Romanticism

A movement in the arts and literature that originated in the late 18th century, emphasizing inspiration, subjectivity, and the primacy of the individual
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Romanticism began in the mid-18th century and reached its height in the 19th
century. The Romantic literature of the nineteenth century holds in its topics
the ideals of the time period, concentrating on emotion, nature, and the
expression of "nothing." The Romantic era was one that focused on the
commonality of humankind and, while using emotion and nature; the poets and
their works shed light on people's universal natures. Romanticism as a movement
declined in the late 19th century and early 20th century with the growing
dominance of Realism in the literature and the rapid advancement of science and
technology. However, Romanticism was very impressionative on most individuals
during its time.
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A movement in art and literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in revolt against the Neoclassicism of the previous centuries...The German poet Friedrich Schlegel, who is given credit for first using the termromantic to describe literature, defined it as "literature depicting emotional matter in an imaginative form." This is as accurate a general definition as can be accomplished, although Victor Hugo's phrase "liberalism in literature" is also apt. Imagination, emotion, and freedom are certainly the focal points of romanticism. Any list of particular characteristics of the literature of romanticism includes subjectivity and an emphasis on individualism; spontaneity; freedom from rules; solitary life rather than life in society; the beliefs that imagination is superior to reason and devotion to beauty; love of and worship of nature; and fascination with the past, especially the myths and mysticism of the middle ages.

English poets: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats

American poets: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman

http://www.uh.edu/engines/romanticism/introduction.html