romantics essay questions

121 Romanticism Essay Topics & Examples

In a romanticism essay, you can explore a variety of topics, from American literature to British paintings. For that task, these ideas of romanticism collected by our team will be helpful!

🏆 Best Romanticism Ideas & Essay Examples

• ⭐ Simple & Easy Romanticism Essay Titles

📌 Most Interesting Romanticism Essay Topics

👍 good research ideas on romanticism, ❓ essay questions on romanticism.

• Wordsworth’s Romanticism in Tintern Abbey Poem The tone of the poem is calm and meditative and Wordsworth describes the “landscape” and compares it to the “quiet” of the sky: “The landscape with the quiet of the sky”..
• Nature in 18th Century and Romanticism Literatures The anxiety inherent in a sketch – the feeling of being unsettled – leads Goldsmith to other stylistic choices, most notably the creation of illusions and the reliance upon sentiment, both of which smooth away […]
• Romanticism in Frankenstein: The Use of Poetry in the Novel’s Narrative Although the dark and horrific motifs of Frankenstein may appear to contrast with the bright tones and subjects of such poetry, there is a clear connection, as established in the text, between the poetry of […]
• Between Romanticism and Modernism The first of the modernists in music sought to begin new dimensions and depths in music through the use of non-conventional instruments and novel sounds.
• Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism in Literature Romantic literature is characterized by several key traits, such as a love of nature, an emphasis on the individual and spirituality, a celebration of solitude and sadness, an interest in the common man, an idealization […]
• Romanticism and Victorian Literature Comparison In this respect, literature can be proud of the Romanticism and Victorian literature, because of their gradual framework and applicable emergence due to the significant events, such as the French Revolution, American Revolution, the defeat […]
• Romanticism in Wolfgang Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther It is the fruitless reconciliation of the impulsive and sensitive to the society that makes Young Werther’s journey so powerful. What is even more interesting is that this general tone is what led to the […]
• The French Revolution: Romanticism Period Romanticism was anchored in the work of the poets which was evident in the daily lives of the society. Besides, the role of women in romantic literature was significant, thus; they were greatest poets and […]
• Restoration Literature and Romanticism: Common Facts All in all, the period of Restoration in the English literature can be described as the vindication of mind, intellectual values and political interests. The diction of this period is soft, inspiring, light and moving.
• Ethnocentrism, Romanticism, Exoticism, and Primitivism as Depicted in James Cameron’s “Avatar” Ethnocentrism is depicted in most scenes of Avatar; the film outlines Na’vi’s ways of life and the way the protagonist is forced to profess the culture before being admitted into the community.
• Romanticism and the Modern Theatre The statement by the Romantic writer confirms the need to involve ordinary people in the theatre. The relationship between Faust and the devil in Goethe’s play is different from that in the traditional myth.
• Feminism Builds up in Romanticism, Realism, Modernism Exploring the significance of the theme as well as the motifs of this piece, it becomes essential to understand that the era of modernism injected individualism in the literary works.
• Romanticism Period in Art 3 It is against this scope that this paper aims to explore the aspect of romanticism in the history of painting by considering the works of artists such as Kauffmann, David, Delacroix and Gros.
• Gothic Romanticism of Edgar Allen Poe When the thought of today, the nineteenth-century writer Edgar Allan Poe is remembered as the master of the short story and the psychological thriller.
• The History of the Romanticism Period Romanticism refers to the period of intellectual, artistic and literary movement in Europe in the first half of nineteenth century. The supporters of the Romantic Movement point to the spontaneous and irrational display of powerful […]
• Gothic Romanticism in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Nathaniel Hawthorn’s “The Birthmark” In the film “The Black Swan” directed by Darren Aronofsky, Nina struggles to fit into the ultimate role of the play “The Swan Lake”, as the Black Swan, even though she is comfortable playing the […]
• Romanticism of Blake’s and Ghalib’s Poems In this journal, I will look at how Blake and Ghalib exemplify the Romantic movement, how their works differ from those of the Enlightenment, and the significance of their democratic and accessible writing style.
• Romanticism: Beethoven’s Pathétique and Douglass’ The Narrative Two such examples of Romanticism works are Beethoven’s piano sonata, Pathetique, and Frederick Douglass’s The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.
• Researching of Musical Romanticism The critical characteristics of musical Romanticism could be seen in the stress on uniqueness and individuality, the expression of one’s emotions, and freedom of form and experimentation.
• Renaissance and Romanticism: Concepts of Beauty Titian, as a representative of the Renaissance, depicted a portrait of a girl in compliance with all the canons of his time.
• Romanticism as an Ideological and Artistic Trend Romanticism in painting rejected the rationalism of classicism and reflected the attention to the depths of the human personality characteristic of the philosophy of the Romantics.
• Romanticism in Modern Ecological Literature The current efforts by humans to safeguard the environment, coupled with the onset of ecological literature, not only indicates that romanticism never disappeared but also proves that the romantics were right. The artists were critical […]
• Neo-Classicism, Romanticism, and Rococo Thus, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the neoclassical style was widely popular in Europe. This style contradicted the coldness and simplicity of neoclassicism.
• Features of French Romanticism in Camille Saint-Saens’s Music It is important to analyze Camille Saint-Saens’s works in the context of French Romanticism because the composer often combined the elements of French Romanticism with features typical of other movements and music styles like habanera.

