The Solitary Reaper

At the end of the 18th century and into the early decades of the 19th century, a cultural movement swept across much of Europe. This movement, later known as Romanticism, was paradoxically both a product of the 18th-century Enlightenment and a reaction against it. Like many prominent Enlightenment thinkers, many Romantics had a deep interest in the dignity of the individual, and they tended to idealize revolutionary ideas. They often questioned or outright rejected the social, religious, and political norms that seriously curtailed or oppressed the rights of the average person, and they championed freedom of feeling and expression.

However, unlike their Enlightenment predecessors, the Romantics tended to strongly favor feeling and instinct over the more methodical, calculating rationality of figures like Voltaire or David Hume. To this end, Romantic works were often emotionally turbulent—from Goethe’s famous novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, to the odes of transcendent experiences through art and nature penned by Wordsworth and Keats. Romanticism and political revolution often went hand-in-hand: As a young man, Wordsworth himself had been deeply interested in the French Revolution, although he later became disillusioned and more conservative in his beliefs. Lord Byron, one of the “second generation” of English Romantics, died fighting for Greek independence against the Ottoman Empire.