romanticism literature essay topics

Romanticism Essay Topics & Ideas

• Argumentative Essay Topics About Romanticism
• Good Essay Topics About Romanticism

Persuasive Essay Topics About Romanticism

Interesting essay topics about romanticism, ✒️ argumentative essay topics about romanticism.

• “The Devil And Tom Walker” and Romanticism
• “This Lime-tree Bower My Prison” and The Essence of Romanticism
• American Industrialization, Romanticism and Civil War Report (Assessment)
• American Romanticism Analysis
• American Romanticism of “The Minister’s Black Veil”
• Analysis of Romanticism in The Extra Gum Commercial
• Analysis of The Transition from Romanticism to Realism in Art
• Analyze the Romanticism and Realism
• Analyzing Romanticism in Pushkin’s “The Shot”
• Art influences Culture: Romanticism & Realism
• Baroque and Romanticism Art Periods and Influences
• Between Romanticism and Modernism
• British Romanticism and Its Origins
• Chopin: Musician Who Had Effect Romanticism Music Report
• Classicism And Romanticism In Sleepy Hallow
• Dark Romanticism in “The Devil and Tom Walker”
• Edgar Allan Poe, an American Romanticism Writer Research
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Dark Romanticism in The Murders in The Rue Morgue
• Elements of Romanticism in Wordsworth’s poem
• English Literature: Romanticism and Victorian
• English Romanticism And Its Characteristics English Literature
• Enlightenment and Romanticism

✨ Best romanticism Topic Ideas & Essay Examples

• on Romanticism in Frankenstein Essay on Romanticism in FrankensteinAll literature is influenced by the time period in which it was written;whether it be war, poverty, or any other social trends. People tend to writecommentaries of political events, or just describe the time ….
• Nature In Classicism And Romanticism Sample In the terminal of the eighteenth century. Romanticism came out as a response to Classicism. This alteration was moderate but however. it could be seen in literature. doctrine. art etc. The classical attack to universe was bound and determined and ….
• Romanticism V Realism Throughout the course of American literature there have been noticeable sweeps and vast changes in the writing style popular for any given era. These changes in the literary world are known as movements. One movement, kown as Romanticism, took place ….
• Romanticism – Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience The Romantic poets wrote about many political and social issues facing the era, mirroring the societal change of the 18th century with the industrial revolution. This time saw small towns become vast cities and cultural values shift away from ones ….
• American Literature from Puritanism to Romanticism American Literature from Puritanism to Romanticism Comparison of Puritanism, the Age of Reason, and Romanticism. Puritanism hard times God-centered (look for answers from God)> unknown is defined as God Salem witch trials Puritanism>mysticism>….
• Romantic Literature as Romanticism There are many themes in Romantic literature as Romanticism was a movement against the previous movement of rationalism. In Romantic literature, the qualities that are stressed most are nature, emotionalism, and individualism. These qualities are ….
• Romanticism of a Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein I agree that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein does indeed attack masculine Romanticism however not totally. Typical Romantic characteristics include heightened interest in nature, emphasis on the individual’s expression of emotion and imagination, and ….
• An Analysis of Romanticism of Atala The Romantic Era brings to the mind of an uneducated person of a time of idyllic pleasure, carefree and light. If asked to picture it some may say a damsel in distress rescued by her knight riding in on a white stallion. However, the Romantic Era ….
• Goya, Berlioz, and Edgar Allan Poe: the Dark Side of the Romanticism Movement Berlioz, Goya and Poe: The dark side of the Romanticism movement The Industrial Revolution changed not only the way that the world functioned in its day to day proceedings, but it also inspired a new wave of creativity in art, music, and literature. ….
• Romanticism in “Persuasion” by Jane Austen In the Romantic Era, women thought to not make rational decisions and instead go by their emotions. Jane Austen uses her writing in Persuasion and many other novels to prove that society is wrong and women can and do make rational decisions. For ….
• Frankenstein And English Romanticism The literary world embraced English romanticism when it began to emerge and wasso taken by its elements that it is still a beloved experience for the reader oftoday. Romanticism “has crossed all social boundaries,” and it was duringthe seventeenth ….
• Influence of Neoclassicism on Romanticism Niccolo Machiavelli once said, “whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past”, seems to sum the influence of past artistic styles on works of art across varying time periods. Neoclassicism, a popular art style in the 18th and early 19….
• Romanticism in English Literature of the Beginning of the 19th Century Romanticism in English literature of the Beginning of the 19th Century (The Age of Romanticism) Britain became a large trading empire. The cities grew fast. London remained the largest one. In the 19th century Britain was at its height and self ….
• Romanticism – Art, Music, Poetry, Drama The Romanticism was a period in which certain ideas and attitudes arose; intellect became the dominant mode of expression. Expression was everything to the Romantics; art, music, poetry, drama, literature and philosophy (The History guide). The ….
• Discuss Endymion in the light of Romanticism Romanticism is defined as: An artistic and intellectual movement originating in Europe in the late 18th century and characterized by a heightened interest in nature, emphasis on the individual’s expression of emotion and imagination, departure from ….
• Lasting Impact of Romanticism in Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson Romanticism was an important event in history where new ideas were created through the mindset and feelings. It was known as an ‘age of maturity’ as the work of artists, poets, and philosophers started in Europe and eventually began to spread across ….
• Romanticism Vs Realism American American Romanticism was as an artistic motion that took topographic point during the eighteenth century. Romantic authors had a really different manner than the normal authors of the clip. They stressed the scrutiny of interior feelings, emotions, ….
• Realism And Romanticism In The Poetry Of Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson is generally known as a romantic era poetess, yet she frequently integrated a surprising realism into her romantically styled poetry. Often choosing topics related to realism for her poetry, she enigmatically shrouded her lines in ….
• Frankenstein Romanticism Chart A deepened appreciation of the beauties of nature. When Frankincense was dealing with the stress of the creature killing his family members, he found comfort in appreciating nature in solitude. A general exaltation of emotion over reason and of the ….