⭐ Simple & Easy Romanticism Essay Titles

• Romanticism. Artists Associated With the Movement Art dealt mostly with issues of motive and realism while other forms of art dealt with the darkness of the community on one hand and its magnificence on the other.
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Poetry: British Romanticism There can be no doubt as to the fact that Romantic writers and poets strongly opposed the ideals of the French Revolution; however, this was not due to these ideals’ rational essence, but because, during […]
• Revolution and Romanticism in Europe and America The analysis of romanticism presentation on the basis of Rousseau’s theory is to be reflected through the atmosphere of French revolution period. Romanticism of Rousseau appeared to be close to the approach of ‘primitivism’, characterizing […]
• Romanticism: Paintings by Francisco Goya The first painting depicted a nude woman in the Western art and the second painting was painted after controversial thoughts from the Spanish society over the meaning of The Nude Maja.
• Tristan and Isolde Opera Romanticism The Tristan and Isolde drama is influenced by a wide range of things. Wagner uses the voices to show what is in the thoughts of Isolde and her attendant.
• British Romanticism and Its Origins It was partially a rebellion against aristocratic social and political standards of the Age of Enlightenment and a response against the scientific explanation of nature and was exemplified most powerfully in the visual arts, music, […]
• Romanticizing Literature, Visual Arts and Music During Romanticism 1800-1850 As “it emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental”, the Romanticism period inspired many artists in the field of literature, painting, music, […]
• Enlightenment and Romanticism: Comparison In the wake up of the feminist and historicist takes to pieces of the older Romanticism, particularly Bloom’s “creative thinker corporation” and the Wordsworth-centered verse of consciousness and the natural world, one has to inquire […]
• American Romanticism of “The Minister’s Black Veil” In the story Hawthorne pondered upon the three ways of making God’s word clearer to people. The author himself and his main hero saw the mission of a clergyman in explaining the Bible to the […]
• Chopin: Musician Who Had Effect Romanticism Music At the beginning of the musical period known as Romanticism Frederic Chopin was born in Poland. The piano was his chosen instrument and one that he mastered at a very young age.
• The Age of Romanticism and Its Factors Characteristics of the genre identified by Welleck include a “revolt against the principles of neo-classicism criticism, the rediscovery of older English literature, the turn toward subjectivity and the worship of external nature slowly prepared during […]
• Neoclassicism and Romanticism: Comparison They were the two poles of architectural thinking on the side of Neoclassicism was a rational, objective, almost scientific method of thought, which put reason in the first place among human abilities.
• Romanticism. Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” One of the most typical traits of romantic literature is the prevalence of emotions, setting the natural world above the created world, and the most important, freedom of an individual.
• Gustave Courbet: Revolutionary Artist of Romanticism While the clergy is visible from the background of the work, the decision by the painter to focus on the dog in the foreground was even more appalling.
• Baroque and Romanticism Art Periods and Influences The above two works of art depict great disparities in art as a result of communal, political, and economic factors of mankind during the periods.
• American Industrialization, Romanticism and Civil War In the article, the Romantic Movement Romantic impulse meant the liberation of the Americans to a point of freedom regarding respect and love.
• The Age of Romanticism: Dances Articles Analysis On the one hand, it seems that these two writings have nothing in common except the intentions of the authors to make contributions to the field of dance and choose the theme of ballet for […]
• Edgar Allan Poe, an American Romanticism Writer Poe’s three works “The fall of the house of Usher”, “the Raven” and “The Masque of the Red Death” describe his dedication to literature and his negative attitudes towards aristocracy.
• Romanticism in Seascape Painting by Jules Dupre In particular, it is important to examine the stylistic peculiarities of this artwork and the way in which it reflects the cultural trends that emerged in the nineteenth century.
• Nineteenth Century Romanticism The works of early composers, writers, painters, and poets evolved from the onset, and in the increased quest for perfection, a spirit of romanticism was born.
• Romanticism, Baroque and Renaissance Paintings’ Analysis It is possible to focus on such artworks as the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar Friedrich, The Taking of Christ by Caravaggio, and Raphael’s The School of Athens.
• Art influences Culture: Romanticism & Realism In addition, the paper also highlights issues of the time and influences of the later works on the art world. Realism presented events of the society as they happened in reality.
• Light vs. Dark Romanticism As the narration continues and Katrina is wooed by Crane, Irving interrupts and expresses his imagination about the challenging and admirable nature of women.
• Nature as the Mean of Expression in Romanticism The period of Romanticism is characterized by its address to nature, in other words, the world was perceived through the nature.”It is characterized by a shift from the structured, intellectual, reasoned approach of the 1700’s […]
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Romanticism
• The Three Different Features of Romanticism in The World is Too Much With Us, a Poem by William Wordsworth
• Romanticism And Realism: Examples Of Mark Twain And Herman Melville Novels
• William Cullen Bryant and American Romanticism
• The American Renaissance: Transcendentalism, Romanticism and Dark Romanticism
• The Influence Of The French Revolution Upon British Romanticism
• The Relationship Between Romanticism And Transcendentalism
• Transcendentalism: Principal Expression of Romanticism in America
• Socialism And Ideas Associated With The Movement In Relation To Those Of Romanticism
• Women’s Self-Discovery During Late American Romanticism
• The French Romanticism Of Moliere And Shakespeare ‘s Midsummer Night ‘s
• The Role of Romanticism and Realism in the Development of Art
• The Historical Development of Literature from the Enlightenment through Romanticism to Modernism
• The Characteristics of the Romanticism in Wordsworth
• The Influence of Romanticism on People as Demonstrated in the Story of Madam Bovary
• Realism and Romanticism: Similarities and Differences
• The Romanticism Movement in the Novel The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff
• Varieties Of Romanticism In The Poetry Of Blake Shelly And Keats
• Walt Whitman And The Romanticism Movement
• Sexism, Romanticism, and the Portrayal of Women in Eighteenth Century Art
• The Shift from Romanticism to Realism in Mark Twain’s Satire Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences
• The Washington Irving’s Romanticism
• The Categorization of Romanticism and Realism at the End of the Baroque Period in the 18th Century
• The Theme of Nature in Frankenstein as a Representation of the Effect Romanticism Had on Mary Shelley
• The Key Tensions in Romanticism in Coleridge’s Kubla Khan and Keat’s Ode to a Nightingale
• Tom Sawyer as a Representation of Walter Scott’s Romanticism and Tradition in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a Novel by Mark Twain
• The Use of Romanticism in The Raven, a Poem by Edgar Allan Poe
• William Wordsworth’s Daffodils and Negative Romanticism
• The Use of Romanticism by Different Literary Authors
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – An Obvious Depiction of Romanticism and Realism
• What Is The Romanticism Of Johnathan Keats And Wordsworth
• The Romanticism Of The 19th Century
• The Tables Turned’ by William Wordsworth and Romanticism
• Use Of Romanticism In Development Of Characters In The Scarlet Letter
• The Similarities Between Romanticism And Modernism
• The Effect of Romanticism, Nationalism, and Communism in Shaping the European Nations
• The Progression of Knowledge Between the 18th-Century Neoclassicism and 19th-Century Romanticism
• The Origins, Spirit, Style, Themes, and Decline of the Romanticism Movement in Literature
• The Elements of Romanticism in the Short Story, The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Symbols of Romanticism in the Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Characteristics Of Romanticism Found In The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner
• The Romanticism and Realism in Art and Literature
• The Themes of Guilt, Suffering, and Experience in Literature During the Romanticism and Victorian Era
• What Is the Difference Between Romanticism and Postmodernism?
• How Does William Wordsworth’s Poetry Fit Into the Literary Tradition of Romanticism?
• What Are the Differences Between Romanticism and Classicism?
• How Did Romanticism and Photography Shape Western Modernity?
• What Is the Opposite of Romanticism?
• Is Nature a Dominant Theme in Romantic Poetry?
• What Were the Material Causes of the Rise of Romanticism?
• How Did Romanticism Change Society’s Way of Thinking?
• What Are the Similarities Between Romantic Literature and Early Victorian Literature?
• How Has Romanticism Diminished Throughout Popularity?
• What Are the Main Features of Romantic Poetry?
• How Did Romanticism Influence American Architecture?
• What Are the Four Basic Tenets of Romanticism?
• How Did Romanticism Kill Love?
• What Did the Romantics Revolt Against, and What Did They Revive?
• How Do Romantics Emphasize Individuality?
• What Were the Characteristic Features of Poetry During the Romantic Movement?
• Why Did Romantic Writers Reject Rationalism?
• What Are Some Characteristics of Romantic Poetry?
• Why Is Imagination Closely Linked With Romanticism?
• What Is the Contribution of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley to the Romanticism?
• Why Is the Prometheus Myth Important for Romanticism?
• What Is Romantic Language and Style?
• Who Were the Most Famous Writers During the American Romantic Era?
• What Are Some Short Notes on Romanticism?
• Why Should a Student Study Romantic Poetry?
• What Is the Importance of 3 Major Concepts of Romanticism?
• How Does Romantic Writing Differ From the Early American Writings Done by the Puritans?
• What Are the Salient Features of Romanticism?
• What Inspired Poets of Romantic Era to Write Poems?
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104 Romanticism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

