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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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Romanticism Essay Topics & Ideas

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on Romanticism in Frankenstein Essay on Romanticism in FrankensteinAll literature is influenced by the time period in which it was written;whether it be war, poverty, or any other social trends. People tend to writecommentaries of political events, or just describe the time ….
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Romanticism – Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience The Romantic poets wrote about many political and social issues facing the era, mirroring the societal change of the 18th century with the industrial revolution. This time saw small towns become vast cities and cultural values shift away from ones ….
American Literature from Puritanism to Romanticism American Literature from Puritanism to Romanticism Comparison of Puritanism, the Age of Reason, and Romanticism. Puritanism hard times God-centered (look for answers from God)> unknown is defined as God Salem witch trials Puritanism>mysticism>….
Romantic Literature as Romanticism There are many themes in Romantic literature as Romanticism was a movement against the previous movement of rationalism. In Romantic literature, the qualities that are stressed most are nature, emotionalism, and individualism. These qualities are ….
Romanticism of a Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein I agree that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein does indeed attack masculine Romanticism however not totally. Typical Romantic characteristics include heightened interest in nature, emphasis on the individual’s expression of emotion and imagination, and ….
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Topic Details

Began approximately:	1770
Quality:	Any list of particular characteristics of the literature of romanticism includes subjectivity and an emphasis on individualism; spontaneity; freedom from rules; solitary life rather than life in society; the beliefs that imagination is superior to reason and devotion to beauty; love of and worship of nature; and ...
Philosophy:	Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism, idealization of nature, suspicion of science and industrialization, and glorification of the past with a strong preference for the medieval rather than the classical.
Significance:	It involved breaking with the past, and consciously moving away from the ideas and traditions of the Enlightenment. In so doing, Romanticism fundamentally changed the prevailing attitudes toward nature, emotion, reason and even the individual.

Romanticism in Literature: Definition and Examples

Finding beauty in nature and the common man.

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B.A., English, Rutgers University

Romanticism was a literary movement that began in the late 18th century and ended around the middle of the 19th century—although its influence continues to this day. Marked by a focus on the individual (and the unique perspective of a person, often guided by irrational, emotional impulses), a respect for nature and the primitive, and a celebration of the common man, Romanticism can be seen as a reaction to the huge changes in society that occurred during this period, including the revolutions that burned through countries like France and the United States, ushering in grand experiments in democracy.

Key Takeaways: Romanticism in Literature

Romanticism is a literary movement spanning roughly 1790–1850.
The movement was characterized by a celebration of nature and the common man, a focus on individual experience, an idealization of women, and an embrace of isolation and melancholy.
Prominent Romantic writers include John Keats, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelley.

Romanticism Definition

The term Romanticism does not stem directly from the concept of love, but rather the French word romaunt (a romantic story told in verse). Romanticism focused on emotions and the inner life of the writer, and often used autobiographical material to inform the work or even provide a template for it, unlike traditional literature at the time.

Romanticism celebrated primitive and elevated "regular people" as being deserving of celebration, which was an innovation at the time. Romanticism also fixated on nature as a primordial force and encouraged the concept of isolation as necessary for spiritual and artistic development.

Characteristics of Romanticism

Romantic literature is marked by six primary characteristics: celebration of nature, focus on the individual and spirituality, celebration of isolation and melancholy, interest in the common man, idealization of women, and personification and pathetic fallacy.

Celebration of Nature

Romantic writers saw nature as a teacher and a source of infinite beauty. One of the most famous works of Romanticism is John Keats’ To Autumn (1820):

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,– While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

Keats personifies the season and follows its progression from the initial arrival after summer, through the harvest season, and finally to autumn’s end as winter takes its place.

Focus on the Individual and Spirituality

Romantic writers turned inward, valuing the individual experience above all else. This in turn led to a heightened sense of spirituality in Romantic work, and the addition of occult and supernatural elements.

The work of Edgar Allan Poe exemplifies this aspect of the movement; for example, The Raven tells the story of a man grieving for his dead love (an idealized woman in the Romantic tradition) when a seemingly sentient Raven arrives and torments him, which can be interpreted literally or seen as a manifestation of his mental instability.

Celebration of Isolation and Melancholy

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a very influential writer in Romanticism; his books of essays explored many of the themes of the literary movement and codified them. His 1841 essay Self-Reliance is a seminal work of Romantic writing in which he exhorts the value of looking inward and determining your own path, and relying on only your own resources.

