Romantic Thinkers

Romanticism has very little to do with things people consider "romantic", although love may occasionally be the subject of Romantic art. But, it is an international artistic and philosophical movement that redefined the fundamental ways in which people in Western cultures thought about themselves and about their world. Romanticism was an international movement affecting all the arts, it began at least in the 1770's and continued into the second half of the nineteenth century, later for American literature than for European, and later it was introduced in some of the arts, like music and painting, other than just literature. It changed as time went by."Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Kant is not a Romantic philosopher, but his ideas, especially his Pure Critique of Reason, influenced many Romantic thinkers. Essentially, Kant was interested in how we can know that the world we experience is real and not just the product of our minds."(http://faculty.gvc.edu/ssnyder/102/romantic.html). He concluded that we can never be really sure about the world outside of our minds, but we can be more sure about the categories our minds impose upon the world.