Dark Romanticism

[citation needed] Romanticism's celebration of euphoria and sublimity has always been dogged by an equally intense fascination with melancholia, insanity, crime and shady atmosphere; with the options of ghosts and ghouls, the grotesque, and the irrational.

[1][2] According to the critic G. R. Thompson, "the Dark Romantics adapted images of anthropomorphized evil in the form of Satan, devils, ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and ghouls" as emblematic of human nature.

[3] Thompson sums up the characteristics of the sub-genre, writing: Fallen man's inability fully to comprehend haunting reminders of another, supernatural realm that yet seemed not to exist, the constant perplexity of inexplicable and vastly metaphysical phenomena, a propensity for seemingly perverse or evil moral choices that had no firm or fixed measure or rule, and a sense of nameless guilt combined with a suspicion the external world was a delusive projection of the mind—these were major elements in the vision of man the Dark Romantics opposed to the mainstream of Romantic thought.[4]"Cannibals?

I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgement, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate de fois gras.” – Herman Melville's Moby Dick: or The Whale To fully grasp the idea of dark romanticism, we must recognize the attributes that come with the artwork so we can identify them.

Fuseli's unique pictorial language impacted a number of painters, including William Blake, whose famous watercolor The Great Red Dragon is on display at the Brooklyn Museum.

[8]Dark Romanticism arguably began in Germany, with writers such as E. T. A. Hoffmann,[9] and Ludwig Tieck, and also pre-Romantic figure of Christian Heinrich Spiess, — though their emphasis on existential alienation, the demonic in sex, and the uncanny,[10] was offset at the same time by the more homely cult of Biedermeier.

[11] Like the Gothic novel, Schwarze Romantik is a genre based on the terrifying side of the Middle Ages, and frequently feature the same elements (castles, ghost, monster, etc.).

The motive of secret societies is also present in Karl Grosse's Horrid Mysteries (1791–1794) and Christian August Vulpius's Rinaldo Rinaldini, the Robber Captain (1797).

[16] British authors such as Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley, and John William Polidori, who are frequently linked to Gothic fiction, are also sometimes referred to as Dark Romantics.

The American form of this sensibility centered on the writers Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, with Charles Brockden Brown being a predecessor.

[18] As opposed to the perfectionist beliefs of Transcendentalism, these darker contemporaries emphasized human fallibility and proneness to sin and self-destruction, as well as the difficulties inherent in attempts at social reform.

French authors such as Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud echoed the dark themes found in the German and English literature.