The vague cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment gave place to a new national consciousness in keeping with the spirit and traditions of different peoples. Thus historicism and creative spiritualism are the predominant characteristics of Romanticism. The new Romantic Movement first took form in Germany between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, and immediately made its impress upon the field of culture, art and poetry, the area in which the creative power of the human spirit is more readily evidenced. Soon utterly revolutionary principles made their appearance in the field of the fine arts. Nothing and no one can place rules upon genius.
Genius is a law unto itself.
There is no reality outside the reality that genius creates. Genius can be bound by no limits, not even by the limits of its own achievements. To create is to dream and to dream is to poetize. Transcendental Idealism Romanticism distorted the activity of Kant's thinking ego into a complete anarchy of thought. Many thinkers, however, not only abstained from such intemperate conclusions, but even sought to give the nature of the Kantian ego an interpretation more in conformity with the demands of its author's Criticism.