Romanticism is a literary and artistic movement that emerged in the late 18th century and reached its peak in the 19th century. It is characterized by a focus on emotion, individualism, nature, and the supernatural. Romanticism rebelled against the rationalism and order of the Enlightenment, embracing instead the power of imagination and the beauty of the natural world.

If you are studying Romanticism in your literature class and need some inspiration for essay topics, look no further. Here are 104 romanticism essay topic ideas and examples to help you get started:

• The role of nature in Romantic literature
• The theme of individualism in Romantic poetry
• The influence of the Gothic on Romanticism
• The role of the artist in Romantic literature
• The concept of the sublime in Romanticism
• The portrayal of women in Romantic literature
• The use of symbolism in Romantic poetry
• The influence of folk and fairy tales on Romantic literature
• The depiction of the supernatural in Romantic poetry
• The theme of love in Romantic literature
• The idea of the "romantic hero" in Romantic literature
• The role of music in Romantic poetry
• The influence of Romanticism on modern literature
• The portrayal of childhood in Romantic poetry
• The use of irony in Romantic literature
• The relationship between Romanticism and nationalism
• The role of history in Romantic literature
• The influence of Romanticism on the visual arts
• The depiction of the city in Romantic poetry
• The influence of Romanticism on the development of the novel
• The role of the supernatural in the poetry of William Blake
• The theme of the journey in the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• The portrayal of nature in the poetry of William Wordsworth
• The use of myth in the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley
• The influence of the French Revolution on the poetry of Lord Byron
• The role of religion in the poetry of John Keats
• The influence of science on the poetry of Mary Shelley
• The portrayal of the artist in the poetry of William Blake
• The influence of Romanticism on the poetry of Emily Dickinson
• The role of the supernatural in the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe
• The theme of madness in the poetry of Charlotte Smith
• The influence of Romanticism on the poetry of Walt Whitman
• The portrayal of nature in the poetry of Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The use of symbolism in the poetry of Henry David Thoreau
• The influence of Romanticism on the poetry of Emily Bront''
• The role of the supernatural in the poetry of Christina Rossetti
• The theme of love in the poetry of Robert Browning
• The influence of Romanticism on the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• The portrayal of nature in the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson
• The use of symbolism in the poetry of Oscar Wilde
• The influence of Romanticism on the poetry of W.B. Yeats
• The role of the supernatural in the poetry of William Butler Yeats
• The theme of love in the poetry of Ezra Pound
• The influence of Romanticism on the poetry of T.S. Eliot
• The portrayal of nature in the poetry of Robert Frost
• The use of symbolism in the poetry of Wallace Stevens
• The influence of Romanticism on the poetry of Langston Hughes
• The role of the supernatural in the poetry of Sylvia Plath
• The theme of love in the poetry of Maya Angelou
• The influence of Romanticism on the poetry of Allen Ginsberg
• The portrayal of nature in the poetry of Anne Sexton
• The use of symbolism in the poetry of Adrienne Rich
• The influence of Romanticism on the poetry of Seamus Heaney
• The role of the supernatural in the poetry of Derek Walcott
• The theme of love in the poetry of Derek Walcott
• The influence of Romanticism on the poetry of Louise Gl''ck
• The portrayal of nature in the poetry of Jorie Graham
• The use of symbolism in the poetry of Rita Dove
• The influence of Romanticism on the poetry of Natasha Trethewey
• The role of the supernatural in the poetry of Tracy K. Smith
• The theme of love in the poetry of Tracy K. Smith
• The influence of Romanticism on the poetry of Terrance Hayes
• The portrayal of nature in the poetry of Terrance Hayes
• The use of symbolism in the poetry of Terrance Hayes
• The role of the supernatural in the poetry of Terrance Hayes
• The theme of love in the poetry of Terrance Hayes

