when Heinrich Heine published Die Romantische Schule (The Romantic School) in 1836, he assumed that the movement was already long past. “What was the Romantic school in Germany?” he asks at the beginning, before undertaking his critical survey of its most familiar writers and works. In one respect, of course, Heine was correct. By 1836 most of the key figures of early Romanticism in Germany and England were deceased—in England, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats; and in Germany, Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Fichte, Arnim, Kleist, and Hoffmann. Wordsworth, A. W. Schlegel, Tieck, and a few others still survived, but their principal achievements lay behind them. As Heine remarked cynically: “Herr Klemens [sic] Brentano is now probably about 50 years old, and he lives in Frankfurt, withdrawn like a hermit, as a corresponding member of Catholic Propaganda. His name in recent times has almost been forgotten.” But, as Wolfgang Frühwald has noted, “the Romantics did not realize that their poetry was only a by-product of the times, that the movement of the times strode rapidly over their poetry, that Romanticism appeared to be over and done with as a mere episode in the history of the German spirit.”

In Germany and Austria the literary scene from 1815 to 1848 was colored extensively, though not dominated, by the writers and artists of Biedermeier culture, such as Adalbert Stifter and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff; it was a period of bourgeois tranquility made possible largely by the repressions of the Metternich regime. After 1830 and inspired by the July Revolution in Paris, opposition to those repressions inevitably arose, initially among the writers of so-called Junges Deutschland (Young Germany)—a group that included Heine. That movement was shortlived, but in the 1840s the spirit of liberalism reemerged in the German “Vormärz” (pre-March), leading eventually to the revolutions of 1848.

In England the parliamentary reforms that led to the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of Catholics prevented the rise of radical movements and prepared the way for the era of Victorianism that began in 1837 with Queen Victoria's ascension to the throne. At the same time the English Romanticism that had dominated Europe for several decades, as it gave way at home to the realism of Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot, began to make its way across the Atlantic to such writers as Poe, Hawthorne, and Emerson.