✍ Good Essay Topics About Romanticism

• Enlightenment Vs Romanticism
• European Romanticism in The 19th Century and Its Role in The Rene Novella
• Faust and Romanticism
• Features of French Romanticism in Camille Saint-Saens’s Music
• Gothic Romanticism in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Nathaniel Hawthorn’s “The Birthmark” Research
• Gothic Romanticism of Edgar Allen Poe Report (Assessment)
• Gustave Courbet: Revolutionary Artist of Romanticism
• Hawthorne’s Use of The Themes of Dark Romanticism in The Scarlet Letter
• How Did Neoclassicism Influence Romanticism
• How Romanticism and Photography Shaped Western Modernitymodern
• Introduction For A Dark Romanticism Anthology English Literature
• John Keats’ Lamia as a Product of Romanticism
• Light vs. Dark Romanticism
• Literary Period – Romanticism
• Nathaniel Hawthorne: Romanticism Characteristics
• Nature as the Mean of Expression in Romanticism
• Nature in 18th Century and Romanticism Literatures
• Neoclassicism vs Romanticism
• Nineteenth Century Romanticism Research
• Realism vs. Romanticism
• Representation of Romanticism in Edgar Allen Poe’s Poetry
• Revolution and Romanticism in Europe and America
• Romanticism – Samual Taylor Coleridge & Joseph Turner
• Romanticism and Death
• Romanticism and Modernism in Short Stories
• Romanticism and Neoclassical
• Romanticism and Pathetic Fallacy in Frankenstein
• Romanticism and Poe
• Romanticism and Realism’s Approach to Social Justice
• Romanticism and the Modern Theatre
• Romanticism and the Process of Life
• Romanticism and Victorian Literature Comparison
• Romanticism as a Movement and a Worldview
• Romanticism in “The Scarlet Letter”
• Romanticism in American Lit
• Romanticism in American Literature
• Romanticism in Art, Music and Literature
• Romanticism in Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee and The Raven
• Romanticism in El Matadero
• Romanticism in Frankenstein
• Romanticism in Friedrich’s “The Monk by the Sea”
• Romanticism in Seascape Painting by Jules Dupre
• Romanticism in The Devil and Tom Walker
• Romanticism in the Poem Nutting
• Romanticism in Wolfgang Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther
• Romanticism of Wordsworth’s Poem and Mary Hamilton Ballad
• Romanticism Period in Art
• Romanticism Poem and the Concept of Mercy
• Romanticism Resource Page
• Romanticizing Literature, Visual Arts and Music During Romanticism 1800-1850
• Salient Features of Romanticism
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Poetry: British Romanticism
• Self and Imagination in Romanticism
• Sense and Sensibility: Neo-classicism vs Romanticism
• Shelley’s Romanticism in Ozymandias
• The Age of Romanticism and Its Factors Research
• The French Revolution: Romanticism Period
• The History of the Romanticism Period Report (Assessment)
• The Industrial Revolution and Romanticism
• The Interconnection Between Realism and Romanticism in The Novel
• The Romantic Era: Romanticism in Art and Literature
• The Romanticism and Character’s Personal Struggles
• The Romanticism and Expressionism of The Germans as Epitomized in The Rime of The Ancient Mariner and Nosferatu
• The Romanticism of Edgar Allen Poe
• The Romanticism of Wordsworth and Shelley: a Poetry of The “Happiest Moments”
• The Scarlet Letter – Elements of Dark Romanticism
• The Theme of Romanticism in The Military as Illustrated in The Red Badge of Courage
• Tom Sawyer Representing The Tradition and Romanticism of Walter Scott in Twain’s ‘the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’
• Transcendentalism and Romanticism
• Transcendentalism vs, Dark Romanticism
• Tristan and Isolde Opera Romanticism
• William Wordsworth’s Portrayal of Romanticism in ‘the World is Too Much with Us’ and ‘i Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’
• Wordsworth’s Romanticism in Tintern Abbey Poem

Get a Quality Essay on Your Topic

Topic Details

Other Topics

• Holocaust Essay Topics & Ideas
• History Research Paper Topics
• Imperialism Essay Topics & Ideas
• Industrial Revolution Essay Topics & Ideas
• Julius Caesar Essay Topics & Ideas

Hi, my name is Amy 👋

In case you can't find a relevant example, our professional writers are ready to help you write a unique paper. Just talk to our smart assistant Amy and she'll connect you with the best match.

Romanticism in Literature: Definition and Examples

Finding beauty in nature and the common man.

Apic / Getty Images

• Authors & Texts
• Top Picks Lists
• Study Guides
• Best Sellers
• Plays & Drama
• Shakespeare
• Short Stories
• Children's Books

• B.A., English, Rutgers University

Romanticism was a literary movement that began in the late 18th century, ending around the middle of the 19th century—although its influence continues to this day. Marked by a focus on the individual (and the unique perspective of a person, often guided by irrational, emotional impulses), a respect for nature and the primitive, and a celebration of the common man, Romanticism can be seen as a reaction to the huge changes in society that occurred during this period, including the revolutions that burned through countries like France and the United States, ushering in grand experiments in democracy.

Key Takeaways: Romanticism in Literature

• Romanticism is a literary movement spanning roughly 1790–1850.
• The movement was characterized by a celebration of nature and the common man, a focus on individual experience, an idealization of women, and an embrace of isolation and melancholy.
• Prominent Romantic writers include John Keats, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelley.

Romanticism Definition

The term Romanticism does not stem directly from the concept of love, but rather from the French word romaunt (a romantic story told in verse). Romanticism focused on emotions and the inner life of the writer, and often used autobiographical material to inform the work or even provide a template for it, unlike traditional literature at the time.

Romanticism celebrated the primitive and elevated "regular people" as being deserving of celebration, which was an innovation at the time. Romanticism also fixated on nature as a primordial force and encouraged the concept of isolation as necessary for spiritual and artistic development.

Characteristics of Romanticism

Romantic literature is marked by six primary characteristics: celebration of nature, focus on the individual and spirituality, celebration of isolation and melancholy, interest in the common man, idealization of women, and personification and pathetic fallacy.

Celebration of Nature

Romantic writers saw nature as a teacher and a source of infinite beauty. One of the most famous works of Romanticism is John Keats’ To Autumn (1820):

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,– While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

Keats personifies the season and follows its progression from the initial arrival after summer, through the harvest season, and finally to autumn’s end as winter takes its place.

Focus on the Individual and Spirituality

Romantic writers turned inward, valuing the individual experience above all else. This in turn led to heightened sense of spirituality in Romantic work, and the addition of occult and supernatural elements.

The work of Edgar Allan Poe exemplifies this aspect of the movement; for example, The Raven tells the story of a man grieving for his dead love (an idealized woman in the Romantic tradition) when a seemingly sentient Raven arrives and torments him, which can be interpreted literally or seen as a manifestation of his mental instability.

Celebration of Isolation and Melancholy

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a very influential writer in Romanticism; his books of essays explored many of the themes of the literary movement and codified them. His 1841 essay Self-Reliance is a seminal work of Romantic writing in which he exhorts the value of looking inward and determining your own path, and relying on only your own resources.

Related to the insistence on isolation, melancholy is a key feature of many works of Romanticism, usually seen as a reaction to inevitable failure—writers wished to express the pure beauty they perceived and failure to do so adequately resulted in despair like the sort expressed by Percy Bysshe Shelley in A Lament :

O world! O life! O time! On whose last steps I climb. Trembling at that where I had stood before; When will return the glory of your prime? No more—Oh, never more!

Interest in the Common Man

William Wordsworth was one of the first poets to embrace the concept of writing that could be read, enjoyed, and understood by anyone. He eschewed overly stylized language and references to classical works in favor of emotional imagery conveyed in simple, elegant language, as in his most famous poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud :

I wandered lonely as a Cloud That floats on high o'er vales and Hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden Daffodils; Beside the Lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Idealization of Women

In works such as Poe’s The Raven , women were always presented as idealized love interests, pure and beautiful, but usually without anything else to offer. Ironically, the most notable novels of the period were written by women (Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Mary Shelley, for example), but had to be initially published under male pseudonyms because of these attitudes. Much Romantic literature is infused with the concept of women being perfect innocent beings to be adored, mourned, and respected—but never touched or relied upon.

Personification and Pathetic Fallacy

Romantic literature’s fixation on nature is characterized by the heavy use of both personification and pathetic fallacy. Mary Shelley used these techniques to great effect in Frankenstein :

Its fair lakes reflect a blue and gentle sky; and, when troubled by the winds, their tumult is but as the play of a lively infant, when compared to the roarings of the giant ocean.

Romanticism continues to influence literature today; Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight novels are clear descendants of the movement, incorporating most of the characteristics of classic Romanticism despite being published a century and half after the end of the movement’s active life.

