Romanticism was a European phenomenon, at its height in Britain from 1785 to 1825, a movement of all the arts, though in England literature and painting predominantly. In its modern sense, the term seems to have originated in Germany, by association with romance languages and the characteristics of medieval romance. For Goethe and Schiller it signalled our alienation from the order and harmony of an earlier classical world, the resultant melancholy one of its most representative tones.

Coleridge used the word in recalling his aims for Lyrical Ballads in 1798. He was to procure a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ for ‘persons and characters supernatural’. A taste for supernatural terrors had already been exploited by the novelists Horace Walpole and Matthew Lewis. The poets learned from them. Wordsworth's contribution to Lyrical Ballads illustrates another aspect of the Romantic impulse. In the 1800 preface, the manifesto of English Romanticism, he investigated the relationship between language and nature as Herder had done before him, though the German took his inspiration from the supposedly more ‘natural’ genius of the early English writers. Later, constable recommended that the painter seek perfection ‘at its primitive source, nature’. The appeal of the ballad, stimulated by Percy's Reliques (1765), lay in its folk form; the sophisticated Wordsworth imitated its simplicity, but his interest in ‘low and rustic life’ was more than aesthetic. Poetry and politics went hand in hand. Hazlitt suggested that ‘this school of poetry had its origins in the French Revolution, or rather in the sentiments and opinions which produced that revolution’. Blake shared his friend Tom Paine's antipathy to ‘Priestcraft and Tyranny’, and where direct action was suppressed, it surfaced in verse.

In claiming that ‘passion speaks truer than reason’ Hazlitt echoed Rousseau, founding father of the movement with its new emphasis on subjectivity and emotion. ‘The way to all mysteries heads inward’, wrote Brandes in the year Wordsworth chose the growth of his own mind as a subject for epic. In his notebook, Coleridge recorded that ‘in looking at objects of nature … I seem to be seeking a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists’.

Increasingly the 18th cent. was dismissed as an age of prose. Blake's quarrel with Sir Joshua Reynolds lent an edge to his work as an engraver, his ‘wiry bounding line’ challenging the ideals of the Academy. Turner followed Wordsworth to the Alps, while his extraordinary Rain, Steam and Speed looks to the future. In arguing that ‘if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to the tree it had better not come at all’, Keats illustrates the cult of spontaneity and of organic metaphor.

The displacement of reason by imagination as the faculty by which the truth is apprehended was a commonplace of the period. Coleridge's famous definition of it as ‘the living power and prime agent of all human perception’ owes a good deal to Kant and Schelling, but there was always a certain native resistance to German metaphysics. The second generation of Romantics had other priorities; Keats questioned Wordsworth's cultivation of ‘the egotistical sublime’, while for Shelley Wordsworth had betrayed the hopes of the Revolution. As that Revolution receded, and young radicals became old Tories, the dynamism of the movement was dispersed or transmuted, though its currents can be felt into the present century.

John Saunders