was literature, art philosophy etc. better before the romantic

literally anything, romance is shit and should be kept out of literature.

>>9789010
I mean Romantic Movement as in the Romantics

>>9788984
I wouldn't necessarily say so,
music: Well you have Haydn and Mozart (and early Beethoven)in the classical period, which is nice, but can get a bit boring in the long run, also Mozart brought the style to perfection so there had to happen something new and thanks to late Beethoven we got romantic period with; Brahms, Mahler, Liszt, Chopin, Wagner, Strauß, Schumann etc.
so all in all romantic > classic
lit: here I can only speak about my own country (germany), but I think classical period is superior (Goethe, Schiller etc.) than romantic, but again I like me some Heine and Eichendorf and it made people like ETA Hoffman possible
in England you have poets like Shelley, Keats and Byron, which is also nice,
all in all I think romanticism was a necessary transition period
art: classiscism > romanticism by far

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>>9789634
>Brahms, Mahler, Liszt, Chopin, Wagner, Strauß, Schumann etc.

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>>9789638

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>>9788984
English poetry is all downhill after Pope

The 18thC picaresque novel from Sterne, Smollett or Fielding is preferable to the bloated 19thC memes

No, it made modernism possible which is the acme of human thought and expression.

>>9788984
technically and mathematically, yes

meaningfully and spiritually, no

>>9788984
I'll bite. WHAT THE FUCK IS A SPOOK?

>>9790821
it's a spook

>>9788984
Yes. Romanticism started the trend of rejecting all standards of form for subjectivism. As >>9790586 recognizes, even self-styled "anti-Romantics" like Eliot and Pound were actually more "Romantic" than the writers they criticized (Eliot was influenced by the French symbolists who were influenced by Poe, for example; Pound's ancestors were the Aestheticists like Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Yeats). Both Eliot and Pound were charlatans who did drastic damage to poetry as an art. The best poets of the 20th century were people like Louise Bogan, Yvor Winters, and L.E. Sissman who rejected the loose associationism of modern poetry in favor of clear, precise, plain statement.

In painting, Romanticism led to Impressionism which led to modern art, most of which is completely talentless. In music it led to the pretentious and flatulent art music of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, which was and is so bad that the general public would rather listen to niggers mumbling into a microphone.

Now, the greatest age of English literature was the English Renaissance: the literature of the Tudor, Elizabethan, and Jacobean eras. This is the age where we got Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Greville, Gascoigne, etc. The Romantics don't even approach the greatness of that era.

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>>9791556
>the general public's dismissal of 20th century serious music was because the music was bad and not because of the fetish-character of music listening brought on by the culture industry
>19th century music wasn't listener friendly
>plebs get a say in what is good to begin with

>>9791556
I take it you're one of those people who think that poetry is all about rhyme and rithm. Or that painting is all about how real it is. Or that music...fuck it, you don't know anything about that.

Let me guess. You are either a mediocre lit major who struggled all through college to find a way of explaining why the proffessors criticised you or you are a STEMfag with rightist beliefs that only uses the arts as reasons for >muh degeneration

>>9790821
It's when a concept is created which is supposedly valid to worship in and of itself, and which people convince themselves that they worship for reasons other than self-interest. For instance, the state, family, God, morality, etc.

Stirner calls them "spooks" because he sees that ultimately, psychologically, behind following any of them, everyone is still being egoistic; either that, or deluding themselves that they are doing something good for their ego when in fact they are harming themselves. They're just hiding the egoism behind an ideal, a "ghost" or a spook. For instance, someone says that the state must be served for the best of all, and is even willing to die for the state. As Stirner sees it, the person follows the state because they believe the state will ultimately do what is best for them, and is willing to die for the state because they are absorbed by the feelings of patriotism, of self-love and glory and heroism this makes them feel. Religious beliefs might also make them think that they'll go to heaven for it (again, the egoism behind such so-called self-sacrifice). It makes them feel really cool.

Stirner's philosophy is, why not just get rid of the middleman, the surrogate, the vicariousness, and just serve oneself openly? He calls spooks ridiculous because people torture themselves trying to follow them with the secret belief (secret on some level) that they'll be rewarded, or conversely, they are rewarded precisely because of the belief that they are doing something good. Why not just be open that we want the best for ourselves?

>>9790821
An idea that can only exist in the mind and is used to control your behavior in some way. I.E. religion, morals, nationalism, and all politcal ideologies.

>>9791612
What exactly is poetry about if not rhythm? Poetry without rhythm is prose.

>>9791634
'You do everything because you want to" is a tautology, and not a very useful one.

Individual action is necessarily reliant upon a self coming to a conclusion about what their priorities are. What isn't addressed there is whether the end goal is meaningful, desirable, or even just pleasurable, and what methods should be used.

It's like saying that a book's contents are meaningless because they're 'just' ink on a page. Just like books are only informative when read, action is only selfish in the sense that it's ultimately directed by the self. Cutting out the context in which decisions are made and priorities are set seems plain short-sighted.

I'm no high-level intellectual, though.