The Wisdom of the Romantics

Explore the transformative power of Romanticism­—where emotion, imagination, and contradiction collide—through the eyes of its greatest thinkers and artists.

The post-Enlightenment movement known as Romanticism is a messy period; so messy, in fact, that many scholars eschew any attempt to define it. In reaction to the overreliance placed on reason by Enlightenment thinkers, Romantics emphasized individual freedom, emotional intensity, introspection, sincerity, and heightened imagination. The...