Period: Late 18th to mid-19th century
formal start: William Wordsworth’s Lyrical ballads (1798)
Key Ideas
Deeper understanding of the world is achieved through intuition and emotional connections, rather than reason.
Reaction to Enlightenment rationality + Industrial Revolution
RTSM - Sturm und Drang
RTSM - Romantic hero
Key figures
Literature
Exceptional individuals as protagonists are the norm in Romanticism, in part from the early admiration of Napoleon Bonaparte. One example: in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Klan touches on the Romantic idea of poet as genius.