Skip to content

Reading path

The Romantic Imagination

The poets and visionaries who set fire to the Age of Reason and rebuilt literature from feeling, instinct, and the sublime. Romanticism was not soft. It was volcanic: an insistence that the inner life matters more than any system, that nature is sacred, that the imagination is the highest faculty a human being possesses. Many of the writers on this path burned bright and fast. What they left behind changed everything.

In the app a path keeps your place, marks what you have read, and hands you the next work when you are ready for it.

Open in the appDownload

The first button needs the app on this device; the second gets it there.

The route

  • 1. The Sorrows of Young WertherJohann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774
  • 2. FaustJohann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1832
  • 3. I Wandered Lonely as a CloudWilliam Wordsworth, 1807
  • 4. The PreludeWilliam Wordsworth, 1850
  • 5. Kubla KhanSamuel Taylor Coleridge, 1816
  • 6. The Rime of the Ancient MarinerSamuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798
  • 7. OzymandiasPercy Bysshe Shelley, 1818
  • 8. Prometheus UnboundPercy Bysshe Shelley, 1820
  • 9. FrankensteinMary Shelley, 1818
  • 10. Don JuanLord Byron, 1824
  • 11. Ode to a NightingaleJohn Keats, 1819
  • 12. Ode on a Grecian UrnJohn Keats, 1819
  • 13. To AutumnJohn Keats, 1819
  • 14. The Eve of St. AgnesJohn Keats, 1820
  • 15. Eugene OneginAlexander Pushkin, 1833
  • 16. L'infinitoGiacomo Leopardi, 1819
  • 17. The TygerWilliam Blake, 1794
  • 18. Rob RoySir Walter Scott, 1817
  • 19. Ode to PsycheJohn Keats, 1819
  • 20. AdonaisPercy Bysshe Shelley, 1821
  • 21. Ode to the West WindPercy Bysshe Shelley, 1820
  • 22. A Defence of PoetryPercy Bysshe Shelley, 1821