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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 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, ending 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 from 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 the 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 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 half after the end of the movement’s active life.

The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. “Romanticism.” Encyclopedia Britannica, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 19 Nov. 2019, https://www.britannica.com/art/Romanticism.
Parker, James. “A Book That Examines the Writing Processes of Two Poetry Giants.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 23 July 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/07/how-two-literary-giants-wrote-their-best-poetry/594514/.
Alhathani, Safa. “EN571: Literature & Technology.” EN571 Literature Technology, 13 May 2018, https://commons.marymount.edu/571sp17/2018/05/13/analysis-of-romanticism-in-frankenstein-through-digital-tools/.
“William Wordsworth.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-wordsworth.
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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Romanticism

Théodore Gericault

Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct

Alfred Dedreux (1810–1860) as a Child

The Start of the Race of the Riderless Horses

Horace Vernet

Jean-Louis-André-Théodore Gericault (1791–1824)

Inundated Ruins of a Monastery

Karl Blechen

Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds

John Constable

Eugène Delacroix

Royal Tiger

Stormy Coast Scene after a Shipwreck

French Painter

Mother and Child by the Sea

Johan Christian Dahl

The Natchez

Wanderer in the Storm

Julius von Leypold

The Abduction of Rebecca

Jewish Woman of Algiers Seated on the Ground

Théodore Chassériau

The Virgin Adoring the Host

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Ovid among the Scythians

Kathryn Calley Galitz Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

Romanticism, first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around 1800, gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and flourished until mid-century. With its emphasis on the imagination and emotion, Romanticism emerged as a response to the disillusionment with the Enlightenment values of reason and order in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789. Though often posited in opposition to Neoclassicism , early Romanticism was shaped largely by artists trained in Jacques Louis David’s studio, including Baron Antoine Jean Gros, Anne Louis Girodet-Trioson, and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. This blurring of stylistic boundaries is best expressed in Ingres’ Apotheosis of Homer and Eugène Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus (both Museé du Louvre, Paris), which polarized the public at the Salon of 1827 in Paris. While Ingres’ work seemingly embodied the ordered classicism of David in contrast to the disorder and tumult of Delacroix, in fact both works draw from the Davidian tradition but each ultimately subverts that model, asserting the originality of the artist—a central notion of Romanticism.

In Romantic art, nature—with its uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential for cataclysmic extremes—offered an alternative to the ordered world of Enlightenment thought. The violent and terrifying images of nature conjured by Romantic artists recall the eighteenth-century aesthetic of the Sublime. As articulated by the British statesman Edmund Burke in a 1757 treatise and echoed by the French philosopher Denis Diderot a decade later, “all that stuns the soul, all that imprints a feeling of terror, leads to the sublime.” In French and British painting of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the recurrence of images of shipwrecks ( 2003.42.56 ) and other representations of man’s struggle against the awesome power of nature manifest this sensibility. Scenes of shipwrecks culminated in 1819 with Théodore Gericault’s strikingly original Raft of the Medusa (Louvre), based on a contemporary event. In its horrifying explicitness, emotional intensity, and conspicuous lack of a hero, The Raft of the Medusa became an icon of the emerging Romantic style. Similarly, J. M. W. Turner’s 1812 depiction of Hannibal and his army crossing the Alps (Tate, London), in which the general and his troops are dwarfed by the overwhelming scale of the landscape and engulfed in the swirling vortex of snow, embodies the Romantic sensibility in landscape painting. Gericault also explored the Romantic landscape in a series of views representing different times of day; in Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct ( 1989.183 ), the dramatic sky, blasted tree, and classical ruins evoke a sense of melancholic reverie.

Another facet of the Romantic attitude toward nature emerges in the landscapes of John Constable , whose art expresses his response to his native English countryside. For his major paintings, Constable executed full-scale sketches, as in a view of Salisbury Cathedral ( 50.145.8 ); he wrote that a sketch represents “nothing but one state of mind—that which you were in at the time.” When his landscapes were exhibited in Paris at the Salon of 1824, critics and artists embraced his art as “nature itself.” Constable’s subjective, highly personal view of nature accords with the individuality that is a central tenet of Romanticism.

This interest in the individual and subjective—at odds with eighteenth-century rationalism—is mirrored in the Romantic approach to portraiture. Traditionally, records of individual likeness, portraits became vehicles for expressing a range of psychological and emotional states in the hands of Romantic painters. Gericault probed the extremes of mental illness in his portraits of psychiatric patients, as well as the darker side of childhood in his unconventional portrayals of children. In his portrait of Alfred Dedreux ( 41.17 ), a young boy of about five or six, the child appears intensely serious, more adult than childlike, while the dark clouds in the background convey an unsettling, ominous quality.

Such explorations of emotional states extended into the animal kingdom, marking the Romantic fascination with animals as both forces of nature and metaphors for human behavior. This curiosity is manifest in the sketches of wild animals done in the menageries of Paris and London in the 1820s by artists such as Delacroix, Antoine-Louis Barye, and Edwin Landseer. Gericault depicted horses of all breeds—from workhorses to racehorses—in his work. Lord Byron’s 1819 tale of Mazeppa tied to a wild horse captivated Romantic artists from Delacroix to Théodore Chassériau, who exploited the violence and passion inherent in the story. Similarly, Horace Vernet, who exhibited two scenes from Mazeppa in the Salon of 1827 (both Musée Calvet, Avignon), also painted the riderless horse race that marked the end of the Roman Carnival, which he witnessed during his 1820 visit to Rome. His oil sketch ( 87.15.47 ) captures the frenetic energy of the spectacle, just before the start of the race. Images of wild, unbridled animals evoked primal states that stirred the Romantic imagination.

Along with plumbing emotional and behavioral extremes, Romantic artists expanded the repertoire of subject matter, rejecting the didacticism of Neoclassical history painting in favor of imaginary and exotic subjects. Orientalism and the worlds of literature stimulated new dialogues with the past as well as the present. Ingres’ sinuous odalisques ( 38.65 ) reflect the contemporary fascination with the exoticism of the harem, albeit a purely imagined Orient, as he never traveled beyond Italy. In 1832, Delacroix journeyed to Morocco, and his trip to North Africa prompted other artists to follow. In 1846, Chassériau documented his visit to Algeria in notebooks filled with watercolors and drawings, which later served as models for paintings done in his Paris studio ( 64.188 ). Literature offered an alternative form of escapism. The novels of Sir Walter Scott, the poetry of Lord Byron, and the drama of Shakespeare transported art to other worlds and eras. Medieval England is the setting of Delacroix’s tumultuous Abduction of Rebecca ( 03.30 ), which illustrates an episode from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe .

In its stylistic diversity and range of subjects, Romanticism defies simple categorization. As the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1846, “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling.”

Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “Romanticism.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/roma/hd_roma.htm (October 2004)

Additional Essays by Kathryn Calley Galitz

Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ The Legacy of Jacques Louis David (1748–1825) .” (October 2004)
Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) .” (May 2009)
Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ The French Academy in Rome .” (October 2003)

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Romanticism Essay Examples

Romanticism and dark romanticism.

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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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