Romanticism has two sides, which I call the self-destructive tendency of romanticism and the self-creative tendency of romanticism.
Self-destructive romanticism is epitomized in the legend of Tristan und Isolde, particularly in Wagner's version. The essence of this is ecstatic pessimism. You also see a different side of it in The Flying Dutchman. There's something Dionysian about it. (One can see a trace of this in Foucault's work, and perhaps also Bataille? But that's a more complicated question.)
But there has always been another side of Romanticism: self-creative Romanticism, or Promethean Romanticism. Blake epitomizes this, and perhaps Shelley even more so - not to mention Byron.
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