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English Romanticism: The Movement That Defined English Lyric Poetry

English Romanticism is the most familiar form of the Romantic movement to the English-speaking world, and arguably the most influential. Flourishing in Britain between roughly 1790 and 1850, English Romanticism produced some of the supreme achievements of English literature, transformed the way English poetry was written, and laid the foundation for the great Victorian novel, the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and a host of later developments in English literature and thought. This page offers a structured introduction to English Romanticism — its origins, its major figures, its characteristic themes, and its long influence.

The Origins of English Romanticism

English Romanticism emerged in the 1790s, in the same years that saw the French Revolution and the early stirrings of the German Romantic movement. Several intellectual and social developments contributed to the rise of the new sensibility:

The crisis of Augustan classicism — the elaborate, polished, rule-bound verse of the Augustan age had begun to seem narrow to a younger generation of writers.
The graveyard poets and the pre-Romantic mood — the melancholy, the supernatural, the medievalist interest of Thomas Gray, Edward Young, Robert Blair, James Macpherson’s Ossian, and the Gothic novel of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew “Monk” Lewis had prepared the ground.
The revolutionary moment — the early years of the French Revolution gave the new poetry a sense of political and historical urgency.
The legacy of German Romanticism — translated into English by Coleridge, De Quincey, and others, the German Romantic philosophy and literature had a major influence on the English movement.

The Major Phases

English Romanticism is usually divided into two generations:

The first generation (1790s–1810s) — William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Robert Southey, and (in some accounts) Walter Scott. The defining works of this generation are the 1798 Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge (treated in detail in our page on Wordsworth and Coleridge) and Wordsworth’s long autobiographical poem The Prelude.
The second generation (1810s–1820s) — Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and (in some accounts) the early writings of Mary Shelley, Leigh Hunt, and others. The defining works of this generation include the great odes of Keats, the political and visionary poems of Shelley, and the Byronic narratives and lyrics of Byron.

The early Victorian period continued the Romantic tradition in new forms. The major Victorian poets — Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, the Pre-Raphaelites — were all direct descendants of the Romantics, even as they tried to rein in some of the wilder extremes of their predecessors.

The Major Writers

The major English Romantic writers include:

The Six Great Romantic Poets — William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats — treated in detail in our page on English Romantic Poets.
Walter Scott (1771–1832) — the great Scottish poet and novelist, author of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and the long series of Waverley novels that established the historical novel as a major literary form. The page on Romantic Novels treats his contribution.
Jane Austen (1775–1817) — the great English novelist, author of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), and Northanger Abbey (1817). Austen’s relation to Romanticism is one of the most debated topics in English literary history; her irony, her classical restraint, and her social comedy have often been seen as a counterweight to the Romantic exuberance of her contemporaries.
Mary Shelley (1797–1851) — author of Frankenstein (1818), the founding text of science fiction and a major work of the Gothic novel.
Robert Southey (1774–1843) — poet, historian, and review editor; the third of the “Lake poets” with Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Charles Lamb (1775–1834), William Hazlitt (1778–1830), Leigh Hunt (1784–1859), Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) — major essayists, critics, and memoirists of the Romantic period.
Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855) — William’s sister, a brilliant diarist and observer of nature whose writings influenced her brother’s work and are now read as major works of Romantic literature in their own right.
John Clare (1793–1864) — the “peasant poet” of Northamptonshire, author of poems of rural and natural observation that rank among the great works of English Romantic poetry.

The Major Themes

The major themes of English Romanticism include:

The power of nature and the natural world — the conviction, developed most powerfully by Wordsworth, that nature is a teacher, a healer, and a source of spiritual renewal.
The artistic genius and the imagination — the new conception of the artist as visionary seer, treated in detail in our page on Genius and Imagination.
The heroic individual and the social outcast — the new conception of the artist and the rebel as figures standing apart from society, treated in detail in our page on The Romantic Hero.
The supernatural and the gothic — the new fascination with the supernatural, the uncanny, and the macabre, treated in detail in our pages on the Gothic Novel and Dark Romanticism.
The medieval past and the folk tradition — the new interest in the medieval past, in folk songs and folk tales, in the national and local past, treated in detail in our page on Romantic Nationalism.
Revolution and political hope — the early Romantic enthusiasm for the French Revolution and the later engagement with the great political questions of the age, treated in detail in our page on Poetry and Revolution.

The Long Influence of English Romanticism

The influence of English Romanticism on later English-language literature is difficult to overstate. The Victorian novel, the Pre-Raphaelite movement, the American Transcendentalists, the French Symbolists, the modernist poetry of Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Williams, and the others, the contemporary English-language poetry of the present — all draw, in different ways, on the English Romantic inheritance. The great English Romantic works remain central to the English literary tradition and continue to be read, studied, and translated across the world.