The Romantic movement in Britain, Europe, and America provided the broad literary background for the rise of Transcendentalism. Romanticism permeated American literature between 1820 and the end of the Civil War in 1865. It was expressed not only in the writings of the Transcendentalists, but also by their literary contemporaries — James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman — who worked in a variety of genres. Romanticism informed the literature of the period and also gave direction to developments in art, architecture, and music. The landscape paintings of the Hudson River School, for example, and of Washington Allston (1779–1843) — whose work defined art for Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, and others among the Transcendentalists — grew out of European Romanticism.
Romanticism (or "Romanticisms," as some literary scholars have preferred to term the multiplicity of expressions of the movement) emerged in England and Germany in the late eighteenth century. Influenced by the intuitive philosophy of Kant, Romantic writers looked at literature as an outpouring of the inner spirit, and saw imagination as the means of summoning this spirit. They reacted against classical formalism and symmetry, against rationalism, and against other restrictions on individual expression and imagination. Romantic writers celebrated the freedom of the individual, whom they placed at the center of life and art, and the expression of personal emotion. Perceiving physical objects as representative of spiritual, moral, and intellectual reality, Romantic writers relied heavily on symbolism and allegory. Romantic literature displayed a number of recurrent motifs: the theme of the individual in rebellion; the symbolic interpretation of the historic past; subjects from myth and folklore; the glorification of nature; faraway settings; sentimentalism; the nobility of the uncivilized man (the Native American, for example); admiration for the simple life; the elevation of the common man; a fascination with Gothic themes, with the supernatural and mysterious, with introspection, melancholy, and horror; and a humanitarian political and social outlook. The American experience provided much raw material suited to Romantic interpretation.
