Romantic literature

• 1. Introduction

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  Romantic literature arrived in Europe when a young Scottish poet named James Macpherson published a cycle of poems in 1762 that he claimed were translations of an ancient Celtic bard called Ossian. Those poems swept across the continent, inspiring Goethe in Germany and the young Walter Scott in Scotland. They also turned out to be a fraud. Macpherson had invented nearly all of them himself.

  That founding act of creative deception says something important about the Romantic movement. It valued feeling and imagination over fact, folk tradition over classical learning, and the lone visionary over the polished establishment poet. From the Lake District to Warsaw, from Parisian theatres to the American frontier, writers were asking the same restless questions: What is the nation? What is the self? What does nature owe the human heart? This documentary follows those questions across the literary world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from the first ghost of Romanticism in a sixteenth-century Italian noblewoman's poetry to the moment the movement finally gave way to Realism.

• 2. Seeds of a Movement

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  Isabella di Morra, a sixteenth-century Italian poet, wrote lyrics about isolation and loneliness that scholars would later describe as an impressive prefigurement of Romanticism. She was working centuries before the movement had a name, and her verse diverged sharply from the Petrarchist fashion of her era, which centred on idealized love. Her themes instead reflected the tragic circumstances of her own life.

  The more immediate precursors emerged in mid-eighteenth-century England. Joseph Warton, headmaster at Winchester College, argued that invention and imagination were the chief qualities a poet could possess. His brother Thomas Warton held the chair of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. Between them, the Warton brothers helped shift critical taste away from reason and wit toward feeling and originality. Thomas Chatterton, who worked in a similar vein, is generally regarded as the first Romantic poet in the English language, though he too, like Macpherson, made claims about discovered ancient texts that were entirely his own compositions.

  Horace Walpole contributed a different strand. His novel The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764, launched the Gothic novel with its delight in horror and threat and its taste for exotic picturesque settings. Walpole was also an early champion of Gothic architecture, the aesthetic on which his novel drew. Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, published across the years 1759 to 1767, brought a whimsical anti-rational spirit to the English reading public through a very different route. These parallel threads fed into a movement still gathering force.

• 3. Germany and the Inner Life

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  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther spread across Europe with unusual speed. Young men imitated its protagonist, a sensitive and passionate young artist, in their dress and behaviour. In a Germany divided into a multitude of small separate states, Goethe's work also carried a political charge: it helped cultivate a shared sense of nationality where no unified nation yet existed.

  Jena became the intellectual centre of early German Romanticism because the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte lived there, alongside Friedrich Schelling, Hegel, Schiller, and the brothers Schlegel. The German idealist philosophy they developed gave the movement a theoretical backbone, linking the imagination to deeper metaphysical claims about the self and the world. Writers such as Ludwig Tieck, Novalis, Heinrich von Kleist, and Friedrich Holderlin were the literary expression of that philosophical energy. Heidelberg later drew its own circle: Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff met there regularly in literary circles.

  Brentano and von Arnim together published Des Knaben Wunderhorn, a collection of versified folk tales, across 1806 to 1808. The Brothers Grimm followed with their first fairy tale collection in 1812, drawing on gathered folk sources rather than inventing stories from scratch, at least in their early editions. Jacob Grimm published Deutsche Mythologie, a long academic study of Germanic mythology, in 1835. The Romantics' belief in the importance of childhood innocence and folk tradition gave folk literature and children's stories an unprecedented cultural prestige. Later German Romanticism, as in E. T. A. Hoffmann's Der Sandmann from 1817 and Eichendorff's Das Marmorbild from 1819, turned darker and more Gothic in character.

• 4. Byron, Scott, and the English Stage

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  The publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, containing poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is often taken as the formal opening of English Romanticism. Wordsworth wrote many of the poems, mostly about the lives of the poor in the Lake District or about his own feelings toward nature. Coleridge contributed The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the volume's longest poem, which displayed the Gothic side of English Romanticism with its eerie supernatural setting.

  In their own time, Wordsworth and Coleridge were regarded as marginal radicals. Lord Byron and Walter Scott achieved something far grander. Goethe himself described Byron as undoubtedly the greatest genius of his century. Scott's long narrative poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel succeeded immediately in 1805, followed by the full epic Marmion in 1808. Byron matched that with the first part of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in 1812, then four Turkish tales in verse form beginning with The Giaour in 1813, all drawn from his Grand Tour through Ottoman Europe. These poems created and then varied the figure of the Byronic hero, and Byron's own life supplied yet another version.

  Scott meanwhile moved into fiction. Beginning with Waverley in 1814, set during the 1745 Jacobite rising, he produced more than twenty further Waverley Novels over the next seventeen years, with settings reaching back to the Crusades, researched with a thoroughness new to literature. Byron died at thirty-six in 1824 from disease while aiding the Greek War of Independence, a death that from a distance seemed to confirm the Romantic ideal. Keats died in Italy in 1821, Shelley also in Italy in 1822. Blake died in 1827, nearly seventy years old. A famous gathering on Lake Geneva in 1816, with Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley both present, produced Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the novella The Vampyre by Byron's physician John William Polidori, two works that would echo through subsequent literature.