• The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. “Romanticism.” Encyclopedia Britannica, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 19 Nov. 2019, https://www.britannica.com/art/Romanticism.
• Parker, James. “A Book That Examines the Writing Processes of Two Poetry Giants.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 23 July 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/07/how-two-literary-giants-wrote-their-best-poetry/594514/.
• Alhathani, Safa. “EN571: Literature & Technology.” EN571 Literature Technology, 13 May 2018, https://commons.marymount.edu/571sp17/2018/05/13/analysis-of-romanticism-in-frankenstein-through-digital-tools/.
• “William Wordsworth.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-wordsworth.
• An Introduction to the Romantic Period
• A Classic Collection of Bird Poems
• Romanticism in Art History From 1800-1880
• 14 Classic Poems Everyone Should Know
• Personification
• A Brief Overview of British Literary Periods
• Poems of Protest and Revolution
• Biography of Mary Shelley, English Novelist, Author of 'Frankenstein'
• What Was the Main Goal of Mary Wollstonecraft's Advocacy?
• 42 Must-Read Feminist Female Authors
• A Guide to Wordsworth's Themes of Memory and Nature in 'Tintern Abbey'
• William Wordsworth
• A Collection of Classic Love Poetry for Your Sweetheart
• Inexpressibility (Rhetoric)
• How to Find the Main Idea - Worksheet
• William Wordsworth's 'Daffodils' Poem

Romantic Literature Essay Examples and Topics

“the lady and her five suitors” story.

• Words: 1003

Marriage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Symbolism and realism in madame bovary by gustave flaubert, symbolism in the “araby” by james joyce, the narrator’s role in james joyce’s “araby”, “the ocean” by george gordon byron.

• Words: 1422

The Heroism of Othello

Love in a fallen city.

• Words: 1151

Nathaniel Hawthorne: Original Sin in “The Birthmark”

• Words: 1670

Shakespeare’s Love Juice in the Real Life

• Words: 1117

Rationalism Versus Supernatural in Castle of Otranto

• Words: 1406

Shakespeare’s Romeo as a Tragic Hero

The different literary periods, william wordsworth and percy shelley. creative analysis, love poetry of the renaissance, restoration literature and romanticism: common facts, love in modern and postmodern american literature.

• Words: 1126

“The Storm,” a Short Story by Kate Chopin

The romantic period, on the literature of william wordsworth and john keats.

• Words: 1570

“In Another Country” by Ernest Hemmingway

• Words: 1600

Metaphoric Theme of Slavery in “Indiana” by George Sand

• Words: 4248

Analysis of Don Quixote’s Over-Romanticised Chivalric Acts and Beliefs

The role of poetry according to keats and shelley, a pair of voices: frost and plath’s poetry.

• Words: 1935

Fear and intolerance of aging – “Love in the time of cholera” by Gabriel Marquez

• Words: 1646

Ramayana: A Tale About Indian Life

Romanticism of blake’s and ghalib’s poems, individual and society in romanticist texts, romantic values in the victorian poetry, romanticism in modern ecological literature.

• Words: 1629

“The Return of Rip Van Winkle” Representing Literature of 1820-1865

• Words: 1494

J. Austen’s “Sense & Sensibility”, “Pride and Prejudice”, and “Emma”

• Words: 3825

Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” as Gothic Romance

“love in a fallen city” by eileen chang.

• Words: 1461

Willa Cather’s “O Pioneers” Winter Memories

Cosmic love story in “like water for chocolate” by laura esquivel, the downside of marriage in jane austen’s novels.

• Words: 1752

Janie’s Search for Her Freedom and Independence in Their Eyes Were Watching God by Z. N. Hurston

Mina and lucy in bram stoker’s dracula, the novel “shame” by j. m. coetzee review.

• Words: 1705

Romance in Ying-Ying’s and The Western Wing Stories

• Words: 1586

Nature as an Element in Romantic Literature

• Words: 1002

Romanticism. Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”

Gift-giving in “gifts” by nuruddin farah, ‘the great gatsby’: tom and blanche.

• Words: 1384

The Secret by Rhoda Byrne

• Words: 1366

“The Cave of Salamanca” by Miguel de Cervantes

Summary of the novella siddhartha by hermann hesse, “the golden ass” by lucius apuleius.

• Words: 1700

“Araby” by James Joyce

Achebe’s things fall apart and the culture of the igbo.

• Words: 1402

Women writing in India

• Words: 1386

A Representation of Chinese Women the Post-1949 Literature on the Status of Women

Role of women in the poem beowulf, the god of small things, my turkish lover; santiago esmeralda.

• Words: 2207

The Romantic Love myth as seen through Roland Barthes “Myth Today”

Anne frank: the diary of a young girl.

• Words: 1093

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Romantic Poetry

Romantic Poetry

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on February 16, 2021 • ( 0 )

The classic essays on romanticism tend not to define the term but to survey the manifold and unsuccessful attempts to define it. In English poetry, however, we can give a more or less historical definition: Romanticism is a movement that can be dated as beginning with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge ’s Lyrical Ballads of 1798 and that is still continuing today, despite reactions and countermovements which begin almost immediately and which are highly relevant to any consideration of Victorian and modern literature. (Although romanticism includes all of William Blake’s major poetry, beginning more than a decade prior to Lyrical Ballads, Blake’s obscurity limited his influence on other major writers for a good half century.)

Paradoxically, though, these reactions can themselves be regarded as highly romantic in nature— partly, perhaps, because one very general but still useful early (1825) definition of romanticism is, in the words of the French dramatist and politician Ludovic Vitet (1802–73), “Protestantism in arts and letters” (quoted in Furst, European Romanticism ). Protestantism was a protest against the fetters of the past (even romanticism itself)—against rule and convention, as Vitet realized—and therefore was also an analogue to the Protestant Reformation. In this sense, romanticism is the analogue in the literary sphere of the freedom brought by the Enlightenment in the political, moral, and philosophical world—according to Vitet, “the right to enjoy what gives pleasure, to be moved by what moves one, to admire what seems admirable, even when by virtue of well and duly consecrated principles it could be proved that one ought not to admire, nor be moved, nor enjoy.” Wordsworth, too, spoke of his object in Lyrical Ballads as giving pleasure to his readers, rather than conforming to rules: “There will also be found in these volumes little of what is usually called poetic diction . . . because the pleasure which I have proposed to myself to impart is of a kind very different from that which is supposed by many persons to be the proper object of poetry.” That pleasure is Protestant in its deference to the judgment and poetic conscience of the individual soul: “[T]his necessity of producing immediate pleasure . . . is an acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe, an acknowledgment the more sincere because it is not formal, but indirect; . . . it is a homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves” (preface to Lyrical Ballads , 1800).

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, by Caspar David Friedrich, 1818

Romanticism is therefore to be defined negatively, perhaps, as a principled protest against classicism. Since the French were the earliest to identify it as a movement, we can recur to the incisive definition one of the great French romantics, Victor Hugo, who (in the preface to his 1830 play Hernani ) wrote, “Romanticism, so often badly defined, is . . . viewed wholly under its militant aspect, nothing but liberalism in literature . . . a literary liberty [which] is the daughter of political liberty.” The philosopher John Stuart Mill was one of the earliest purveyors of the term in English, but again he was describing French literature when he wrote in 1837:

The stateliness and conventional decorum of old French poetic and dramatic literature, gave place to a licence which made free scope for genius and also for absurdity, and let in new forms of the beautiful was well as many of the hideous. Literature shook off its chains, and used its liberty like a galley-slave broke loose; while painting and sculpture passed from one unnatural extreme to another, and the stiff school was succeeded by the spasmodic. This insurrection against the old traditions of classicism was called romanticism: and now, when the mass of rubbish to which it had given birth has produced another oscillation in opinion the reverse way, one inestimable result seems to have survived it—that life and human feeling may now, in France, be painted with as much liberty as they may be discussed, and, when painted truly, with approval.

