What are some of the main ideas that underpin romanticism?

feelings, emotions, and imagination take priority over logic and facts ("Anything you want you can have if you only want it enough." cf. romance narrative)

belief in children's innocence and wisdom; youth as a golden age; adulthood as corruption and betrayal

nature as beauty and truth, esp. the sense of nature as the sublime (god-like awesomeness mixing ecstatic pleasure mixed with pain, beauty mixed with terror)

heroic individualism; the individual separate from the masses

"outsiders" as representatives of special worth excluded by rigid societies or irrational norms

nostalgia for the past

desire or will as personal motivation

intensification, excess, and extremes (see Romantic rhetoric)

common people idealized as dependable source of true common sense and sentiment

idealized or abstract settings; characters as symbolic types

the Gothic as nightmare world of intense emotions and complex psychology