A term you'll meet in literary movement.
Romanticism was the European literary, artistic, and intellectual movement that emerged in the late eighteenth century and dominated cultural production through roughly 1850. The movement was not a unified programme; it was a constellation of overlapping commitments shared by writers across half a dozen national traditions. To understand the literature of the period — and to understand what the movements that followed (realism, naturalism, modernism) were defining themselves against — you need a working sense of Romanticism's core claims.
What Romantic writers tended to share:
Romanticism took different shapes across national literatures:
The poetic form most associated with Romanticism is the lyric — a short poem expressing personal feeling. The movement transformed the lyric from a minor occasional form into the central serious poetic genre. Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (1798, with Coleridge) is the movement's English-language manifesto, both for what the lyric could do and for the simplification of poetic language Wordsworth advocated.
The Romantic ode — Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn"; Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind"; Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality" — is the period's most ambitious lyric form. Each is a sustained meditation, typically beginning in a specific scene and moving into philosophical or religious reflection.
The movement also produced its distinctive forms in prose:
One of Romanticism's most influential character types: the Byronic hero, a moody, charismatic, morally compromised, intellectually superior, sexually magnetic outsider. Created by Byron in his early poems (particularly Childe Harold's Pilgrimage) and his narrative poems, the type was adopted by Charlotte Brontë's Rochester, Emily Brontë's Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights's landscape itself, and a long line of subsequent literary brooders. The antihero as a serious literary type largely begins here.
Romanticism defined itself partly against the neoclassicism of the eighteenth century — the poetic decorum of Pope, the satirical reason of Swift, the formal artificiality of much eighteenth-century verse. Where neoclassicism valued balance, order, restraint, and imitation of classical models, Romanticism valued intensity, originality, emotion, and individual vision.
The shift was not just aesthetic. It was philosophical: the Romantic argument was that the world had been over- rationalized by Enlightenment thinking, and that imagination, feeling, and nature had to be recovered as legitimate sources of knowledge.
By the 1840s and 50s, Romanticism was being supplanted in several directions:
Romanticism has had an enormous afterlife. Most ideas about "the artist" as a special, suffering, visionary figure descend from it. Modern environmentalism inherits the Romantic relationship to nature. Modern individualism is partly a Romantic inheritance. The teenage idea of authenticity through intense feeling is recognisably descended from young Werther.
This makes "Romantic" a tricky word in modern usage — sometimes it refers to the specific 1790–1850 movement, sometimes to anyone whose work has roughly Romantic sensibilities. Both uses are legitimate; the context usually makes clear which is meant.
When approaching writing from roughly 1790–1850, ask which Romantic commitments are operating. The poem that celebrates a mountain at sunset; the novel that places the brooding outcast at its centre; the essay that asserts the truth of individual feeling against reasoned convention — each is working in the Romantic vocabulary. The movement is most visible in its small recurring moves rather than in any one statement of principle.
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