Mill’s account shows the extent to which romanticism was central to Victorian literary attitudes, even as the heyday of what came to be called high romanticism came to an end in England with the beginning of the Victorian period. Indeed, the Victorian parody of the continued influence of romanticism identified what it called the “spasmodic school” of poetry.

These quotations show the extent to which romanticism is regarded as a revolutionary rejection of the past—of Mill’s classicism—which might be regarded as the literary equivalent of the French Revolution. Indeed, the first generation of English romantics were admirers of the French Revolution before its descent into destruction and terror. For this reason as well, the romantics saw Napoleon Bonaparte as a Promethean figure who promised liberty but ended up besotted with despotic power. Wordsworth, who celebrated the death of the French revolutionary Robespierre in The Prelude, nevertheless began that work with an ode to liberty. For the English romantics, that liberty was at once a break with Enlightenment rationalism and (as we have seen) a continuation of the Enlightenment’s intensely humanistic project of rejecting religious superstition and arbitrary law on behalf of the human soul’s freedom and primacy.

It is important not to make the mistake that some critics fall into of thinking of romanticism as essentially an irrational egotism. Romanticism is far more the inheritor of Enlightenment ideas than their displacer. It shares with the Enlightenment an intense focus on the powers of the human mind. For Enlightenment philosophers, that focus was often on its rational and analytic powers, whence the flowering of modern science. But such Enlightenment figures as the philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau paid equal or greater attention to the mind’s subjective experience. Rousseau’s Confessions (1769) as well as his novel Julie (1761) were forerunners of intense influences on (respectively) such works as Wordsworth’s The Prelude , Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage , and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s T he Triumph of Life . In Immanuel Kant and the German idealists, and in Coleridge, much of whose work is uncomfortably close to plagiarism of the idealists, the relationship between its objective and subjective powers is central to a philosophical account of the mind. Kant saw that relationship forming in the faculty of judgment, of which aesthetic judgment was the most vivid example. The half-creation, half-perception of the world which takes place in judgment is the theme of romanticism, explicitly in such poems as Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and Shelley’s “Mont Blanc.” Sometimes the difference between subjective and objective attitudes manifested itself as a sense of self-division within the soul, a sense that could be traced back to the philosophy of John Locke (1632– 1704), which was repugnant but therefore powerfully influential, to such figures as Blake and Wordsworth.

Self-division, solitude, subjective longing—all of these are aspects of the subjectivity which romanticism took as its starting point and theme (in part inheriting it from the more sentimental mode of 18th-century sensibility, though sensibility was far more an overtly social phenomenon than romanticism). Because of its intense interest in subjectivity as well as its rejection of superstition, it is possible to see romanticism as a kind of religious sensibility without religious belief. The soul, or self, experiences itself as fallen in a fallen world (often represented as the world of childhood or the world most closely present in childhood). In Romanticism, by rejecting the doctrines of religion—that the biblical Fall is punishment for some derogation from a state of grace—the soul also rejects the consolations of religion; accordingly, it has no hope of salvation except within itself and its own experience. That salvation is therefore primarily aesthetic and philosophical (the distinction between the two is one of emphasis, which is why so many romantic poems are so intensely philosophical). The romantics took to heart Satan’s claim in John Milton’s great 17th-century work Paradise Lost (the poem most essential to the English romantics) that “The mind is its own place and in itself / Can make a Heaven of hell, a Hell of heaven (1, l. 254).” Our sense of ourselves as fallen, as having a destiny and home “with infinity,” as Wordsworth says, makes the finite world a negative measure of our own subjective intensity. When this intensity is represented as a claim to greatness of soul, it can look egotistical; but what counts is the intensity of experience measured by the failure as well as by the intermittent success of the outside world at matching it.

This intermittent success tends to come with a sense of the grandeur of nature, which is why so much great romantic poetry is about nature in its most intense aspects: those of beauty, solitude, and most of all, the sublime. Nature’s wildness, partly imaged in ruined castles and abbeys, which had been a staple of gothic fiction in the 18th century were particularly appropriate settings for romantic thought. But nature is itself a projection—it is the place the mind makes of it, as in the last two lines of Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” where it is the human mind’s imaginings that transfigure vacancy into silence and solitude.

The general mode of a romantic poem is one of crisis—a crisis that leads to its own solution. The very fact of crisis is a sign that the intensity of feeling and thought at risk is still there. Romantic poets worry about the loss of intensity that seems the inevitable course of human experience, but they reimagine that loss of intensity as the intensity of loss. Loss becomes, as the 20th-century literary critic Paul de Man put it somewhat skeptically, “shadowed gain.” The gain for the soul is in its apprehension of its own capacity to measure its losses, and therefore to rise above them. Loss within the soul comes to be figured as the loss of poetic vocation. The poetry inspired by this loss is a sign that poetic vocation is intensified in its own undoing, rather than dissipated— for a while at least. Romanticism reimagined poetry as an intense analysis of human subjectivity, and in doing so it lent splendor to the universal human experience of loss and decline. What more can poetry do?

Bibliography Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton, 1973. Bloom, Harold. The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961. ———, ed. Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism. New York: Norton, 1970. Brown, Marshall. Preromanticism. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991. Deane, Seamus. French Revolution and Enlightenment in England, 1789–1832. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. De Man, Paul. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Furst, Lilian, ed. European Romanticism: Self-Definition: An Anthology. London: Methuen, 1980. Lovejoy, Arthur. “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms.” PMLA (journal of the Modern Language Association) 39, no. 2 (June 1924): 229–253. McGann, Jerome. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Mill, John Stuart. “Armand Carrel.” In Dissertations and Discussions. Vol. 1. 237–308. Boston: Holt, 1882. Quinney, Laura. The Poetics of Disappointment: Wordsworth to Ashbery. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999.

Romanticism in England

Romanticism in France

Romanticism in America

Romantic Literary Criticism

Literary Criticism of William Wordsworth

Literary Criticism of S.T. Coleridge

Share this:

Categories: Literature

Tags: Features of Romanticism , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Poetry , Romantic Poetry , Romantic poets , Romantic poets and their themes , Romanticism , Romanticism analysis , Romanticism essay , Romanticism ideas , Romanticism in England , Romanticism in Poetry , Themes of Romantic poetry

Related Articles

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

• Entertainment
• Environment
• Information Science and Technology
• Social Issues

Home Essay Samples History

Essay Samples on Romanticism

Romanticism paintings analysis: the raft of medusa and liberty leading the people.

I will be focusing on romanticism that is based on emotions and sublimity. I will be displaying the features of romantic art by analysing two paintings from the 19th century. These are The Raft of Medusa by Theodore Gericault (1819; Louvre Museum, Paris), oil on...

• Romanticism

Romanticism and Western Industrialization: The Evolution of Creative Freedom

When it comes to discussing or learning about Romanticism, it is automatically taken with care and respect as everyone can acknowledge this is the basis of society, classic. And that is exactly what is being relayed in the writing of the text. The literal title...

• Industrialization

Reality Of Romanticism And Realism Under The Umbrella Of Gothic Genre

Two of the most common genres of writing that is found in literature belongs to either the Romanticism movement or the Realist/Naturalism movement. While these two movements might seem like they are related to each other, they are very opposite from one another in the...

The Figures and Inspiration Behind the Start of Romanticism

Paul Cezanne and Van Gogh are two famous painter of 19th century. They lead a new way to follow in the avant garde art movements by exploring. To illustrate, they include intimacy into the paintings because they start to think outside the box of traditional...

