I'm a Romantic at Heart

Romanticism isn't about boy meets girl, it is about the way nature asserts, or reasserts itself over the work of man. It is about man being of nature, inspired by it and creating work to honour it. It is about the individual as a creator of beautiful things. Noted Romantics include Scott, Byron, Shelley, Mary Shelley, Taylor Colerridge and Turner.

Tintern Abbey by JMW Turner

As a movement it began as a reaction to Enlightenment, a period of scientific discovery and invention that set the ball rolling for the Industrial Revolution. Some people, then as now, feared that industrialisation would over run the country and destroy the beauty of the British countryside. The natural intuitive instinct of man was prized by the Romantics over rationalism. They valued ingenuity, authentic authorship and inspiration above laborious repetition and recording of data.

So I am a contradiction. I love science, particularly physics, and yet I hanker for the realm of the imagination, the lone individual rising above to create works of heroic individuality. I have an enlightened head and a romantic heart!