Wanderlust World Wanderlust World Romanticism** (c. 1780–1850) revolutionized European literature by elevating emotion, imagination, and the individual over Enlightenment reason, classical form, and social convention. Its fingerprints appear across poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism.
Literature became the exploration of subjective experience. Wordsworth: "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." Lyric "I" dominates — not universal types but unique consciousness. Confessional tone (Coleridge's "Dejection," Shelley's "Stanzas Written in Dejection").
Nature is sublime, restorative, morally instructive — not mere setting. Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" — nature as "anchor of my purest thoughts." Shelley's "Mont Blanc" — nature as manifestation of Power. Clare, Clare, Constable — microscopic observation. Pantheism (divinity immanent in nature).
Historical romance (Scott's *Waverley* novels) — past as living world. Gothic (Walpole, Radcliffe, Lewis) — terror, supernatural, medieval ruins. Orientalism (Byron's *Turkish Tales*, Moore's *Lalla Rookh*) — East as fantasy projection. Folk revival (Grimm, Herder, Macpherson's *Ossian*) — "authentic" popular culture.
Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "Kubla Khan" — dream logic, symbolic landscapes. Blake's illuminated prophecies — private mythology. Hoffmann, Poe — psychological horror. The irrational as truth-teller.
Coleridge's *Biographia Literaria*: Imagination = "esemplastic" (shaping into one) power — primary (perception) and secondary (artistic creation). Opposed to "fancy" (mechanical combination). Keats's "Negative Capability" — dwelling in uncertainties without irritable reaching after fact/reason.
Symbols (rose, west wind, albatross, skylark) carry multivalent, evolving meaning — not fixed allegory. Organic form (Coleridge): form grows from content, not imposed (vs. neoclassical rules). Fragment as valid form (Schlegel, Coleridge's unfinished poems).
Shelley's "Defence of Poetry": "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Byron's celebrity — poet as cultural icon. Autobiographical myth-making (Wordsworth's *Prelude*, Byron's *Childe Harold*).
Wordsworth/Coleridge *Lyrical Ballads* (1798) Preface: "Language really used by men" — rustic, simple, passionate. Rejection of "poetic diction" (personifications, inversions, Latinate). Dialect poetry (Burns, Clare).
Romanticism birthed modern literary subjectivity. Its DNA persists in: symbolism, modernism, confessional poetry, magical realism, environmental writing, the very concept of "the writer" as visionary. We read ourselves through Romantic lenses.