• Paul Cezanne
• Vincent Van Gogh

The Emotional Side of the Romanticism in Literature

Romanticism was a literary and artistic movement that identified the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Romantic Period can be defined as a time in which literature expressed the following characteristics: the individual and his/her feelings, the importance of nature, and the exploration of...

• Annabel Lee
• Edgar Allan Poe

Stressed out with your paper?

Consider using writing assistance:

• 100% unique papers
• 3 hrs deadline option

Analysis of Romanticism in the Poetry of Robert Frost

Frost’s poetic vision in the 20th century collection, ‘Early Poems’, is very much motivated by his profound sense of ecological consciousness which in turn, is driven by his environmental activism. As a result, he presents an all-pervasive and constant world of nature within his poems....

• Environmentalism
• The Road Not Taken

The Interconnection of Realism and Romanticism in All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy is an American writer whose work has captured multiple eras in a multitude of settings, demonstrating his incomparable versatility as an author. Two of these books, All the Pretty Horses and The Road, show this through the stark contrast between their tones, settings,...

• All The Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses: The Growth of the Characters

All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy is a quest story in which John Grady Cole trades his innocence for experience and finally finds the ‘paradise’ he has always been dreaming of. John Grady Cole does not value the same things as those whom he...

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Nomination of Nobel Prize in Literature for Adonaïs

Percy Bysshe Shelley's corpse was found on a beach near Viareggio. His sailboat had been wrecked in a storm ten days ago, on July 8, 1822, at sea off the Italian coast. In his jacket pocket, he had a copy of the last book of...

• Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Themes of Societal Issues in Frankenstein

I will analyzed some themes and some basic ideas in this novel.I will trying explain importance of science in that time. Firstly I will tell about writer and her book.She born in 1797 and, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley's Father William Godwin was a well-known writer...

• Frankenstein

Manners and Customs During Romance in England

During romance in England, the customs were meant more than just please and thank you; in the modern sense of the term, they have referred to their own manners rather than courtesy, the way people behave, their character, their expression and their sincere appeal. In...

• Pride and Prejudice

The Last of the Mohicans: The Frontier Changing Characters

When Mr. James Fenimore Cooper started writing his books, he was writing them in the American Romanticism era. This means that his books most likely reflected values found in this era. The book The Last of the Mohicans had many of these characteristics. We find...

• American Literature
• Last of The Mohicans

Frederick Douglass and Reasons for Usage of Theme

Throughout the centuries of time, American literature has been characterized and shaped by the writers of the then present time. Each century seemed to have its own rules of what the concept of literature was. In the early years of American writing, the literature standards...

• Frederick Douglass

"Pride and Prejudice": Depiction of Nature in Romanticism

Return to nature is an age when George III leaded Great Britain. In this age there was a war between French and Britain and that war gave impact to the social condition at the time. There were many people did not have job, the tax...

• Jane Austen

Enlightenment and Romanticism: Revolutionary Movements That Shaped the World

Enlightenment and Romanticism are known as two of the biggest movements in the history of western civilization. From these two, many political, economic, social, industrial and cultural movements developed. Many of these developments are still continued in today’s time. Enlightenment is known as the “Age...

• Enlightenment

Romanticism Ideas and History's Effect on Humanities

In the years prior to the Civil War, an era of Romanticism ideas struck the citizens of America. From this Romantic Movement arouse the Gothic movement, which included ideas of guilt that changed the way people created artistic pieces and interpreted them. Specifically, the element...

• Art History

Immense Impact of Romanticism Era on Art and Culture

Romanticism was the largest artistic movement of the late 1700s. Romanticism came around because of political, social, and economic changes. (History) Some important features of romanticism are emphasis on imagination, a capacity for wonder, and the importance of self-expression and feeling. This style of writing...

Importance Of Childhood Emotional Intuition And Nature.

Following the Enlightenment Period, European writers developed what is known as Romanticism, where they were free to express their feelings and emotions in their writing. This emotional transformation from the rationality of the Enlightenment allowed writers to focus on originality and individual genius, as well...

• Emotional Intelligence

Best topics on Romanticism

1. Romanticism Paintings Analysis: The Raft of Medusa and Liberty Leading the People

2. Romanticism and Western Industrialization: The Evolution of Creative Freedom

3. Reality Of Romanticism And Realism Under The Umbrella Of Gothic Genre

4. The Figures and Inspiration Behind the Start of Romanticism

5. The Emotional Side of the Romanticism in Literature

6. Analysis of Romanticism in the Poetry of Robert Frost

7. The Interconnection of Realism and Romanticism in All the Pretty Horses

8. All the Pretty Horses: The Growth of the Characters

9. Percy Bysshe Shelley: Nomination of Nobel Prize in Literature for Adonaïs

10. The Themes of Societal Issues in Frankenstein

11. Manners and Customs During Romance in England

12. The Last of the Mohicans: The Frontier Changing Characters

13. Frederick Douglass and Reasons for Usage of Theme

14. “Pride and Prejudice”: Depiction of Nature in Romanticism

15. Enlightenment and Romanticism: Revolutionary Movements That Shaped the World

• Civil Rights Movement
• American History
• The New Deal
• Eleanor Roosevelt
• African American History
• Historical Figures
• Atlantic Slave Trade

Need writing help?

You can always rely on us no matter what type of paper you need

*No hidden charges

100% Unique Essays

Absolutely Confidential

Money Back Guarantee

By clicking “Send Essay”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement. We will occasionally send you account related emails

You can also get a UNIQUE essay on this or any other topic

Thank you! We’ll contact you as soon as possible.

• WordPress.org
• Documentation
• Learn WordPress
• Members Newsfeed

Most Interesting Romanticism Essay Topics

• Essay Topics

• Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter & Romanticism
• William Wordsworth’s Poem “The World Is Too Much With Us”: The Three Characteristics of Romanticism
• Mark Twain & Herman Melville’s Novels As Examples of Romanticism & Realism
• American Romanticism & William Cullen Bryant
• Transcendentalism, Romanticism, & Dark Romanticism In The American Renaissance
• The French Revolution’s Impact On British Romanticism
• The Connection Between Transcendentalism & Romanticism
• Transcendentalism: The Main American Romantic Expression
• The Relationship Between Romanticism & Movement Ideas & Socialism
• Late American Romantic Women’s Self-Discovery
• Molière’s & Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream’s French Romanticism
• The Historical Development of Literature From The Enlightenment Through Romanticism To Modernism
• The Role of Romanticism & Realism In The Development of Art
• Wordsworth’s Romanticism’s Defining Traits
• The Story of Madam Bovary As An Example of Romanticism’s Influence On People
• Similarities & Dissimilarities Between Realism &  Romanticism
• David Ebershoff’s The Danish Girl & The Romanticism Movement
• Romantic Substances In Blake Shelley & Keats’ Poetry
• The Romantic Movement & Walt Whitman
• The Portrayal of Women In Eighteenth-Century Art & Sexism, Romanticism
• The Transformation of Mark Twain’s Satire Into Realism & Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses

