The Legacy of Romanticism: How the Movement Shaped the Modern World

“The Romantic movement was, in a sense, the discovery of the self.” — Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, 1965

The influence of Romanticism did not end with the deaths of its great poets, painters, composers, and philosophers. On the contrary, the Romantic revolution helped to create the modern world. Many of the ideas and sensibilities that we now think of as essentially modern — the cult of artistic genius, the reverence for nature, the fascination with the unconscious, the celebration of individual freedom, the suspicion of pure reason, the love of myth and symbol — were inherited from the Romantic period. To trace the legacy of Romanticism is to trace the intellectual and artistic history of the modern world.

The Victorian Era

The Victorian era carried the Romantic inheritance forward in Britain and around the world. The major Victorian poets — Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Pre-Raphaelite poets — were directly descended from the Romantics, even when they tried to rein in the wilder excesses of their predecessors. The Victorian novel, from Dickens to George Eliot to Thomas Hardy, was also a Romantic creation in many of its essential features: a deep interest in the inner life, in social criticism, in the relation of the individual to society, and in the moral weight of the past.

The Victorian period also saw the development of new Romantic-inflected art forms:

• The Gothic Revival in architecture, with the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament in London and the construction of countless churches, universities, and country houses in the medieval style.
• The Pre-Raphaelite movement in painting and poetry, addressed in our pages on the Pre-Raphaelites.
• The early conservation movement, including the founding of the National Trust in Britain and the campaign for the first National Parks in America. Our page on Romanticism and environmentalism traces this often-overlooked legacy.

Symbolism and Decadence

The Symbolist movement of the late nineteenth century was a direct outgrowth of Romanticism, even as it pushed the Romantic project in new directions. The French Symbolists — Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé — turned away from the public and political concerns of the early Romantics and toward the inner world of dreams, reverie, melancholy, and the unconscious. They revived the Romantic interest in myth, symbol, and music, and they gave to modern poetry and painting some of its most enduring images.

The late-nineteenth-century Decadent movement — Huysmans, Wilde, Dowson, the early Yeats — extended Symbolism into a cultivation of the artificial, the perverse, the beautiful, and the doomed. The Decadents were the heirs of the Romantic cult of the artist-genius, and they helped set the stage for twentieth-century modernism.

The Twentieth Century

The twentieth century was, in many ways, a series of attempts to come to terms with the Romantic inheritance. The great modernists — Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Proust, Rilke — were all steeped in Romantic literature, even when they tried to overthrow it. The Expressionists in Germany, the Surrealists in France, the Abstract Expressionists in America all drew on Romantic ideas about the unconscious, the sublime, and the power of the artistic imagination. The existentialists — Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir — took over the Romantic cult of individual freedom and gave it a twentieth-century inflection.

The environmental movement of the twentieth century — from the founding of the Sierra Club in 1892 to the modern green movement — also has deep Romantic roots. The American Transcendentalists, especially Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, carried the Romantic reverence for nature into a program of conservation and ecological awareness that continues to shape environmental politics today.

Modern Romanticism

Modern Romanticism — also called Neoromanticism — is the term sometimes used for the persistence of Romantic themes and forms in twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture. Fantasy fiction, science fiction, the Gothic novel, the vampire and werewolf myth, the haunted house, the dark detective, the troubled artist-hero — all of these are direct descendants of Romantic literature. Our page on dark romanticism explores the persistence of the dark Romantic tradition in particular.

In music, the Romantic tradition continued through Mahler, Strauss, Sibelius, and the early Schoenberg, and beyond them into the film music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The orchestral and harmonic language of the great Romantic composers remains the dominant musical language of the cinema.

In philosophy, the Romantic inheritance shaped the development of existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and much of contemporary continental thought. The contemporary interest in the philosophy of nature, in the philosophy of art, and in the philosophy of the imagination owes a great deal to the Romantic tradition.

The Environmental Legacy

The Romantic reverence for nature, treated in detail in our page on Romanticism and environmentalism, is one of the most influential legacies of the period. The conservation movement, the wilderness preservation movement, the deep ecology movement, and contemporary environmentalism all draw on ideas first developed by the Romantics. The Transcendentalist conviction that nature is a teacher and a sanctuary, the Wordsworthian insight that nature can heal the divided mind, the Ruskinian argument that industrial civilization cuts human beings off from the sources of true life — these remain powerful ideas in the twenty-first century.

The Political Legacy

The political legacy of Romanticism is more complicated. On the one hand, Romantic ideas about freedom, the nation, the people, and the heroic individual helped inspire the liberal and nationalist movements of the nineteenth century and the anticolonial movements of the twentieth. On the other hand, the Romantic cult of the nation, the people, and the heroic leader was also distorted in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries into forms of aggressive nationalism, fascism, and ethnic chauvinism. The page on Romantic nationalism explores this difficult legacy in detail.

The Continuing Power of the Romantic Imagination

The Romantic movement is not simply a period in the history of Western culture. It is a permanent part of the modern imagination. The Romantic idea of the artist as a kind of secular prophet, the Romantic idea of nature as a teacher and a sanctuary, the Romantic idea of the self as something to be cultivated and explored, the Romantic idea of the great work of art as a window onto a deeper reality — these remain powerful and pervasive in contemporary culture. To study the legacy of Romanticism is to understand the cultural background of our own time.

Further Reading

• Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (1965) — the standard account, with a long closing chapter on the legacy.
• Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Harvard, 1989) — for the modern identity in its Romantic inheritance.
• The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism (2018) — for the latest scholarship.

Related Pages

• Victorian Romanticism
• Symbolism and Decadence
• Twentieth-Century Echoes
• Modern Romanticism
• Romanticism and Environmentalism
• Gothic Revival Architecture
• Romantic Nationalism
• Romanticism by Country