Romanticism is the artistic and cultural movement of roughly 1770–1850 that put the individual subject at the centre of European art, philosophy, and music. Sturm und Drang in 1770s Germany — Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), Schiller's The Robbers (1781) — was the first wave. Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads (1798) brought it into English; Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) gave it visual form, Beethoven's Ninth (1824) musical, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) gothic-novel, Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830) political. The Romantics knew they were rebelling against the Enlightenment, and invented the modern conception of the artist as set apart.
Romanticism is not a single doctrine but a family of related commitments. The substitution running through all: private, personal, emotional experience replaces the public, civic, moral themes that organised neoclassical art. The subjective lyric is the Romantic form par excellence; organic form replaces eighteenth-century rule-making; imagination — the creative, integrative, world-making faculty Coleridge distinguished from mere fancy — replaces reason as the proper artistic centre. Nature is reread along the same axis: cultivated fields give way to terrifying nature — Friedrich's icy seas, Turner's storms, the Alpine sublime — no longer a backdrop but a force before which human concerns dwindle. The Romantic hero (Werther, Childe Harold, Onegin, Heathcliff) is socially marginal, psychologically intense, doomed; the form continues into Modernist anti-heroes and contemporary anti-hero television. Romanticism also rediscovered the medieval, the folk (Herder, the Brothers Grimm), and the non-Western (Goethe's West-östlicher Divan, the Romantic Orientalist tradition). Above all it gave us the artist as visionary — Blake's prophetic poetry, Beethoven's late quartets, Shelley's claim that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world — surviving as the modern cult of the artist. Historically the movement was a response: to Enlightenment reason, to the French Revolution, to the Industrial Revolution it viewed with horror and fascination, and to a secularisation whose absence it filled with art, nature, and the inner life.
Romanticism's afterlife is everywhere. The Romantic conception of the artist — visionary, suffering, set apart — is still the dominant cultural model in 2025 even when disavowed. Singer-songwriter culture (Dylan, Cohen, Mitchell, Eilish), auteur cinema, and confessional memoir all descend from Wordsworth's lyric I; the cult of the genius founder in tech (Jobs, Musk, Altman) borrows the Romantic figure of the special person who sees what others cannot; deep-ecology and wilderness traditions (Muir, Leopold, Abbey, Snyder) descend from Romantic nature-philosophy. Modernism rebelled against Romantic excess; postmodernism deconstructed authenticity claims; Romanticism's cultural nationalism (Herder, Fichte) provided material for twentieth-century nationalist movements with disastrous consequences. Even rejecting Romantic premises explicitly, most modern selves hold some of them implicitly.