These essay topics cover a wide range of themes and ideas within the realm of Romanticism. Whether you are interested in exploring the role of nature in Romantic literature or analyzing the influence of the supernatural in Romantic poetry, there is sure to be a topic that sparks your interest. Happy writing!

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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)

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English and Comparative Literary Studies

Essay questions.

EN 206 English and German Romanticism: Assessed Essay Titles

The following titles are suggestions which you may modify in consultation with tutors:

1. Nature for the Romantics often appears to have two faces, to be the source both of people's happiness and of their misery. Discuss the ways in which two or three works have explored that duality.

2. 'Both Goethe's Faust and Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein can be seen as titanic overreachers, as modern versions of Prometheus: the difference lies in how that overreaching is evaluated'. Discuss.

3. One of the books that Frankenstein's monster reads is Goethe's Werther . In what ways are these two texts mutually illuminating?

5. ‘Wie aber der Riese Antäus unbezwingbar stark blieb, wenn er mit dem Fusse die Mutter Erde berührte, und seine Kraft verlor, sobald ihn Herkules in die Höhe hob: so ist auch der Dichter stark und gewaltig, so lange er den Boden der Wirklichkeit nicht verlässt, und er wird ohnmächtig, sobald er schwärmerisch in der blauen Luft umherschwebt’ (Heine). Compare Heine’s poltically radical poetry with Shelley’s in the light of this statement. (or, alternatively, use the statement as the basis for a comparison of one English and one German prose text).

6. The essential vision of the German Romantics has been defined as ‘their feeling for the uncanny, the menace, the sense of evil lurking behind the façade of the world’ (Wellek). Compare one German and one English work in the light of this view.

7. Discuss and compare the role of nature and landscape in Goethe’s and Wordsworth’s poetry. (You should focus on a small selection of poems).

8. ‘Alles Übel ist isoliert und isolierend -- es ist das Prinzip der Trennung’ (Novalis). Discuss the relationship between evil and isolation/separation in one English and one German text.

9. ‘The dialectic is pervasive in romantic writing, and will frequently turn on the recognition that rises may be inseparable from falls’ (Karl Miller). Consider the dialectical relationship between ‘rises’ and ‘falls’ in Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Der goldene Topf , or any other Romantic texts in which you find it present.

10. Discuss and compare the importance of either Sehnsucht; or history; or revolution; or irony; or Italy; or the journey; or the figure of the devil; or the Doppelgänger in any two works.

11. ‘Since the object of romantic or erotic love is not the recognition and appreciation of the beloved woman as an independent other but rather the assimilation of the female into the male [. . .] the woman must finally be enslaved or destroyed, must disappear or die’ (Anne Mellor). Discuss the representation of romantic love in one English and one German text in the light of this statement.

12. Consider how far Werther and Frankenstein (or P. B. Shelley's Alastor ) can be read as a critique of the Romantic ego.

13. ‘Romantic Irony is the irony of a writer conscious that literature can no longer be simply naive and unreflective but must present itself as conscious of its contradictory, ambivalent nature’ (Muecke). Discuss and compare any two works in the light of this definition.

14. In 1843 Heine described himself as Romanticism’s ‘letzter Dichter’. In what sense is this true, and could the same label be attached to Byron?

15. Todorov in The Fantastic defined fantastic writing as one in which ‘the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural and a supernatural explanation of the events described’. Compare two texts that are illuminated by this definition.

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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?

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Romanticism - List of Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. Essays might delve into its key characteristics, major figures, its impact on art and literature, and its contrast with Enlightenment ideals. A substantial compilation of free essay instances related to Romanticism you can find in Papersowl database. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

Shelley about Romanticism Versus the Enlightenment

In the novel, "Frankenstein," Mary Shelley uses various elements of both mysterious and romantic literature to convey her indictment of the Enlightenment thinking over the use of her characters displayed throughout the novel. Being written in the time of the Romantic era, Shelley uses vivid language to portray her objection of the Enlightenment age as it influenced many people to use logical reasoning and science to disregard barbarism and superstition from the World. In Frankenstein, Shelley's response to this ideology […]

Neoclassicism and Romanticism

During the 18th century, a new movement brushed through Europe and created a primitive change in politics, science, and art. The Enlightenment was partially a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, as the world witnessed the importance of technological innovation for the growth of humankind. Neoclassicism and Romanticism literature and arts affected the present world. Neoclassicism was the foundation of romanticism especially in the influence either in literature, arts and of their genres.Neoclassical and Romanticism both developed from Greece and Rome […]

Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle”

Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, was first published in 1819, the last year to be categorised as the predecessors of the American short story before American Romanticism began. The story instantly became famous because its use of literary form that other predecessors often lacked. Many early American stories were undeveloped with flat characters and plot lines that often gave a didactic tone. “Rip Van Winkle,” is written with more eloquence and literary style that it can easily be identified as […]

