If the images and ideas on these pages have a beginning, it is in Romanticism. There is a heightened interest in ruins as an image and/or conceit. We most typically associate it with the Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron. Webster's Dictionary defines Romanticism:
''As a critical term romanticism generally denotes the principles, characteristics, or spirit of the movement, the romantic movement, primarily in literature, for reasserting imagination and sentiment and emphasizing individualism in thought and expression as against the restrictive formality of classicism.''
Scholars have also contrasted the Romantic movement with Classicism on the grounds that its understanding of the world is founded on an appreciation of its infinite nature, whereas in the Classicist paradigm the world could be mapped perfectly and completely. This included much use of rural imagery, set in opposition to what the Romantics perceived as the spiritual bleakness of town and city—what Harbison describes as a "healthy distrust of the metropolis" (Harbison, 91). Nature is grand, enduring, infinite; man's existence and achievements are fleeting.
Ruins of dead civilisations played a large role in this rural imagery. The irony is, that while Romanticism was based upon an appreciation of infinity, this found its expression in an understanding of the world as fragments, as ruins—this was the limit of man's capacity for understanding the world around him (MacFarland, 29).
Part of this understanding of the nature's grandeur involves the concept of the sublime. In his A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke argued that the main response to the sublime was one of astonishment. "Astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended with some of horror" and from horror there followed fear, a sense of danger, and an appreciation of vast power (Radisch, 133, quoting Burke).
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