The Garden of Love

Romanticism, or the Romantic era, was an artistic and intellectual movement that began in Europe toward the end of the 18th century, with its peak in the mid-1800s. Its characteristics were based on the idealization of nature, on emotion and individualism, on glorification of the medieval past, and suspicion and criticism of both the Age of Enlightenment (with its emphasis on science and rationalism) and the Industrial Revolution (with its mechanization of work and move towards modernity). The visual arts, music, and literature were strongly represented in the Romantic movement.

Blake wrote his poems before the period recognized as the English Romantic movement, a period most scholars date as beginning with the publication of Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Henry Taylor Coleridge in 1798. However, Blake’s poetry and visual art (with his use of images, symbols, metaphors), and his revolutionary spirit combined with simple form and vocabulary, as well as his spontaneous expression of thoughts and emotions place him as a typical Romantic poet. He has been called a pre-cursor to the Romantics because Blake emphasized the importance of the imagination, and his own visionary experiences contributed much to his work. The role of nature and its connection to human liberty and pleasure is a key theme in Blake’s work and aligns closely with the Romantic attitude, as do his political and spiritual beliefs.