Romantics

The Romantics, or Romanticism, was an influential cultural, artistic, and intellectual movement that began in late 18th-century Europe and flourished into the mid-19th century. It arose as a reaction against Enlightenment emphasis on reason and the early effects of industrialization, prioritizing imagination, emotion, individual experience, and a deep engagement with nature and the past. Romantics sought to recover a sense of mystery, the sublime, and the spiritual dimension of life, often highlighting wonder, intuition, and personal conscience.

In literature, Romantic writing emphasized lyric intensity, imagination, and a fascination with folklore, medieval history, and the inner life. Prominent figures include William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats in Britain; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and other German writers; and later American voices like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who helped shape Transcendentalist thought. Visual art for Romantics favored expressive landscapes and the sublime, as seen in Caspar David Friedrich and J. M. W. Turner. In music, composers such as Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, and later Richard Wagner expanded musical expression to mirror Romantic ideals of emotion, individuality, and national or folk-inspired character.

Regional variants include British Romanticism, German Romanticism, and American Transcendentalism, all sharing core concerns with nature, imagination, freedom, and the critique of mechanized modernity. The influence of the Romantics extended into philosophy, politics, and later aesthetic movements, shaping notions of selfhood, creativity, and the value of the arts in human experience.