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Romanticism and Realism in “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Young Goodman Brown is a story that challenged the American society. “Young Goodman Brown has long been recognized as signifying more than an individual’s spiritual paranoia.” (Christophersen, p. 2, 1986). (Hawthorne drew from his experiences in the Romantic period, the concept of realism, and examples of real-life occurrences, to help the reader truly understand the meaning behind the story. Hawthorne uses examples of Romanticism by showing times when Goodman Brown thinks irrationally and doesn’t think about other explanations. He also […]

Dark Romanticism

“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality” (Edgar Allan Poe). Dark Romanticism is a literary movement that made waves that still resonate today within modern horror and pop culture, from Frankenstein to Dracula many recognizable names came from this era of writing. From the subjects covered by the many influential authors of the era to how it still has a place within modern writing, Dark Romanticism, a writing movement that began in […]

The Romantic Era and the Renaissance Period

The Italian Renaissance, lasting from the 14th to the 17th centuries, and the Romantic era of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were influential both in the aspects of art and of literature. The Italian Renaissance saw a notable revival of interest in the classical values of ancient Greece and Rome. Having the ability to rely on the political stability and growing prosperity in Italy, the people allowed for the development of new technologies- including the printing press, a […]

The Devil and Tom Walker: Romanticism

Washington Irving stated "The Devil and Tom Walker" as a component of a short stories assortment named "Stories of a Traveler" in 1824. Set in New England during the 1700s, Walker offering his spirit to Satan for treasure is one awful segment to this story that may appear everything except heartfelt. Notwithstanding, "The Devil and Tom Walker," which is frequently educated in secondary school writing classes, offers numerous qualities that are important for the heartfelt writing type. "The Devil and […]

American Romanticism and the Gothic Theme in the Novel Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Passion Versus Reason: Phaedra and Confessions

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The Term “Romanticism”

The word romanticism was initially used to describe new ideas in literature and painting. Afterward, the term "Romanticism" stood for the most famous intellectual movement that originally generated in Europe toward the end of the eighteenth century (Cranston M. W., & Cranston, 1994). At the end of the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth century, romanticism rapidly spread throughout Europe and the United states to challenge the rational concept held so tightly within the Enlightenment, the former intellectual and […]

Revolution Republics and Romanticism

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Romantic and Gothic Elements in House of Usher

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William Wordsworth: the Quintessential Poet of Romanticism Whose Literary Legacy Shaped an Era

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The Lush Landscape of the Romanticism Era

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Dark Romanticism: the Brooding Sibling of the Romantic Movement

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Romantic Features in Frankenstein

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John Keats, one of the most celebrated Romantic poets, often grappled with themes of beauty, art, and mortality. Among his vast repertoire, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" stands as a testament to his deep contemplation of these themes. In this ode, Keats elegantly crafts a bridge between the visual and the verbal, using an ancient Greek urn as a symbol of timeless beauty and the eternal nature of art. The urn, an artifact of a bygone era, captures frozen moments […]

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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.

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Home — Essay Samples — History — Medieval Europe — Romanticism

Essays on Romanticism

What makes a good romanticism essay topics.

When it comes to writing an essay on Romanticism, choosing the right topic is crucial. A good essay topic should be engaging, thought-provoking, and provide ample opportunity for critical analysis. But how do you go about brainstorming and choosing the right topic for your Romanticism essay? Here are some recommendations to consider:

• First, it's important to consider your interests and passions. What aspect of Romanticism speaks to you the most? Whether it's the literature, art, music, or philosophy of the Romantic period, choosing a topic that resonates with you will make the writing process much more enjoyable and fulfilling.
• Next, consider the scope of your essay. Are you looking to explore a specific theme, literary work, or artist from the Romantic period? Narrowing down your focus will help you to delve deeper into the subject matter and provide a more comprehensive analysis.
• It's also important to consider the availability of research material. A good Romanticism essay topic should have ample scholarly sources and critical analysis available to support your arguments and insights.
• Finally, a good essay topic should be original and unique. Avoid choosing overused or cliché topics, and instead, look for fresh and innovative ideas that will captivate your readers and demonstrate your creativity and critical thinking skills.

Best Romanticism Essay Topics

• The Role of Nature in Romantic Literature
• The Influence of Romanticism on Modern Art
• The Sublime in Romantic Poetry
• Gender and Sexuality in Romantic Literature
• Individualism and Rebellion in Romantic Philosophy
• The Romantic Hero in Literature and Film
• The Gothic and Romanticism
• Romanticism and the Industrial Revolution
• Nationalism and Romanticism in Music
• Romantic Love in Poetry and Prose
• Transcendentalism and Romanticism
• The Romantics and the Supernatural
• The Influence of Romanticism on Environmentalism
• Romanticism and Revolution
• The Romantics and the City
• Folklore and Mythology in Romantic Literature
• Romanticism and the Subversion of Traditional Values
• The Romantics and the Cult of Emotion
• The Romantics and the Exotic
• Romanticism and the Pursuit of the Ideal Self

Romanticism essay topics Prompts

• Imagine you are a Romantic poet living in the 19th century. Write a letter to a fellow poet discussing your views on nature and its role in your poetry.
• Choose a piece of Romantic art and analyze how it reflects the ideals and themes of the Romantic movement.
• Create a modern-day adaptation of a Romantic literary work, setting it in a contemporary context and exploring how the themes and ideas of the original text are still relevant today.
• Compare and contrast the portrayal of love and relationships in two Romantic literary works, exploring how they reflect the cultural and social values of the Romantic period.
• Write a persuasive essay arguing for the importance of studying Romanticism in the modern-day, demonstrating how the ideas and themes of the Romantic period continue to resonate and influence contemporary culture and society.

Choosing a good Romanticism essay topic requires careful consideration and creativity. By following these recommendations and exploring the best Romanticism essay topics and prompts provided, you'll be well on your way to crafting an engaging and insightful essay that demonstrates your understanding and appreciation of the Romantic period.

