In Spain, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer deployed his romantic imagination in legends and narratives that are still read in schools to this day. Faced with the monotony of an increasingly rigid and uniform world, the Romantics advocated the power of the human mind to fantasize. After the collective trauma of the coronavirus pandemic, many young people have again turned their eyes and hearts to nature, abandoning the cities and giving new impetus to what in the late 1960s was known as neo-ruralism. For them, nature is the source of all creativity, mystery, and beauty. In a world on the verge of being engulfed by the Industrial Revolution, the Romantics took refuge in nature to recover the connection to our primary home.

The unity between human beings and nature.

There were three fundamental aspects that particularly interested the Romantics, and which again are undeniably relevant in the times in which we live. They spoke of the link between art and life, between the individual and society, between humanity and nature.” As Wulf explains: “They wanted to romanticize the whole world, and that meant perceiving it as an interconnected whole.

What is historically known as romanticism was born in Jena, Germany, more than two centuries ago, among a circle of friends comprising young personalities such as Goethe, Schlegel, Schelling, Schiller or Novalis. To be “romantic” was to discover one’s own self and to understand the peaks and troughs of life without being daunted by them, a philosophy well-suited to modern times. Originally, the adjective romantic had nothing to do with the meaning it has today, at least in popular culture. Following the success of The Invention of Nature, in which the German-British historian Andrea Wulf examined the life and work of the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self (2022) explores the romantic spirit.

Romanticism norbert wolf