Romanticism

Romanticism was a rich and complex body of philosophy, literature, and art that originated in Europe in the late eighteenth century. Some of its central figures included the English poets and literary theorists, William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), and the German poets and philosophers, Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), Novalis (1772-1801), and Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), among others. Romantic thought had an impact not only on nineteenth-century English and European culture, but also on nineteenth century American thought through the work of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) and especially Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882).