Romanticism and The Transcendental Club

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Enlightenment Vs. Romanticism: Unveiling Similarities

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The Romanticism of Wordsworth and Shelley: a Poetry of The "Happiest Moments"

Representation of romanticism in edgar allen poe’s poetry, romanticism in the masque of the red death by edgar allan poe, william wordsworth’s expostulation and reply: a neoclassical and romantic analysis, get a personalized essay in under 3 hours.

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Review on The Relationship Between Poetic Form and Political Significance

Isolation and the sublime in rousseau and wordsworth, comparison of william blake and william wordsworth's writing styles, class system and morality in jane austen's novels, two interpretations of "a slumber did my spirit seal", primary and secondary nature in wordsworth’s "the thorn", the union of opposing elements by wordsworth and coleridge, victorian, romantic and modernist literature: style as cultural commentary, naturalism in tintern abbey, european romanticism in the 19th century and its role in the rene novella, how learning leads to the sublime in the works of william wordsworth, the creative function of ekphrasis in the work of shelley, keats, and wordsworth, romanticism: love and revolution, analyzing romanticism in pushkin's "the shot", sublimity in wordsworth and smith, forms of psychoanalysis in keats, smith and wordsworth, analysis of "mariana", a common theme in hardy’s "arcadia" and stoppard’s "poems 1912-1913’, wordsworth’s references to nature in resolution and independence, planning a romantic gateway for your loved one’s.

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

Romanticism was an artistic, historiographical, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe somewhere between 1770 to 1850. This movement is typically emphasized individualism, imagination and strong emotion.

In literature, Romanticism presented such themes as the cult of "sensibility" with its emphasis on women and children, the isolation of the artist or narrator and respect for nature. The Scottish poet James Macpherson influenced the early development of Romanticism. An early German influence came from Goethe with the novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther". The poets such as Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Byron were the key figures in Romanticism in English literature.

Nature was a main source of inspiration in the visual arts of the Romantic Movement. Romantic artists depicted nature as beautiful, powerful, unpredictable and destructive. The most known artists of the movement was Caspar David Friedrich, J. M. W. Turner, Thomas Bewick, Samuel Palmer, John Constable.

The term “Romanticism” appeared in music from the 1820s until 1910. The Romantic Movement in music was marked by emphasis on individuality, personal emotional expression, freedom and experimentation of form. The most known Romantic composers in Europe were Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn, Frédéric Chopin, Hector Berlioz, Felix Mendelssohn, and latest works of Ludwig van Beethoven.

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Romantic Poetry - full set of resources for Edexcel A Level Literature

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Lord Byron Was Hard to Pin Down. That’s What Made Him Great.

Two hundred years after his death, this Romantic poet is still worth reading.

“Who would write, who had anything better to do?” Byron once said. Credit... Musée Fabre/Hulton Fine Art Collection, via Getty Images

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By Benjamin Markovits

Benjamin Markovits is the author of a trilogy of novels about Lord Byron, “Imposture,” “A Quiet Adjustment” and “Childish Loves.”

• April 19, 2024

This week is the 200th anniversary of Lord Byron’s death. The most famous poet of his age (an odd phrase now) died fighting for Greek independence in the marshes of Missolonghi. “Who would write, who had anything better to do?” he once said. There was a strange contest over his body and memory: The lungs and larynx remained in Greece but friends carried the rest back to England, where huge crowds followed the funeral procession. A month after his death, his former editor burned his memoirs, worried they would damage the reputation of a superstar read around the world.

Does anyone read Byron now? He’s one of those unusual figures who have become better known for the lives they led than the books they wrote. Even some of his fans admire the letters more than the poems. It isn’t totally clear what it means to say that Byron is your favorite poet. Of the so-called Big Six Romantics, he’s the hardest to place. The hikers and the introverts read Wordsworth, the hippies love Blake, Keats is for the purists, Shelley for the political dreamers … and Byron? In spite of his fame, he lacks brand recognition. That’s partly because, halfway through his career, he decided to change the brand. “If I am sincere with myself,” he once wrote, “(but I fear one lies more to one’s self than to any one else), every page should confute, refute and utterly abjure its predecessor.”

All of which makes him a complicated sell. Academics trying to revive his reputation sometimes claim him as the anti-Romantic, a satirist who made fun of the movement’s clichés. Which is true. But he also wrote wonderful love poems, including two of his best-known lyrics, “ She Walks in Beauty ” and “ So We’ll Go No More a Roving .” Both are cleareyed about their own sentimentality, but more sad than satirical.

There are other ways of reclaiming him: as the first celebrity writer, as an early adopter of autofiction, for his sexual fluidity. He fell in love with both men and women, and slept with almost everybody, including his half sister, Augusta — which explains why his old editor, John Murray, decided to burn the memoirs.

Writers usually get famous because they touch a chord, and then keep playing it. And even if, as their work matures, they find ways to deepen the tone, it’s still recognizable; readers know what to expect from the product. And Byron touched a chord very young. His breakthrough poem — another odd phrase — was published when he was 24. “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” about a moody young nobleman who travels through war-torn Europe chased by some secret sorrow, made him a household name. Fan mail flowed in; women offered themselves in assignations. (Philip Roth joked in “The Ghost Writer” that for an author to get laid in New York you need only publish a couplet.) “Childe Harold” eventually stretched to four volumes.

Movie versions of Byron’s life tend to take the Childe Harold angle, presenting him as the beautiful young nobleman and exaggerating his Gothic or camp tendencies. He’s been played by Rupert Everett and Hugh Grant. You can find those elements in his writing, too, especially in the early verse, but then a few things changed. He got married, and the marriage went badly; he left England in 1816 and didn’t return; his fame hardened, and as it hardened, he began to realize that it didn’t really fit him.