• 5. Scotland, Poland, and National Identity

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  After Scotland's union with England in 1707, its literature began developing a distinct national character. Allan Ramsay, who lived from 1686 to 1758, revived interest in older Scottish literature and helped shape the Habbie stanza as a poetic form. Robert Burns, born in 1759 and died in 1796, became the national poet of Scotland and a major presence in the wider Romantic movement. His song Auld Lang Syne is sung at Hogmanay, and Scots Wha Hae served for a long time as an unofficial national anthem.

  Scotland was also home to two of the most influential literary magazines of the era. The Edinburgh Review was founded in 1802 and Blackwood's Magazine in 1817. Scholars Ian Duncan and Alex Benchimol have argued that these publications, alongside Scott's novels, helped make Edinburgh the cultural capital of Britain in the early nineteenth century. The connections between Scottish Romanticism and a broader sense of British Isles nationalism ran deep.

  Poland offers a stark contrast. Polish Romanticism, commonly taken to begin with Adam Mickiewicz's first poems in 1822, was shaped by the fact that Poland had lost its statehood. The Polish intelligentsia left the country in the early 1830s in what is called the Great Emigration, resettling in France, Germany, Great Britain, Turkey, and the United States. Working in exile, poets like Mickiewicz, Juliusz Slowacki, and Zygmunt Krasinski developed the concept of the poeta wieszcz, the prophet-bard who served as spiritual leader to a nation fighting for independence. Krasinski's dramas Nie-boska komedia from 1835 and Irydion from 1836, and his later Psalmy przyszlosci from 1845, cast Poland as the Christ of Europe, chosen to suffer and be resurrected. No other national tradition gave its Romantic poets this burden and this role.

• 6. France, Russia, and the Wider Reach

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  François-René de Chateaubriand brought Romanticism to France through the difficult experiences of an aristocrat who had survived the Revolution in exile and returned under Napoleon. His novella René from 1802 introduced an alienated hero who anticipated Byron, and his religious defence Genie du christianisme appeared the same year. His enormous autobiography Memoires d'Outre-Tombe occupied his later decades in the 1830s and 1840s.

  French Romanticism found its popular energy in the theatre. Adaptations of Scott and Byron filled Parisian stages alongside works by French authors, and debates between pro- and anti-Romantic factions grew rowdy. When Shakespeare was performed in 1822, one theatregoer shouted that Shakespeare was Wellington's aide-de-camp, framing a literary argument as a national insult. Victor Hugo's Hernani, a historical drama in a quasi-Shakespearean style, had famously riotous performances in 1830. His novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame followed in 1831. Alexandre Dumas began with the drama Henri III et sa cour in 1829 and then produced his best-known historical novels, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, both in 1844. Stendhal, by contrast, drew on his experience surviving the French retreat from Moscow in 1812 to develop a penetrating psychological realism; his major novels Le Rouge et le Noir from 1830 and La Chartreuse de Parme from 1839 placed him closer to Realism than to the Romantic mainstream.

  In Russia, Alexander Pushkin stands as the principal Romantic, with major works spanning from The Prisoner of the Caucasus of 1820-1821 through Eugene Onegin, composed across 1825 to 1832. Mikhail Lermontov explored Byronic discontent in A Hero of Our Time from 1839. Fyodor Tyutchev worked in categories of night and day, cosmos and chaos, winter stillness and spring abundance. Pushkin's influence on nineteenth-century Russian writing was so great that he eventually won recognition as Russia's greatest poet.

• 7. The Americas and Romanticism's Range

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  William Cullen Bryant's poem To a Waterfowl, published in 1818, is often cited as an early marker of Romantic poetry in the United States. Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow from 1820 and Rip Van Winkle from 1819 established an American Gothic strand. James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, beginning in 1823, featured landscape descriptions of a mythicized frontier populated by figures Cooper associated with philosophical ideals of the noble savage drawn from Rousseau.

  The full flowering of the American Romantic novel came with Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter in 1850. Emily Dickinson's poetry went nearly unread in her own lifetime. Herman Melville's Moby-Dick stands as another touchstone of American Romantic writing. Transcendentalism, represented by Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, carried forward Romantic values in philosophy and essay form, emphasizing feeling over reason and a personal rather than institutional relationship with the divine. American Romanticism drew particular energy from the country's revolutionary heritage and from opposition to the strict Calvinist traditions of early settlement, which held that individual destiny was preordained.

  In South America, the Argentine writer Esteban Echeverria shaped Spanish-language Romanticism through his work in the 1830s and 1840s, using the metaphor of a slaughterhouse to depict the violence of the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas. Brazilian Romanticism moved through three distinct periods: a first phase centred on national identity and the figure of the heroic Indian, with writers such as Jose de Alencar and Goncalves Dias; a second phase of ultra-Romanticism marked by Byronic melancholy and unobtainable love; and a third cycle dominated by social poetry and the abolitionist movement, including Castro Alves and Tobias Barreto. Romantic literature reached these hemispheres at least partly because the cost of books fell during the period, extending the reading public well beyond its earlier limits.