Category

Romantic

A poetic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries that turned toward nature and the interior world of feeling, in opposition to the mannered formalism and disciplined scientific inquiry of the Enlightenment era that preceded it.

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  • Glossary Terms

    Romanticism

    A poetic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries that turned toward nature and the interior world of feeling, in opposition to the mannered formalism and disciplined scientific inquiry of the Enlightenment era that preceded it. English poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Blake, and Lord Byron produced work that expressed spontaneous feelings, found parallels to their own emotional lives in the natural world, and celebrated creativity rather than logic. Browse more Romantic poets.

  • Author

    James Montgomery

    James Montgomery is Sir Thomas Adams’s Professor of Arabic, Fellow of Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge.
  • Author

    William Cullen Bryant

    Poet and editor William Cullen Bryant stood among the most celebrated figures in the frieze of 19th-century America. The fame he won as a poet while in his youth remained with him as he entered his 80s; only...
  • Author

    Sir Walter Scott

    Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, influential novelist, poet, and historian, and biographer Sir Walter Scott studied law as an apprentice to his father before his writing career flourished. At age 25, he published...
  • Author

    Thomas Moore

    Thomas Moore was closely attuned to the taste and artistic sensibility of his age, but he is remembered now primarily by the Irish, who still sing his songs and claim him as their own. He was a born lyricist...
  • Author

    Gérard de Nerval

    Gérard de Nerval is the pen name of French Romantic poet and author Gérard Labrunie, who was born in Paris. He was the son of an army doctor and was raised by his great-uncle in the Mortefontaine countryside...
  • Author

    Heinrich Heine

    Heinrich Heine was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, to assimilated Jewish parents. Heine’s uncle was a powerful banker who supported Heine for much of his life, only to write him out of his will. Heine attended...
  • Author

    Mikhail Lermontov

    Romantic poet Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov was born in Moscow, Russia and was raised in the Penzenskaya province by his wealthy maternal grandmother. His mother, an aristocrat, died when he was three years ...
  • Author

    Robert Southey

    Unlike most of the English Romantics, who wrote predominantly either in verse or in prose, Robert Southey—like his friend and brother-in-law Samuel Taylor Coleridge and, to some extent, Sir Walter Scott—was...
  • Author

    George Crabbe

    George Crabbe was born in 1754 in the village of Aldeburgh, Suffolk, England. He apprenticed to a doctor at the age of 14 but left his village and medical career in 1780 to pursue his literary interests in...
  • Author

    Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna

    Protestant evangelical activist, journalist, editor, novelist, children’s author, and poet Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna was born in Norwich, England. The daughter of an Anglican priest, she lost her hearing permanently...
  • Author

    Ann Yearsley

    British Romantic poet Ann Yearsley was one of only a few working-class women of the era to gain prominence as a writer. Educated at home in Clifton, near Bristol, Yearsley worked as a milkmaid in her early...
  • Author

    Felicia Dorothea Hemans

    Born in Liverpool, England, Romantic poet Felicia Dorothea Hemans was the daughter of a merchant and a granddaughter of the consul, and the fifth of seven children. The family relocated to Wales following ...
  • Author

    Hartley Coleridge

    Hartley Coleridge was the oldest son of Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Although he was the subject of two of his father’s poems—“Frost at Midnight” and “The Nightingale”—Coleridge was nonetheless estranged...
  • Author

    Dr. Thomas Lovell Beddoes

    Poet and playwright Thomas Lovell Beddoes was born in Clifton, Bristol, England, to a literary and educated family. His father, a well-known physician, was a friend and confidant of Samuel Coleridge Taylor...
  • Author

    Erasmus Darwin

    British naturalist, poet, philosopher and physician Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of naturalist Charles Darwin, was born in Nottinghamshire and educated at Cambridge and Edinburgh. In 1756 he settled in Lichfield...
  • Author

    Emily Dickinson

    Emily Dickinson is one of America’s greatest and most original poets of all time. She took definition as her province and challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work. Like writers such...
  • Author

    Helen Leigh

    What little biographical information is known about the life of British Romantic poet Helen Leigh comes from the preface to her sole collection of poetry, Miscellaneous Poems (1788). In the piece, she mentions...
  • Author

    Dorothy Wordsworth

    Born in Cumberland, British Romantic poet and prose writer Dorothy Wordsworth was the third of five children. Her mother died when Wordsworth was six, and she moved to Halifax to live with her aunt. In 1781...
  • Author

    William Wordsworth

    William Wordsworth was one of the founders of English Romanticism and one its most central figures and important intellects. He is remembered as a poet of spiritual and epistemological speculation, a poet ...
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