People who met Byron for the first time expected him to be someone he wasn’t. This bugged him, not just as a human being but as a writer. He asked his friend Tom Moore to tell a well-known literary critic “that I was not, and, indeed, am not even now , the misanthropical and gloomy gentleman he takes me for, but a facetious companion, well to do with those with whom I am intimate, and as loquacious and laughing as if I were a much cleverer fellow.”

Byron was writing this from Venice after his separation from his wife. It was in many ways an unhappy couple of years. Still recovering from the trauma of his marriage, he overindulged himself, sexually and otherwise. The beautiful young nobleman was growing middle-aged. “Lord Byron could not have been more than 30,” one visitor remarked, “but he looked 40. His face had become pale, bloated and sallow. He had grown very fat, his shoulders broad and round, and the knuckles of his hands were lost in fat.” Some of Byron’s reputation for scandalous living dates to his stay in Venice. But he also made another literary breakthrough, finishing one long poem, “ Beppo ,” and starting his masterpiece, written “in the same style and manner” — “ Don Juan .”

“Don Juan” would occupy him for the rest of his short life. It cost him his relationship with Murray, who disapproved of the new tone in Byron’s writing. “You have so many ‘ divine ’ poems,” Byron told him. “Is it nothing to have written a Human one?” Around the time that Shelley was writing “ To a Skylark ” (“Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!”) and Keats was working on “ Ode to a Nightingale ” (“Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!”), Byron in “Beppo” was advising visitors who come to Venice for the Carnival to bring ketchup or soy with them, because Venetians give up sauce for Lent. But he was making a broader point, too. Poetical truths, about birds, about nature, don’t always rank high on the list of what matters. Poets should spend more time talking about things like money and food.

Part of what his early success taught him was to be suspicious of it, which meant being suspicious of writers — of the ways they lie to themselves and their readers. Keats, for example, was guilty of “a sort of mental masturbation,” Byron said. “I don’t mean that he is indecent but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state which is neither poetry nor anything else.” The work of Leigh Hunt was “disfigured only by a strange style. His answer was that his style was a system … and, when a man talks of system, his case is hopeless.” Experience, Byron believed, was the real source of literary value. “Could any man have written it,” he said of “Don Juan,” “who has not lived in the world?”

But experience relies on the honesty of the writer, and honesty, as Byron knew, is not a simple virtue. His own style became increasingly hard to pin down and hard to imitate — there is nobody who writes quite like him. Sometimes he lays on the devices pretty thick (“He rushed into the field, and, foremost fighting, fell”), the way you might scatter salt over a meal to add all-purpose flavor. But he can also write poetry that is unabashedly prosy: “There might be one more motive, which makes two.” What he’s particularly good at is achieving vividness without metaphor or adjective: “I have imbibed such a love for money that I keep some Sequins in a drawer to count, & cry over them once a week.” This is classic Byron, self-mocking and sincere at the same time.

The overall effect is like someone pitching knuckle balls. He seems to be just tossing lines at you, almost carelessly or without effort, but they’re always moving unpredictably, and when you try to do it yourself, you realize how hard it is to throw without spin. Two centuries later, this still seems a talent worth celebrating.

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Policy has tightened a lot. how tight is it (an update).

May 7, 2024

Over the past few years, I have published a series of essays assessing where we are in our inflation fight and highlighting some important questions policymakers are facing. My most recent essay was in February of this year, where I questioned how much monetary policy was actually restraining demand. This essay is an update to that commentary, and I now examine the current stance of monetary policy in more detail. 1

I will argue that the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has tightened policy significantly, compared with prior cycles, both in absolute terms and relative to the market’s understanding of neutral. But I will also observe that the housing market is proving more resilient to that tight policy than it generally has in the past. Given that housing is a key channel through which monetary policy affects the economy, its resilience raises questions about whether policymakers and the market are misperceiving neutral, at least in the near term. It is possible that once the reopening dynamics of the post-COVID economy have concluded, the macro forces that drove the low-rate environment that existed before the pandemic will reemerge, pulling neutral back down. But the FOMC must set policy based on where neutral is in the short run to achieve our dual mandate goals in a reasonable period of time. The uncertainty about where neutral is today creates a challenge for policymakers.

Economic Update

Since my last update in February, two significant economic developments have occurred simultaneously: Inflation appears to have stopped falling and economic activity has proven resilient, continuing the robust activity we saw in the latter half of 2023.

The FOMC targets 12-month headline inflation of 2 percent. While we saw rapid disinflation in the second half of 2023, that progress appears to have stalled in the most recent quarter (see Figure 1). The question we now face is whether the disinflationary process is in fact still underway, merely taking longer than expected, or if inflation is instead settling to around a 3 percent level, suggesting that the FOMC has more work to do to achieve our dual mandate goals.

During this time, economic activity has continued to show remarkable strength, as shown in Figure 2. While the most recent headline GDP appears somewhat weaker than prior quarters, that slowdown was driven largely by inventories and net exports. Underlying domestic demand remained strong.

The labor market, the other half of our dual mandate, has also remained strong with the unemployment rate at a historically low 3.9 percent.

Policy Is Much Tighter than the Pre-pandemic Period

In prior essays I wrote that the single best proxy for the overall stance of monetary policy is the long-term real rate, specifically the 10-year Treasury inflation-protected securities (TIPS) yield. Focusing on a long-term rate incorporates the expected path of both the federal funds rate and balance sheet, not just the current level of the federal funds rate. Moreover, it adjusts the expected path of policy by expected future inflation—the relevant comparison—rather than by recently realized inflation.

