3. Victorian poetry and poets

2. Romanticism and Writing Style
Romanticism (roe-MAN-tuh-SIZZ-um) was a literary movement that emphasized individualism and emotion. The Romantic era lasted from the end of the 18th century to the middle of the 19th century, but its effects are still evident throughout modern literature.
Romantic works were a reaction to the Age of Enlightenment and the advancing Industrial Age, a time in which science and rationalization began to take firmer hold in the public consciousness. Romantic literature challenged this new wave of ideas by telling stories rooted in emotion, nature, idealism, and the subjective experiences of common men and women.
It’s important to note that romanticism, as a literary movement, is not the same thing as the literary genre of romance novels. Romanticism may be an influence on today’s romance novels, but romance novels do not typically possess all the elements central to Romantic-era literature. Also, the term Romantic does not refer directly to romantic love. It comes from the medieval French romaunt, the term for an epic, chivalrous quest told in verse.
Romantic literature emerged at a time when the world was undergoing a sea-change of thoughts and ideas. The Age of Enlightenment produced a new breed of philosophers and scientists who challenged long-held ideas about how humans thought, lived, and came to be. The Industrial Revolution, quite naturally, was hot on the heels of the Enlightenment. The ideas and theories formed in the latter now came to life in exciting new inventions that changed the way people lived and worked.
There is always some degree of nostalgia for “the old days” when new ways of life come into fashion, and it’s this phenomenon that gave birth to romanticism. The movement harkened back to a time when things were simpler and more straightforward. Life and literature depended on the heart and one’s more primitive emotions—not science or theory or overt religiosity.⁶
The romantic movement began in Germany. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther was a seminal early romantic work infused with a sense of nationalism, which became a hallmark of German romanticism. As romanticism spread throughout Europe and beyond, however, it didn’t concern itself with any explicitly nationalist tendencies.
English romanticism began in Great Britain, with the emergence of poets like Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The 1798 publication of Lyrical Ballads included works by Wordsworth and Coleridge and launched the English movement. During the peak of the English romantic era in the 1810s, the works of Jane Austen took centerstage.
Dark romanticism is a subset of romantic literature that also started in Germany. These works feature elements of the macabre, grotesque, or demonic. They are similar to gothic fiction, but while gothic works are largely horror-centric, the spookier elements of dark romanticism don’t overshadow the romantic characteristics. Dark romantic writers include E.T.A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
American romanticism generally held the same ideals as English romanticism: individualism; a rich, emotional, isolated life; the beauty of nature; and moral uprightness. One of the first notable American romantic works was William Cullen Bryant’s poem “To a Waterfowl” in 1818. Other American romantic authors, like Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Emily Dickinson, followed.
There are six elements common to most romantic works: the common man, the idealization of women, individuality, isolation, nature, and pathetic fallacy.