Romanticism was a major movement in philosophy and art in the later 18th and early 19th centuries in Europe. The Romantics in England and Germany were predominately reacting against the heavy emphasis on Rationalism and Empiricism, which were largely based on the scientific discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton and argued for a mechanical view of the universe. Enlightenment philosophy strongly emphasized the importance of reason in human morality and behavior, and challenged the traditional Christian conception of the world by placing more emphasis on determining the objective, verifiable laws of nature through observation and experimentation.

In the late 18th century, many German philosophers reacted against these heavily rationalist tendencies by closely examining the imagination and emotions. Georg Hegel is considered the most influential of the German Idealist philosophers (who emphasized the primacy of the mind), with his book Phenomenology of Spirit introducing the idea of Absolute Knowing, in which a person can access the interconnectedness of humanity, nature, and the universe. German writers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe also began writing works that centered human feeling and subjectivity, with Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) becoming an important forerunner of Romanticism. These German intellectual and aesthetical developments had a profound effect on the British poets, novelists, and thinkers who brought the Romantic ethos to England.

Some of the major British Romantic poets include William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, William Blake, John Clare, and John Keats, among others. While these poets often differed from one another in various ways, they were generally united in embracing the core tenets that gradually defined Romanticism as an aesthetic movement. The Romantics tended to emphasize the importance of the poet and celebrated individual genius, portraying poetry as something that could offer uniquely powerful commentary on the human experience and subjective feelings. There was sometimes a marked political dimension to their work: Inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution, many Romantic writers championed individual liberty, political reform, the subversion of traditional authority, and criticized the materialist tendencies of the burgeoning Industrial Revolution by valorizing nature. Some of the more radical among them scandalized respectable society by challenging the dominant sexual and social mores of the time, with both Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron attracting considerable notoriety for their unconventional love lives.

In The Mirror and the Lamp, Abrams argues that Romanticism was an important turning point in poetry and literary criticism. He regards the Romantics’ conception of poetry and the role of the poet as challenging many of the older assumptions about the nature and function of poetry. Through discussing the work and thought of such major figures as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and others, Abrams presents Romanticism as a milestone in English literary history.