Related to the insistence on isolation, melancholy is a key feature of many works of Romanticism, usually seen as a reaction to inevitable failure—writers wished to express the pure beauty they perceived and failure to do so adequately resulted in despair like the sort expressed by Percy Bysshe Shelley in A Lament :

O world! O life! O time! On whose last steps I climb. Trembling at that where I had stood before; When will return the glory of your prime? No more—Oh, never more!

Interest in the Common Man

William Wordsworth was one of the first poets to embrace the concept of writing that could be read, enjoyed, and understood by anyone. He eschewed overly stylized language and references to classical works in favor of emotional imagery conveyed in simple, elegant language, as in his most famous poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud :

I wandered lonely as a Cloud That floats on high o'er vales and Hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden Daffodils; Beside the Lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Idealization of Women

In works such as Poe’s The Raven , women were always presented as idealized love interests, pure and beautiful, but usually without anything else to offer. Ironically, the most notable novels of the period were written by women (Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Mary Shelley, for example), but had to be initially published under male pseudonyms because of these attitudes. Much Romantic literature is infused with the concept of women being perfect innocent beings to be adored, mourned, and respected—but never touched or relied upon.

Personification and Pathetic Fallacy

Romantic literature’s fixation on nature is characterized by the heavy use of both personification and pathetic fallacy. Mary Shelley used these techniques to great effect in Frankenstein :

Its fair lakes reflect a blue and gentle sky; and, when troubled by the winds, their tumult is but as the play of a lively infant, when compared to the roarings of the giant ocean.

Romanticism continues to influence literature today; Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight novels are clear descendants of the movement, incorporating most of the characteristics of classic Romanticism despite being published a century and a half after the end of the movement’s active life.

Encyclopaedia Britannica. " Romanticism ."

Cambridge University Press. " The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism ."

Poetry Foundation. " William Wordsworth ."

University of Florida. " Romantic Myth Making: The Sympathetic Soulmate From Romanticism to Twilight and Beyond ."

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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.

Romanticism in England

Romanticism in France

Romanticism in America

Romantic Literary Criticism

Literary Criticism of William Wordsworth

Literary Criticism of S.T. Coleridge

Romanticism - Free Essay Examples and Topic Ideas

Romanticism is a type of art and literature from the late 18th century that features nature, myth, emotion, symbols, and individualism. Grimm’s Fairy Tales are a good example of Romanticism in literature. These stories, including “Little Red Cap ”, “Rumpelstiltskin”, and have as main characters common people who must make choices between good and evil. The stories include a lot of nature and symbolism, and they also have a lot of things that would not happen in real life or nature such as talking animals and magic.

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Little Red Cap

“Little Red Cap” is the story about a wolf who eats an old woman, and then tries to trick the granddaughter, Little Red Cap, into coming close so he can eat her as well. He does this by dressing up as the grandmother and pretending to be her. Even though both the girl and the old woman are eaten by the wolf, a hunter comes by and saves them by killing the wolf and cutting him open, so the girl and her grandmother can get out. In this story, a little girl is the main character, and a common hunter is the hero. They are individuals who make decisions with big consequences. The grandmother lives in the forest, and Little Red Cap is always being distracted by nature, frequently picking flowers on her walk to her grandmother’s house. Nature is one of the key parts of any romanticized story. Nature also doesn’t have to just be about plants. Animals are also an essential part of nature, and the wolf lives there too. A talking wolf isn’t anything that exists, so that part of the story shows the myth element of romanticism. There are other Grimm fairytales that show these things about Romanticism as well.

Rumpelstiltskin Tale Analysis

In “Rumpelstiltskin” a miller tells the king his daughter can spin gold from straw even though she cannot. A little man performs the magic for her but asks her for a reward each time. The third time she has no more jewelry to give him, so he makes her promise to give her first child to him. The girl marries the king, but when her child is born, and the man comes to claim it, she won’t give it up. The little man says he will leave her alone if she can guess his name. She has him followed, and the messenger overhears his name and tells the queen. She tells the little man the right name and he is so angry he gets torn in half. In the Story of “Rumpelstiltskin” we see the theme of rags to riches as the miller’s daughter becomes the queen of the country which is an example of individual choices and the improvement of the self. Spinning straw into gold is an example of magic, but it also uses something in nature to do it with.

Romanticism in Grimm’s Fairy Tales

Grimm’s Fairy Tales are a good example of Romanticism because they include all the key themes that stories in Romanticism have including common people improving their situation by choosing good over evil, nature, magic, and myth. Romanticism is still popular today in stories like Harry Potter. People today still like fantasy stories in which ordinary people can triumph over evil.

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About Romanticism

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

Francisco Goya, William Blake, John Constable, Henry Fuseli, Albert Bierstadt, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, etc.

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