Good Research Ideas On Romanticism

• The Romanticism of Washington Irving
• How Romanticism & Realism Were Classified At The End of The Baroque Era In The 18th Century
• Frankenstein’s Emphasis On Nature As A Reflection of Mary Shelley’s Relationship To Romanticism
• Coleridge’s Kubla Khan & Keat’s Ode To A Nightingale: The Major Romantic Tensions
• The Representation of Tom Sawyer As Walter Scott’s Romanticism & Tradition In Mark Twain’s Novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Poem “The Raven” Makes Use of Romanticism
• Daffodils & Negative Romanticism In William Wordsworth
• How Different Literary Authors Use Romanticism
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Romantic & Realistic Representation
• How Romantics Were Johnathan Keats & William Wordsworth?
• Romanticism In The 19th Century
• William Wordsworth’s The Tables Turned & Romanticism
• The Scarlet Letter ‘s Character Development Makes Use of Romanticism
• Romanticism & Modernism’s Similarities
• How Romanticism, Nationalism, & Communism Shaped The Development of European Nations
• The Advancement of Knowledge Between Neoclassicism of The 18th Century & Romanticism of The 19th Century
• The Romanticism Movement In Literature: Its Origins, Spirit, Style, Themes, & Decline
• The Romantic Elements In Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Story, “The Fall of The House of Usher.”
• Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter : Romantic Symbols
• Romanticism’s Manifestations In The Rime of The Ancient Mariner
• Romanticism & Realism In Literature & Art
• Literature of Romanticism & The Victorian Era: Guilt, Suffering, & Experience Themes

 Essay Questions On Romanticism

• What Distinguishes Romanticism From Postmodernism?
• What Role Does William Wordsworth’s Poetry Play In The Romantic Literary Tradition?
• What Sets Romanticism Apart From Classical Thought?
• How Did Photography & Romanticism Influence Western Modernity?
• What Is Romanticism’s Opposite?
• Is The Theme of Nature Prevalent In Romantic Poetry?
• What Factors Contributed To The Rise of Romanticism?
• How Did Romanticism Modify Society’s Mentality?
• What Connections Can Be Drawn between Romantic & Early Victorian Literature?
• How Has Romanticism Lost Popularity Over Time?
• What Characteristics Define Romantic Poetry?
• What Impact Did Romanticism Have On American Architecture?
• What Are The Four Fundamental Principles of Romanticism?
• How Did Romanticism Put An End To Love?
• What Were The Romantics In Rebellion Against?
• How Do Romantics Stress Individuality?
• What Were The Romantic Movement’s Poetry’s Distinguishing Elements?
• Why Did Romantic Authors Disagree With Rationalism?
• What Aspects of Romantic Poetry Characterize It?
• Why Are Romanticism & Imagination So Closely Related?
• What Did Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, & Shelley Contribute To Romanticism?
• How Does The Prometheus Myth Influence Romanticism?
• What Are The Language & Styles of Romance?
• Who Were The Most Well-Known Authors of The American Romantic Period?
• What Are Some Concise Romantic Notes?
• What Justifies Romantic Poetry Study For Students?
• What Are The Three Key Romantic Ideas Important For?
• How Are Early American Writings By Puritans Distinct From Romantic Writing?
• What Characteristics Define Romanticism?
• What Motivated Romantic Era Poets to Write Poems?

Related Articles

Writing a research paper can be a daunting task, especially when it…

Mo Willems is a Dutch author, illustrator, and humorist who works in…

Multiracial people are people who have two or more races in their…

Pedagogue is a social media network where educators can learn and grow. It's a safe space where they can share advice, strategies, tools, hacks, resources, etc., and work together to improve their teaching skills and the academic performance of the students in their charge.

If you want to collaborate with educators from around the globe, facilitate remote learning, etc., sign up for a free account today and start making connections.

Pedagogue is Free Now, and Free Forever!

• New? Start Here
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Service
• Registration

Don't you have an account? Register Now! it's really simple and you can start enjoying all the benefits!

We just sent you an Email. Please Open it up to activate your account.

I allow this website to collect and store submitted data.

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

• Romanticism

Théodore Gericault

Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct

Alfred Dedreux (1810–1860) as a Child

The Start of the Race of the Riderless Horses

Horace Vernet

Jean-Louis-André-Théodore Gericault (1791–1824)

Inundated Ruins of a Monastery

Karl Blechen

Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds

John Constable

Eugène Delacroix

Royal Tiger

Stormy Coast Scene after a Shipwreck

French Painter

Mother and Child by the Sea

Johan Christian Dahl

The Natchez

Wanderer in the Storm

Julius von Leypold

The Abduction of Rebecca

Jewish Woman of Algiers Seated on the Ground

Théodore Chassériau

The Virgin Adoring the Host

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Ovid among the Scythians

Kathryn Calley Galitz Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

Romanticism, first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around 1800, gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and flourished until mid-century. With its emphasis on the imagination and emotion, Romanticism emerged as a response to the disillusionment with the Enlightenment values of reason and order in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789. Though often posited in opposition to Neoclassicism , early Romanticism was shaped largely by artists trained in Jacques Louis David’s studio, including Baron Antoine Jean Gros, Anne Louis Girodet-Trioson, and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. This blurring of stylistic boundaries is best expressed in Ingres’ Apotheosis of Homer and Eugène Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus (both Museé du Louvre, Paris), which polarized the public at the Salon of 1827 in Paris. While Ingres’ work seemingly embodied the ordered classicism of David in contrast to the disorder and tumult of Delacroix, in fact both works draw from the Davidian tradition but each ultimately subverts that model, asserting the originality of the artist—a central notion of Romanticism.

In Romantic art, nature—with its uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential for cataclysmic extremes—offered an alternative to the ordered world of Enlightenment thought. The violent and terrifying images of nature conjured by Romantic artists recall the eighteenth-century aesthetic of the Sublime. As articulated by the British statesman Edmund Burke in a 1757 treatise and echoed by the French philosopher Denis Diderot a decade later, “all that stuns the soul, all that imprints a feeling of terror, leads to the sublime.” In French and British painting of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the recurrence of images of shipwrecks ( 2003.42.56 ) and other representations of man’s struggle against the awesome power of nature manifest this sensibility. Scenes of shipwrecks culminated in 1819 with Théodore Gericault’s strikingly original Raft of the Medusa (Louvre), based on a contemporary event. In its horrifying explicitness, emotional intensity, and conspicuous lack of a hero, The Raft of the Medusa became an icon of the emerging Romantic style. Similarly, J. M. W. Turner’s 1812 depiction of Hannibal and his army crossing the Alps (Tate, London), in which the general and his troops are dwarfed by the overwhelming scale of the landscape and engulfed in the swirling vortex of snow, embodies the Romantic sensibility in landscape painting. Gericault also explored the Romantic landscape in a series of views representing different times of day; in Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct ( 1989.183 ), the dramatic sky, blasted tree, and classical ruins evoke a sense of melancholic reverie.

Another facet of the Romantic attitude toward nature emerges in the landscapes of John Constable , whose art expresses his response to his native English countryside. For his major paintings, Constable executed full-scale sketches, as in a view of Salisbury Cathedral ( 50.145.8 ); he wrote that a sketch represents “nothing but one state of mind—that which you were in at the time.” When his landscapes were exhibited in Paris at the Salon of 1824, critics and artists embraced his art as “nature itself.” Constable’s subjective, highly personal view of nature accords with the individuality that is a central tenet of Romanticism.

This interest in the individual and subjective—at odds with eighteenth-century rationalism—is mirrored in the Romantic approach to portraiture. Traditionally, records of individual likeness, portraits became vehicles for expressing a range of psychological and emotional states in the hands of Romantic painters. Gericault probed the extremes of mental illness in his portraits of psychiatric patients, as well as the darker side of childhood in his unconventional portrayals of children. In his portrait of Alfred Dedreux ( 41.17 ), a young boy of about five or six, the child appears intensely serious, more adult than childlike, while the dark clouds in the background convey an unsettling, ominous quality.

