✨ Modern · Integrative

Romanticism — Feeling

"Where reason fails, poetry begins"

J.W. Goethe · 18세기 후반~19세기 초

💡 TL;DR

Romanticism — Feeling — "Where reason fails, poetry begins". Romanticism did not deny Reason — it called for what lies beyond.

📜 Origin

In the late 18th century, the shadow of pure Reason showed: measuring and calculating everything dries the soul. In 1774, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther struck Europe like a storm — a young man's love and suicide, a truth of emotion no Reason could explain. Wordsworth wrote in nature: "The Child is father of the Man." The sensitivity we lost, the child still holds.

💡 Meaning

Romanticism did not deny Reason — it called for what lies beyond. Nature's awe, art's inspiration, love's unreason, a people's feeling, a child's intuition — all truths the grid of Reason cannot catch. Kim Sowol's Azaleas, Japanese tanka, Korean sijo — all of romanticism's family.

🌏 Eastern Classic Cross-link

Zhuangzi: "Where two glances meet, the Tao is there." 2,300 years ago Zhuangzi pointed where Reason cannot reach. Some truths are not proven but met. Romanticism and Zhuangzi point to the same place — what cannot be said is the most real.

情

Compressed into One Hanja

"情" = 忄 (heart) + 青 (green/blue) — "the heart in green." Green is the color of spring. 情 is the heart freshly awakened in spring. What Romanticism painted was the same — returning from the gray adult heart to the green spring heart.

🌐 Modern Application

Korean poetry (Kim Sowol, Han Yong-un), the emotional pull of K-dramas, the lyricism of Japanese anime, and American transcendentalism (Emerson, Thoreau).