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Romanticism destroyed nature

Romanticism was a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that began in the second half of the 18th century and grew in reaction to the Industrial Revolution and what it saw as the cold scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment. Central to Romanticism was the idea of strong, spontaneous emotion as the authentic source of aesthetic experience, especially the sort of emotion experienced in confronting the overwhelming grandeur or irresistible power of untamed nature.

The Romantics believed that nature was the inherent possessor of abstract qualities such as truth, beauty, independence and democracy, and the work of writers such as Keats and Wordsworth prompted an appreciation of the "sublime" in nature. However, it has been suggested that the Romantics' interest in scientific enquiry and the Romantic notion of nationalism are partly to blame for such environmentally destructive events as the industrial revolution and the major conflicts of the 20th century.