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.
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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
- AuthorJames Montgomery is Sir Thomas Adams’s Professor of Arabic, Fellow of Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge.
- AuthorPoet 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…
- AuthorBorn 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…
- AuthorThomas 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…
- AuthorGérard 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…
- AuthorHeinrich 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…
- AuthorRomantic 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 …
- AuthorUnlike 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…
- AuthorGeorge 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…
- AuthorProtestant 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…
- AuthorBritish 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…
- AuthorBorn 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 …
- AuthorHartley 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…
- AuthorPoet 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…
- AuthorBritish 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…
- AuthorEmily 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…
- AuthorBritish Poet and anthologist Mary Lamb worked as a seamstress for 10 years to support her ailing family. She suffered from bipolar disorder and, during an episode in 1796, killed her mother with a kitchen …
- AuthorA British playwright, abolitionist, and philanthropist, More was born near Bristol. Her father, a headmaster, trained More and her sisters to be teachers. Hannah More’s father and older sisters founded a school…
- AuthorPoet Elizabeth Bentley was born in Norwich, England, and taught to read and write by her father, a journeyman shoemaker. Bentley worked as a teacher to support her mother. She began writing poetry two years…