Romantic Period 1796-1832

The keywords and important aspects of the movement are emotion, feeling, passion, vision, excess, disorder, spontaneity, subjective, rejection, symbolism; living the past embracing modernity, self-expression, and individualism.

The Romantic Period in English literature begins with William Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, and Taylor Coleridge. The period ends with the death of Sir Walter Scott. The Romantic movements display the most in style, theme, and content, in the 18th and 19th centuries. Romantic movement occurs against Neo-classicism, returning to Ancient Greek culture and literature. German poet Friedrich Schlegel using the term for the first time describes it as "literature depicting emotional matter in an imaginative form." Generally, the term, romantic, means gentle, sentimental, and melancholy. Since Renaissance, the term has been used to suggest free expression of the imagination in arts, but in a negative sense. The psychological desire to escape from unpleasant, unwanted realities.

Poets like William Blake adopted a conception focusing rather than Neoclassical doctrines such as urbanity, decorum, good taste, or didacticism, all of which were founded on the appeal to universal Reason, by exhibiting the virtues of spontaneity, invention, an enthusiastic, creative imagination and populated by allegorical and supernatural characters.

As a result of the Foundation of America (1776), the French Revolution (1789), and the Industrial Revolution in England, the ways of living changed. These changes reflected the ways of thinking. A true Romantic heroic figure is one who faces the painful realities of his time. An English Romantic poet is a bourgeois revolutionary, yearning for freedom. To Romantic poets, their instincts are free, and society puts them in chains. Their desires are for returning to the natural, unspoiled man, and natural language rather than artificial language. There was a glorification of the individual and his creative power, liberation, and entering of a world of unlimited possibilities.

The focal points of the period are imagination, emotion, and freedom. Other characteristics are subjectivity, emphasis on individualism, spontaneity, freedom of rules, the belief that imagination is superior to reason and devotion to beauty, and love, and worship of nature. The important concepts of Romantic Poets are imagination, emotion, nature, and symbolism.