond the calculation of rationality or purpose, need or the extremes of luxury, haunted them. Some of their most characteristic heroes, Faustus and Don Juan, share this unappeasable greed with the business buccaneers of Balzac's novels.

Quotes from Hobsbawm's Age of Revolution btw

>>7038959
>Hugs