Romanticism swept in like a storm of moonlight and melancholy, handing us poetry laced with longing, dreams disguised as destiny, and emotions turned up to eleven. It gave voice to the soul, draped in velvet and mist, and invited us to feel more deeply than perhaps we ever had.
There’s no denying its beauty—or its power. But now, we need to have a little chat.
Today, we’re flipping the mirror. Because alongside the grandeur, Romanticism handed us something else: the quiet but insistent idea that feeling is fact. That perception is truth. That our most fleeting inner whims might carry eternal significance simply because they feel profound.
It’s time to take a step back. Not to discard what was gained, but to ask what was lost along the way.
The Paradox of Romanticism
You might be thinking — hold up. Didn’t we just spend three whole episodes celebrating emotional authenticity and the raw expression of the inner self? Why, yes. Yes we did. And now we’re going to do something Romanticism never liked to do: we’re going to question itself.
Romanticism, for all its emphasis on truth and beauty, often blurred the lines between feeling something deeply and that feeling being true. It glorified the subjective, the personal, the instinctual. And in doing so, it flirted with a dangerous lie: that because I feel something intensely, it must therefore be real, right, and righteous.
But here’s the rub — feelings are not facts.
Romanticism didn’t invent emotional reasoning, but it definitely gave it a press kit. In an age emerging from cold Enlightenment rationalism, the poets of the 19th century wanted to break the mold. And they did — by tossing the mold into a stormy sea of passion, idealism, and mood swings.
The paradox is this: in seeking deeper truth, Romanticism made truth entirely personal. In rejecting stale intellectualism, it embraced emotional impulsivity. The movement that claimed to honor the soul sometimes handed the keys to the ego. It created a world where personal truth trumped shared reality. And here we are, two centuries later, still drunk on that very idea.
Absolutes and the Abyss of Relativism
Let’s talk about truth — the kind that exists whether you feel it or not. The kind that stands tall even when your emotions throw a tantrum.
Cultural relativism, while cozy and fashionable, is a seductive spiral. It tells us there’s no right or wrong — just perspectives. That morality is a social construct. That truth is elastic. That my lived experience trumps all.
And to be clear, lived experience matters. But when it becomes the only metric for truth, you’ve untethered from reality. That’s not justice. That’s solipsism.
In a relativistic world, a person can destroy their marriage, ghost their friends, and justify it all by saying, “I’m living my truth.”
Oscar Wilde — that delightful, flamboyant firebrand of paradox — once said:
“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
Wilde understood something: that self-perception is murky, fragile, and often wrong. He used satire to slice through narcissism and peel back the layers. But here’s what’s rarely discussed: Wilde didn’t stay in that relativistic fog. Later in life, after enduring scandal, betrayal, and prison, he turned toward Christianity. He found in faith what he had missed in fame: the solidity of truth not rooted in the self.
His final published work, De Profundis, written from prison, is a deeply emotional, yet startlingly lucid reflection on suffering, humility, and spiritual clarity:
“Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.”
The man who once mocked the world with irony came to see the limitations of living purely for feeling and expression. And perhaps in that contradiction, we find the very essence of the truth we’re trying to reclaim.
Poets Who Pushed Back
Not every poet bought the full Romantic delusion. Some saw the danger and pulled back the curtain.
T.S. Eliot, in Four Quartets, writes:
“The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”
Eliot recognized that emotional certainty can be a form of arrogance. Real truth, he said, comes not from passion but from quiet surrender to the eternal. In Ash Wednesday, he writes:
“Because I do not hope to turn again / Because I do not hope / Because I do not hope to turn…”
This isn’t despair; it’s surrender — an abandonment of self-driven narrative for a more transcendent one. Eliot lived at the border of Romanticism and modernism but crossed into territory that Romanticism feared: submission.
W. H. Auden, in September 1, 1939, captures the dangers of personal delusion in a world on the brink:
“All I have is a voice / To undo the folded lie, / The romantic lie in the brain…”
He ends with the famous:
“We must love one another or die.”
But even Auden recoiled later at how emotionally simplistic that sounded. Because love is not just a feeling. It’s an act. A discipline. A moral decision.
And then there’s George Herbert, far less fashionable but far more grounded. In The Elixir, he writes:
“A servant with this clause / Makes drudgery divine…”
This isn’t emotional excess. It’s the sacred ordinary. Herbert ties the act of devotion not to what one feels but to what one chooses.
The Irony of It All
Yes, this stance might seem ironic, even hypocritical, after celebrating Romanticism’s lyrical glorification of human feeling. But here’s the twist: the ability to critique something from within its legacy is the mark of maturity.
Romanticism was a necessary rebellion. It gave breath to beauty, dignity to the individual, and voice to the soul. But like all revolutions, it eventually began to devour its own ideals.
It replaced the rigid structures of reason with the chaotic improvisation of feeling, and in doing so, often sacrificed clarity for catharsis. What began as an exploration of inner life turned into a doctrine of personal sovereignty, where truth is treated as bespoke, custom-fitted to our emotions like a well-tailored coat.
And here’s the real paradox: a movement that longed for transcendence ended up chained to the self.
But it doesn’t have to end there.
From Feeling to Formation
Romanticism gave us a lot of powerful tools: introspection, imagination, emotional honesty. But tools can build or destroy. The real question is what we do with them.
The danger isn’t just that we feel too much — it’s that we obey our feelings without question. And when emotion becomes the standard, we lose our bearings.
What if the true measure of maturity isn’t how deeply we feel, but how consistently we choose the good? What if self-expression matters less than self-governance?
Romanticism asks us to explore the self. But wisdom asks us to refine it. Romanticism urges us to express ourselves. But discipline urges us to master ourselves.
Because when emotion is paired with wisdom, when feeling is tempered by truth, when the soul is rooted in something beyond its own echo chamber—we get not just poetry, but meaning. When emotion walks alone, it wanders. But when it walks beside truth, it leads us home.
A Call to Anchor
So where does that leave us? It leaves us with both a challenge and an invitation:
It’s not enough to feel right. We must be right.
It’s not enough to speak our truth. We must seek the truth.
Feelings matter. But they don’t define you.
Perception shapes you. But it doesn’t save you.
Truth doesn’t care how you feel about it. That’s what makes it dependable.
Romanticism gave us the tools to look inward. Now it’s up to us to look outward — and upward — and rediscover the strength of absolutes.
So the next time your heart whispers, “This must be true because I feel it,” let your mind ask, “But is it?”
Until next time, I’m Allen Mowery. And remember: when the world tells you to trust your heart… maybe ask your brain to weigh in first. And possibly your conscience. And maybe even a dead poet or two.
