Protestantism was a protest against the fetters of the past (even romanticism itself)-against rule and convention, as Vitet realized-and therefore was also an analogue to the Protestant Reformation. Paradoxically, though, these reactions can themselves be regarded as highly romantic in nature- partly, perhaps, because one very general but still useful early (1825) definition of romanticism is, in the words of the French dramatist and politician Ludovic Vitet (1802–73), “Protestantism in arts and letters” (quoted in Furst, European Romanticism). (Although romanticism includes all of William Blake’s major poetry, beginning more than a decade prior to Lyrical Ballads, Blake’s obscurity limited his influence on other major writers for a good half century.) In English poetry, however, we can give a more or less historical definition: Romanticism is a movement that can be dated as beginning with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads of 1798 and that is still continuing today, despite reactions and countermovements which begin almost immediately and which are highly relevant to any consideration of Victorian and modern literature.

The classic essays on romanticism tend not to define the term but to survey the manifold and unsuccessful attempts to define it.

Lyrical ballads poems