Age of Literary Romanticism: Late 18th to Mid-19th Century

The Romantic movement in literature emerged in Europe in the late 18th century (1770s–1790s) with precursors like Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and Blake's early poems. It flourished in the early to mid-19th century (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats in Britain; Hugo, Lamartine in France; Emerson, Poe in America). By the 1850s, Realism began to supplant it. Thus, the core Romantic era spans roughly 1780–1850.