Such explorations of emotional states extended into the animal kingdom, marking the Romantic fascination with animals as both forces of nature and metaphors for human behavior. This curiosity is manifest in the sketches of wild animals done in the menageries of Paris and London in the 1820s by artists such as Delacroix, Antoine-Louis Barye, and Edwin Landseer. Gericault depicted horses of all breeds—from workhorses to racehorses—in his work. Lord Byron’s 1819 tale of Mazeppa tied to a wild horse captivated Romantic artists from Delacroix to Théodore Chassériau, who exploited the violence and passion inherent in the story. Similarly, Horace Vernet, who exhibited two scenes from Mazeppa in the Salon of 1827 (both Musée Calvet, Avignon), also painted the riderless horse race that marked the end of the Roman Carnival, which he witnessed during his 1820 visit to Rome. His oil sketch ( 87.15.47 ) captures the frenetic energy of the spectacle, just before the start of the race. Images of wild, unbridled animals evoked primal states that stirred the Romantic imagination.

Along with plumbing emotional and behavioral extremes, Romantic artists expanded the repertoire of subject matter, rejecting the didacticism of Neoclassical history painting in favor of imaginary and exotic subjects. Orientalism and the worlds of literature stimulated new dialogues with the past as well as the present. Ingres’ sinuous odalisques ( 38.65 ) reflect the contemporary fascination with the exoticism of the harem, albeit a purely imagined Orient, as he never traveled beyond Italy. In 1832, Delacroix journeyed to Morocco, and his trip to North Africa prompted other artists to follow. In 1846, Chassériau documented his visit to Algeria in notebooks filled with watercolors and drawings, which later served as models for paintings done in his Paris studio ( 64.188 ). Literature offered an alternative form of escapism. The novels of Sir Walter Scott, the poetry of Lord Byron, and the drama of Shakespeare transported art to other worlds and eras. Medieval England is the setting of Delacroix’s tumultuous Abduction of Rebecca ( 03.30 ), which illustrates an episode from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe .

In its stylistic diversity and range of subjects, Romanticism defies simple categorization. As the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1846, “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling.”

Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “Romanticism.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/roma/hd_roma.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Brookner, Anita. Romanticism and Its Discontents . New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux; : , 2000.

Honour, Hugh. Romanticism . New York: Harper & Row, 1979.

Additional Essays by Kathryn Calley Galitz

• Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ The Legacy of Jacques Louis David (1748–1825) .” (October 2004)
• Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) .” (May 2009)
• Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ The French Academy in Rome .” (October 2003)

Related Essays

• John Constable (1776–1837)
• Poets, Lovers, and Heroes in Italian Mythological Prints
• The Salon and the Royal Academy in the Nineteenth Century
• The Transformation of Landscape Painting in France
• Watercolor Painting in Britain, 1750–1850
• The Aesthetic of the Sketch in Nineteenth-Century France
• Auguste Rodin (1840–1917)
• The Countess da Castiglione
• Gustave Courbet (1819–1877)
• James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) as Etcher
• The Legacy of Jacques Louis David (1748–1825)
• Lithography in the Nineteenth Century
• The Nabis and Decorative Painting
• Nadar (1820–1910)
• Nineteenth-Century Classical Music
• Nineteenth-Century French Realism
• Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century Art
• Paolo Veronese (1528–1588)
• The Pre-Raphaelites
• Shakespeare and Art, 1709–1922
• Shakespeare Portrayed
• Sixteenth-Century Painting in Venice and the Veneto
• Thomas Eakins (1844–1916): Painting
• Women Artists in Nineteenth-Century France
• France, 1800–1900 A.D.
• Great Britain and Ireland, 1800–1900 A.D.
• 19th Century A.D.
• Architecture
• British Literature / Poetry
• Classical Ruins
• French Literature / Poetry
• Great Britain and Ireland
• History Painting
• Literature / Poetry
• Oil on Canvas
• Orientalism
• Preparatory Study

Artist or Maker

• Adamson, Robert
• Blake, William
• Blechen, Karl
• Chassériau, Théodore
• Constable, John
• Dahl, Johan Christian
• David, Jacques Louis
• Delacroix, Eugène
• Eakins, Thomas
• Friedrich, Caspar David
• Fuseli, Henry
• Gericault, Théodore
• Girodet-Trioson, Anne-Louis
• Gros, Antoine Jean
• Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique
• Købke, Christen
• Turner, Joseph Mallord William
• Vernet, Horace
• Von Carolsfeld, Julius Schnorr
• Von Leypold, Julius

Online Features

• 82nd & Fifth: “Motion Picture” by Asher Miller
• Connections: “Fatherhood” by Tim Healing

News alert: UC Berkeley has announced its next university librarian

Secondary menu

• Log in to your Library account
• Hours and Maps
• Connect from Off Campus
• UC Berkeley Home

Search form

Literature in english.

• Archives, Local
• Book Reviews
• Digital Texts
• Dissertations
• Encyclopedias & Reference
• Eighteenth Century
• Irish Literature in English
• Middle Ages
• Renaissance

Romanticism

Newspapers & periodicals, digital collections: broad time spans, related library research guides.

• Victorian and 19th Century
• Twentieth-Century Literature
• Women Writers
• Samuel Beckett
• Emily Dickinson
• Herman Melville
• Edmund Spenser
• ENG 190 Abel
• Professionalization
• Subscribe to Journal Alerts
• Faculty Books

• Early American Fiction 1789–1850 (Chadwyck-Healey) Facsimile page images and keyword-searchable full text for more than four hundred works of American prose fiction published before 1850, including key titles such as James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. more... less... Early American Fiction 1789–1850 is sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of Virginia Library, and published by ProQuest Information and Learning in collaboration with the University of Virginia.
• Early American Fiction 1789–1875 (Chadwyck-Healey) A unique collection of American fictional prose sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of Virginia Library, and published by ProQuest Information and Learning in collaboration with the University of Virginia. more... less... Early American Fiction 1789–1875 offers the full text of 875 first editions of American novels and short stories by such authors as Louisa May Alcott, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain, as well as a host of minor writers of the period.
• African American Poetry (Chadwyck-Healey) The early history of African American poetry, from the first recorded poem by an African American (Lucy Terry Prince's 'Bars Fight', c.1746) to the major poets of the nineteenth century, including Paul Laurence Dunbar and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.
• American Poetry (Chadwyck-Healey) Over 40,000 poems by more than 200 American poets from the Colonial Period to the early twentieth century.
• Canadian Poetry Created in partnership with the Electronic Text Centre at the University of New Brunswick Libraries, this unique collection contains the full text of more than 19,000 poems by 177 poets including Bliss Carman, Isabella Valancy Crawford, Archibald Lampman, Charles G. D. Roberts and Duncan Campbell Scott, offering a comprehensive survey of Canadian poetry from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth.
• English Drama (Chadwyck-Healey) A unique collection of more than 3,900 plays in verse and prose tracing the development of drama in English from the medieval mystery cycles to the comedies of Oscar Wilde.
• English Poetry (Chadwyck-Healey) The original ground-breaking Chadwyck-Healey collection, English Poetry contains essentially the complete English poetic canon from the 8th century to the early 20th. Over 160,000 poems by more than 1,250 poets are drawn from nearly 4,500 printed sources.
• English Poetry, Second Edition (Chadwyck-Healey) English Poetry, Second Edition contains over 183,000 poems, essentially comprising the complete canon of English poetry of the British Isles and the British Empire from the 8th century to the early 20th. Drawn from nearly 4,900 printed sources, more than 2,700 poets are represented. English Poetry, Second Edition redefines the English poetic canon for the 21st century, building on the achievement of the original English Poetry collection with the addition of more than 20,000 poems from several new categories.
• Bibliography of American Literature (Chadwyck-Healey) Recognised as one of the greatest achievements of twentieth-century scholarship, the Bibliography of American Literature describes in exhaustive detail the works of America's most important literary writers from the time of the Revolution to 1930. More than 37,000 works are listed, essentially the complete printed record of American literature from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
• Library of Congress Digital Collections Online access to manuscripts, ephemera, images, maps, and more.
• British and Irish History Research Guide Find the best databases, resources, and primary texts related to the history of the UK and Ireland. Created by the UC Berkeley history librarian.
• << Previous: Renaissance
• Next: Victorian and 19th Century >>
• Last Updated: Feb 28, 2024 4:12 PM
• URL: https://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/subject-guide/english

Browse Course Material

Course info.

