Romanticism was a sweeping movement in art, literature, and thought that peaked in the first half of the 19th century, rising in reaction against Enlightenment rationalism and the grind of industrialization. It exalted emotion, imagination, individual genius, and above all nature and the “sublime” — that mix of awe and terror before something vast. More a cultural current than a formal philosophy, it reshaped how the West thinks about the self and about feeling.