Literary Movement
Romanticism
Roughly 1789–1850. Blake's Songs (1789) and Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) are founding documents. Emphasises the creative power of the individual imagination.
Definition
A broad 19th-century movement valuing imagination, emotion, nature, and the individual self against Enlightenment reason.
Example
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron in England; Goethe, Hugo, Pushkin across Europe.