Romanticism is a term for all the various tendencies towards change in European art, literature, and music in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
It was a not a unified movement with a specific agenda. It is observable as a shift in sensibility and a moving away from the rationalist ideals of Classicism prevalent in Europe since the end of the middle-ages.
Artists influenced by the Romantic movement were concerned with self-expression, uninhibited by formal rules and conventions. This can be seen in the early works of the German poets Schiller and Goethe, and those of the English poets Wordsworth and Coleridge.
The most typical attitude of the Romantic is individualism. The movement took place before and during the era when moral, religious and state control was challenged everywhere in Europe, in the context of the French and American revolutions.
Its most recognisable character is the Romantic hero, a solitary dreamer or an egocentric driven by guilt and remorse. By the late nineteenth century the English poet Byron was not only writing such heroes but posing as one himself.
The Romantic hero was often seen in a historical context, as in the novels of Walter Scott. He was a gift to librettists and composers, who found him a suitably dramatic substitute for the gods and heroes of classical myth.
This new sense of history corresponded with an already growing cult of the primitive, which led to an interest in Celtic bardic verse and in folksong.
Except in Germany, the literary Romantics were not self-consciously romantic. Romantic poets in England came from very different backgrounds, held differing political beliefs and, in some cases, frankly disliked each other. Even their theories about literature itself could be sharply different.
However, one element was common to Romanticism in England, Germany and France. This was the concept of the artist as set apart from other men because of the gift of his Imagination.
