The Romanticism in literature

 Romantic literature in English which not only points out to love and emotion as Saint Valentine´s poems but also a celebration of melancholy, exoticism and history like the novels of Sir Walter Scott or eccentricity, individualism, adventure, bravery and isolation like in Lord Byron´s poetry or nature, animals, magic, transcendentalism, delicacy and art like in John Keats´poems. Romanticism was a literary movement which started as a reaction to Classicism at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth. We have got painters that focus on nature and isolated or tender characters like John Constable, J. W. Turner and Pre Raphaelite painters and later we have the Hudson Rivers painters in the US and European painters like Goya, Géricault, Eugène Delacroix and nature Scottish painters. Also in philosophy we have a Counter-Enlightenment movement preceded by philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, it was a reaction to the Age of Reason in the Germanic Idealism of Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, H.W. F. Schelling and G.W. Friedrich Hegel. 

The Romantic literary trend started in England with the "Graveyard Poets" around 1740s in which the poems are meditations about death in cemeteries among skulls, for example Thomas Gray´s  "Elegy written in a country churchyard", William Cowper, Robert Blair´s "The Grave", Edward Young´s "The Complaint, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death & Immortality". Also the sentimental novels in which sensibility is appreciated and praised and the gothic novels in which mystery and isolation are crucial in the genre with famous novels at the epoch such as Anne Radcliffe´s "The Mysteries of Udolpho", W. Beckford´s  "Vathek" or Matthew Lewis "The Monk". There were some poets who established near a British area of lakes and moors´(the Lake district) and maintained a close friendship and they were called "the Bards of the Lake"or "Lake poets" who are mainly known William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Charles and Mary Lamb, John Wilson and Thomas De Quincey and produced nature and nostalgic poetry. The French and American Revolutions emphasized the ideas of individualism, rebellion against the established order and the aristocry by the destitute and outcast of society, liberty and hope for freedom and renewal of society in countries and there were many poets from the early nineteenth century who lead a rebellious and unique lifestyle and their thoughts about revolution and renewal of society was remarkable in their works such as William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats and Sir Walter Scott also remind the past of Greek, Roman and Middle Ages in poems and novels. Thus the romanticism was successful through all Europe and in America some traits were highlighted like nature, freedom, individualism and philosophy through Transcendentalism and authors like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne...However, towards the middle of the nineteenth century changes in society such as industrialization, clash of social classes, nationalist revolutions, etc. give way to new literary trends such as realism and afterwards naturalism.  Also the Victorian values in England were conservative and though romantic poetry was very much appreciated, the rise of the novel usually upon moral and realistic topics changed the public to be eager to read novels rather than poems. Nevertheless, in the next century, the twentieth century and nowadays there are still traits of the romantic trend from two centuries ago, there are authors such as T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Gabriel García Marquez and other authors from literary trends such as Surrealism and Magic realism.