The Editors of Romanticism.xyz. Last reviewed: 13 June 2026.

Twentieth-Century Echoes: The Persistence of Romanticism in the Modern World

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 — has deep Romantic roots in the Transcendentalist reverence for nature and the Wordsworthian conviction that nature is a teacher and a healer.

This page offers a structured introduction to the twentieth-century echoes of Romanticism — its persistence in literature, philosophy, music, art, and the broader culture.

Literature

The twentieth century was, for literature, an extended negotiation with the Romantic inheritance. The great modernists — T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land (1922), James Joyce in Ulysses (1922), Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and many others — explicitly tried to break with the Romantic tradition, and yet their works are, in many ways, deeply indebted to it. The interior monologue, the stream-of-consciousness technique, the symbolic method, the use of myth, the dense intertextual layering, the international reach — all of these are, in different ways, descendants of the Romantic project.

Other twentieth-century literary movements went even more openly back to the Romantic inheritance. The high fantasy of William Morris, Lord Dunsany, E.R. Eddison, and J.R.R. Tolkien was a deeply Romantic project. The Southern Gothic of Faulkner, O’Connor, and McCullers continued the dark Romantic tradition of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. The post-World-War-II poetry of the Confessional poets, the Beat poets, the New York School, and many others, drew on Romantic ideas about the lyric voice, the interior life, the poet’s role in society.

The German literary tradition of the twentieth century — Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Stefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Musil, and others — was particularly deeply indebted to the Romantic inheritance. Mann’s novels Buddenbrooks (1901) and Doctor Faustus (1947), Hesse’s Steppenwolf (1927) and The Glass Bead Game (1943), Rilke’s Duino Elegies (1923) and the Sonnets to Orpheus (1923) — all of these are deeply Romantic works.

Philosophy

The twentieth century saw an extraordinary continuation of the Romantic philosophical tradition. The phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty; the existentialism of Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir; the hermeneutic philosophy of Gadamer and Ricoeur; the critical theory of the Frankfurt School; the contemporary philosophy of nature, place, and environment; the contemporary philosophy of imagination and creativity — all of these are, in different ways, descendants of the Romantic philosophical tradition.

The most important Romantic philosophical figure of the twentieth century was Martin Heidegger, whose analysis of Dasein, of the world, of truth as aletheia, of art as the disclosure of truth, and of the “saving power” of poetry, drew extensively on the German Romantic and Idealist tradition. Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin, Rilke, and Trakl helped establish the Romantic lyric as a central resource for twentieth-century continental philosophy.

Music

The Romantic musical tradition continued in the early twentieth century in the late works of Mahler, Strauss, Reger, and the early Schoenberg, and beyond them in the neo-Romantic composers of the mid-century — Pfitzner, Schmidt, and others. The major modernist composers — Stravinsky, Bartók, Hindemith, the later Schoenberg, Copland, Shostakovich — were all, in different ways, working in conscious relation to the Romantic inheritance.

The Romantic tradition in music has had an even more powerful afterlife in the cinema, in the music of Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Bernard Herrmann, John Williams, Ennio Morricone, Hans Zimmer, Howard Shore, Alexandre Desplat, and many others. The film score, as a major art form of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, has drawn extensively on the Romantic tradition, and the great Romantic works remain the central reference for the entire tradition.

Visual Art

The visual arts of the twentieth century were, in many ways, a continuation of the Romantic project by other means. The German Expressionism of Kirchner, Nolde, Kandinsky, and the Blaue Reiter; the Russian Constructivism and Suprematism of Malevich, Rodchenko, and the others; the Surrealism of Ernst, Magritte, Dalí, and Miró; the Abstract Expressionism of Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, and the others; the Pop art of Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Hockney; the contemporary figurative painting of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Jenny Saville, and the others — all of these are, in different ways, descendants of the Romantic tradition.

The Romantic conviction that the visual artist has access to deeper truths, that the work of art is a window onto a more-than-physical reality, that the artist is a kind of secular priest — these remain powerful in contemporary visual art.

The Environmental Movement

The environmental movement of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been one of the most important and most popular expressions of the Romantic inheritance. The Transcendentalist reverence for nature, the Wordsworthian conviction that nature is a teacher and a healer, the Ruskinian argument that industrial civilization cuts human beings off from the sources of true life, the conservationist conviction that wilderness has an intrinsic value — all of these have been major resources for the modern environmental movement.

The major figures of the modern environmental movement — John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club; Aldo Leopold, author of A Sand County Almanac (1949); Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring (1962); Wendell Berry, the great American nature writer; E.O. Wilson, the great biologist; the contemporary climate activists and writers — all draw, in different ways, on the Romantic inheritance. Our page on Romanticism and environmentalism treats this important legacy in more detail.

The Persistence of the Romantic Hero

The figure of the Romantic hero — the brooding, solitary, often tortured figure who stands against society and the universe itself — has had a remarkable persistence in twentieth-century literature and culture. The heroes of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), of Camus’s The Stranger (1942) and The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), of Hemingway’s early fiction, of the great film noir of the 1940s and 1950s, of the contemporary detective fiction of Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and their successors — all of these are, in different ways, descendants of the Romantic hero. The contemporary “anti-hero” of the novel, the film, and the television series remains, in many ways, a Romantic figure.

The Long Continuity

The persistence of the Romantic tradition into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is one of the great continuities of modern cultural history. The Romantic ideas about the human being, the human imagination, the human place in the natural world, the human capacity for creativity, and the human struggle against the forces of darkness and tyranny — these remain powerful and pervasive in contemporary culture. To study the twentieth-century echoes of Romanticism is to study the cultural background of our own time.