As I noted in earlier essays, prior to the pandemic the 10-year real yield was about zero, which I estimate was roughly a neutral policy stance at that time. In response to the pandemic, the FOMC acted aggressively to support the economy by driving the federal funds rate to the effective lower bound and massively expanding our balance sheet. Those combined effects drove the 10-year real yield to roughly -1 percent, as shown in Figure 3. Since we began our tightening cycle two years ago, 10-year real yields have more than fully retraced their pandemic decline and are now around 2.2 percent. Thus, we are clearly in a tighter stance now than immediately before the pandemic.

This Tightening Cycle Appears to Be as Aggressive as the 1994 Cycle

Data from the TIPS market only go back 20 years or so; thus, to evaluate earlier tightening cycles one must make a number of assumptions about the neutral rate and about inflation expectations.

I do not think comparisons to the 1970s and early 1980s are particularly relevant to us today because in those decades, the FOMC had to establish its inflation-fighting credibility, so the required monetary tightening was very large.

The tightening cycle in 1994 might be a better benchmark because at that time, as is true now, the FOMC had a lot of credibility with the public. Inflation was not as high in 1994, however, as it was in this episode. So it is not a perfect comparison either.

Minneapolis Fed staff’s best estimate is that when the FOMC raised the policy rate by 300 basis points in the 1994 tightening cycle, this translated into an increase of about 200 basis points in the 10-year real rate (Figure 4), which was coincidentally also about 200 basis points above the then-neutral 10-year real rate. So that is the key: It seems as though policy drove the 10-year real rate about 200 basis points above neutral.

How does that compare to our current tightening cycle? (See Figure 3.) If my estimate of neutral being zero before the pandemic still holds, then we have accomplished similar or a bit more tightening in this cycle than was achieved in the 1994 tightening cycle.

Yield Curve Suggests Policy Is Tight

As I stated earlier, the underlying inflationary dynamics are quite different today than in 1994, so simply repeating the 1994 tightening might not be enough. And perhaps the unique dynamics of the post-COVID reopening economy have caused neutral to increase.

Another indicator I look at to assess the stance of monetary policy is the shape of the yield curve. Specifically, if the yield curve is inverted, it might indicate that monetary policy is in a contractionary stance. A lot of public attention is given to the yield curve, and there is a robust debate about whether an inverted yield curve is a reliable recession indicator. I wrote about this in 2018. Setting aside its usefulness as a predictor of recessions, the yield curve does seem to give some indication of the stance of monetary policy. The long end of the yield curve should offer some signal of where market participants believe interest rates will settle once current economic and policy shocks have run their course; if markets understand that neutral has moved, it should be reflected in the long end of the curve. If current short rates are higher than long rates, then that might signal an overall tight stance of policy today. Figure 5 shows the history of the (nominal) yield curve with a number of inversions over the past 50 years, including the current inversion. 2

Depending on the specific measures chosen, the yield curve has now been inverted for more than 20 months, which is a relatively long and somewhat deeper inversion than most prior cycles, the Volcker disinflation period being the exception. The current inverted yield curve suggests that policy is in fact tight relative to the market’s understanding of neutral.

The Resilience in the Housing Market Nonetheless Raises Questions

Housing is traditionally the most interest-rate-sensitive sector of the economy. Prior yield curve inversions also coincided with a marked slowdown or even contraction in residential investment, as shown in Figure 6. Curiously, while residential investment fell in the first part of our tightening cycle, it has since reversed and has grown 5 percent over the past year.

What could explain this apparent resilience in residential real estate given monetary policy that has led to an inverted yield curve? We know that following the Global Financial Crisis, the country built far fewer housing units than were needed to keep up with population growth and household formation. Thus, there appears to be a significant shortage of housing that will take a long time to close. In addition, responses to COVID have led to an increase in people working from home, and that has led to increased demand for housing. In recent years there has also been a significant increase in immigration. While the long-run effect of increased immigration on inflation is unclear, immigrants nonetheless need a place to live, and their arrival in the U.S. has likely also increased demand for housing. Policy actions by the FOMC have driven 30-year mortgage rates from around 4.0 percent prior to the pandemic to around 7.5 percent today. Perhaps that level of mortgage rates is not as contractionary for residential investment as it would have been absent these unique factors which are driving housing demand higher. In other words, perhaps a neutral rate for the housing market is higher than before the pandemic.

Other Signals from the Real Economy Are Mixed

Monetary policy is a blunt instrument that eventually affects virtually the entire economy, not only housing. While high interest rates may not be slowing housing as much as in prior tightening cycles, it is nonetheless having an impact on other sectors of the economy. For example, auto loan and credit card delinquencies have increased from very low levels and are now at rates higher than existed before the pandemic, indicating that some consumers are feeling stress from increased borrowing costs. Overall, however, economic activity, consumer spending and the labor market have proven surprisingly resilient.

The FOMC has undeniably tightened policy meaningfully, both relative to the pre-pandemic period and to some prior tightening cycles. Nonetheless, it is hard for me to explain the robust economic activity that has persisted during this cycle. My colleagues and I are of course very happy that the labor market has proven resilient, but, with inflation in the most recent quarter moving sideways, it raises questions about how restrictive policy really is. If policymakers and market participants are misperceiving the neutral policy rate, that could explain the constellation of data we are observing. This is also a communication challenge for policymakers. In my own Summary of Economic Projections (SEP) submission, I have only modestly increased my longer-run nominal neutral funds rate level from 2 percent to 2.5 percent. The SEP does not provide a simple way to communicate the possibility that the neutral rate might be at least temporarily elevated.

1 These comments reflect my own views and may not necessarily represent the views of others in the Federal Reserve System or of the Federal Open Market Committee.

2 Conceptually, the real yield curve is a better measure of the stance of monetary policy than the nominal yield curve. That said, because nominal and real spreads have been quite similar over the past 18 months, the nominal spread in Figure 5 currently provides an equivalent measure of the stance of monetary policy. I plot nominal yields in Figure 5 simply because they are available for a longer time period than TIPS yields.

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