How do I begin a focus paper on the Enlightenment and the Romantic Reaction?

I would begin by defining the terms Enlightenment and Romanticism. Since you would be contrasting the two ways of thinking, your definitions would highlight the differences between the two to focus on what it was about the Enlightenment that Romanticism reacted against.
The Enlightenment, which was the embrace of reason and the scientific method, is often critiqued as leaving out the feelings and emotions that are also an important part of the human experience. So your definition of the Enlightenment could focus on how it emphasized the rational at the expense of emotional experience.
Romanticism, at least in English literature, is often identified as beginning with Wordsworth and Coleridge and their publication of the book Lyrical Ballads. The preface to this book defined poetry as emotion recollected in tranquility. Their goal was to move people's hearts through the depiction of nature, the pure, simple lives of lower class people, and the supernatural. You could explore this emphasis on emotion as a reaction against rationalism. You might trace back to before the Romantic poets to a literature of what was called "sensibility," the eighteenth century term for emotion or feeling, in writers such as Thomas Gray. Romanticism also expressed itself through the Gothic genre, such as the work of Edgar Allen Poe, which explored the uncanny.
In any case, defining terms is a tried and true method of beginning a paper. You then find the focus for your Focus paper by exploring just a few examples of what you have defined. You might, for instance, use the scientific experiments of Joseph Priestly or the measured, heroic couplets of Alexander Pope as examples of Enlightenment thinking and contrast them to the poetry of Wordsworth, who studied and reacted to nature in a very different way from a scientist and who wrote poetry that was very different from Pope's. This method of organization is called "definition and exemplification." After you define your terms, you then would find quotes from the figures you have chosen to exemplify your two ways of thinking and use them in the paper. With this organizing strategy in mind, it will be much easier to structure your paper.

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