Characteristics of Romanticism: Via Harriet

Rothenberg's Poetry for the Millennium presents this as a checklist for Romanticism (19th century and beyond):

1. A challenge to closure.
2. A conscious emphasis on defamiliarization.
3. A foregrounding of emotions, feelings, and perceptions…as process and experiment.
4. The poet as visionary/seer.
5. The poet as a conduit for other voices.
6. An erasure of the boundaries between poetry and other forms of composition and speculation.
7. At its finest, a poetry that allows for the guiding principle of uncertainty.
8. Alongside the celebration of beauty (both “intellectual” and physical), a recurring exploration of the ugly and the grotesque.
9. A calling into question of traditional religious forms.
10. Alongside Romantic ideas of fancy and fantasy, an emergence of a new realism. . .an attention to the details of the everyday world.
11. A heightened sense of the transgressive set against an officially sanctioned ethos of gentility and conformity.
12. A widespread experience of exile.
13. Changes in form, including irregular forms, prose poetry, the fragment as a conscious poetic form, improvisation and performance poetry, sound poetry, dialect experiments, and verbal/visual interaction.