• Prof. Noel Jackson

Departments

As taught in, learning resource types, romantic poetry, assignments.

This section contains descriptions of the two essay assignments for the course.

For your first assignment, please write an essay (approx. 5-7 pages) focusing on one poem (or two sonnets) by Lloyd, Smith, Seward, Wordsworth, or Coleridge. You certainly may - though you are not required to do so - refer to additional poems or to Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads if it will help you illustrate a point. Keep in mind, though, that your essay should be conceived as an exercise in close literary analysis, and should present a coherent and contestable argument about the poem under examination. What appear to be the larger themes or preoccupations that emerge from a close reading of the poem? What were the poet’s probable aims in writing the poem, and how are these aims expressed? What is the relation between the “meaning” of the poem (its thematic or symbolic content) and its formal features (such as genre, rhyme, meter, imagery, etc.)?

Wherever possible, focus on key passages that offer a particularly fruitful way to frame or address a question about the poem under discussion. Be as specific as possible, and develop your argument out of your reading of the text. Make sure that your quotations do some “work” for your argument: do not, in other words, use quotations merely to illustrate an otherwise self-evident point; by the same token, do not presume the self-evidence of your quotations, but describe what significance the quoted passage has within the whole or in the context of your argument.

This essay is due in Week 6.

For your second essay assignment, write an 8-10 page essay on one of the following topics. While your first essay explored a single poem in some depth, your second essay should have a comparative emphasis - that is, you should focus on and develop an argument out of a reading of two or (at most) three texts. Think of this as a variation on the “compare and contrast” essay, where you draw relationships and distinctions between a few texts, and consider what may be learned by reading these texts as formulations of or responses to a single issue or problem. Considered loosely as a group, what may these works teach us about your chosen topic and about the period of British Romanticism more generally? For each topic, I have listed some authors that you might consider; feel free to choose others if you wish.

• A related topic, but one that you are welcome to approach independently if you wish, concerns the relationship of Romantic writers to science and/or scientific knowledge. From Wordsworth’s critique of murderous dissection to Frankenstein’s monster, the literature of Romanticism is clearly skeptical of much scientific activity. Yet many writers of the period describe poetry and science as profoundly compatible enterprises. Discuss Romantic attitudes towards scientific pursuit and understanding in the work of at least two of the following authors: Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Keats, and Mary Shelley.
• The period of Romanticism is characterized not least by the frequency and force of claims made in this period on behalf of the poet and the faculty of imagination. Analyze these claims, and the relationships between them, in works by two or more of the following authors: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Hazlitt. What sort of power is imagination, and what are its effects? What are the grounds upon which the poet is claimed to be a privileged figure in the modern world? And what are the difficulties facing the poet (and the imaginative faculty more generally) in that world?
• While many of the texts we’ve read seem, at one level, to celebrate the joyous potential of individuality, discussion of these same texts has often led us to consider the limitations of autonomous selfhood. Write an essay on the problematic nature of individuality in two or three texts, including The Prelude, Frankenstein , and Keats’s “ Ode to a Nightingale .”
• As a fourth alternative, you may write an essay on a topic of your choice, provided that you meet with me in advance to discuss your ideas for the topic.

This essay is due in Week 14.

You are leaving MIT OpenCourseWare

Home / Essay Samples / History / Medieval Europe / Romanticism

Romanticism Essay Examples

Romanticism and dark romanticism.

Both Romanticism and Dark Romanticism values emotions as more important than knowledge and logical thinking. However, Dark Romanticism uses different forms of expression. Most popular representatives of this genre, such as Herman Melville or Edgar Alan Poe, believed that there is no stronger emotion than...

The Main Features of Romanticism Movement

Romanticism was and is a global movement that cleared Western Europe and Russia toward the finish of the eighteenth and start of the nineteenth centuries. It extended to North America starting around 1830. As a movement, Romanticism drew its motivation and vitality from different sources...

Analysis of Michael Ferber’s Book on Romanticism

Romanticism, a literary theory or a movement or whatever name it can be called with very much familiar to a student of literature. Even before delving into the deep ocean of Romantic realm of poetry he or she feels at one with this very word...

Analysis of the Main Values of the Romantic Era

William Wordsworth once said, “Come forth into the light of things, let nature be your teacher”. In other words, let nature enlighten one in becoming a pure individual. Romanticism was a movement in the late 18th century that emphasized individuality and flawed human nature, while...

Industrial, Scientific Revolution, Age of Enlightenment, Romanticism: Causes of Revolutions

The Scientific Revolution was a progression of occasions that denoted the rise of present day science during the early current time frame, when advancements in arithmetic, material science, space science, science and science changed the perspectives on society about nature. The Scientific Revolution occurred in...

Industrial, Scientific Revolution, Age of Enlightenment, Romanticism: Impact on the World

Having to know the scientific revolution is not just fun but it is also very important for us to know it adds to our general knowledge and how did we reach to this point now in this generation, it’s because of these incredible people in...

Analysis of the Basic Tenets of the Romantic Era

Romanticism can be defined as a type of reaction alongside age which involves logical decision making and reasoning. Romanticism as an ideology is comprised of three main themes which include human emotions, the love of nature, as well as the belief in the supernatural. The...

Analysis of Romanticism and Revolutionary Literature

The difference between romanticism and revolutionary literature has to do with individuals. Romanticism emphasizes inspiration and subjectivity of an individual. Revolutionary literature has to do with enlightenment thinkers and individualists that were common. They are different because romanticism is about individuals and Revolutionary literature is...

Romanticism in the Devil and Tom Watson   

Romanticism was an artistic literary movement that emphasized love, nature,emotion, and out of the box ideas. It highlighted the difference of British literature and American literature in the 19th century because of its distinguishing style. Characteristics of this style includes the belief that civilization is...

Romanticizing the Past: Slow Life Strategists Use Nostalgia to Cope with Loneliness

From an evolutionary perspective, we all come from different environments and genetic combinations. These factors, along with many others, influence the development of humans. Life History Theory categorizes two different life strategies between slow and fast lifestyles. To distinguish one another, fast life strategists derive...

Trying to find an excellent essay sample but no results?

Don’t waste your time and get a professional writer to help!

You may also like

• Industrial Revolution
• French Revolution Essays
• Imperialism Essays
• Trail of Tears Essays
• Human Trafficking Essays
• Alexander Hamilton Essays
• Holocaust Essays
• Harriet Tubman Essays
• Rosa Parks Essays
• Civil Rights Movement Essays
• The Progressive Era Essays

About Romanticism

From the late 18th to the mid-19th century.

Francisco Goya, William Blake, John Constable, Henry Fuseli, Albert Bierstadt, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, etc.

samplius.com uses cookies to offer you the best service possible.By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .--> -->