I am a fan of Simon Schama who is a good and serious person but I found his first Romantics TV programme disappointing. It too much aligned Romanticism with Revolution. But former often ambivalent about latter and latter and about former.

The revolution-born left vs right distinction has complex relations to the rationalism versus feeling/imagination axis. There were Romantics like De Quincey and Scott who were conservative from start to finish.

In France one can distinguish enlightenment turning towards feeling with Rousseau from romanticism proper often post the revolution and uneasy about it: Joubert, De Biran etc. Later Ballanche etc. Socialism itself really an *alternative* to revolution.

Germany went unmentioned and yet it had the most self-conscious romantics. Like Coleridge and Wordsworth, Novalis and Schlegel naturally (not because they got old and sad etc) evolved from being pro revolution to a communitarian conservatism.

One could even maybe argue that eg Shelley’s full-blooded cult of sublimity as feeling is not exactly romantic or too much near its dark side (at his worst). That romanticism proper is feeling tempered by irony and Platonic integration of reason, force and feeling. Schlegel.

For so much of what we think of as ‘romantic’ is pre-romantic: cults of sensibility, sublimity, the picturesque etc. These all had different inflections. One can even see Beethoven as more about the sublime than the romantic. (Though he is beyond so much.)

Romanticism is more specific than we think: Coleridge is nearest to it in Britain and also the influence of Thomas Taylor. Romanticism tends to a re-working of Platonic realism (not Idealism) in terms of imagination and creativity. Novalis, Schlegel and Holderlin defined it best.

Also ‘romantic’ (as eg used by Walter Scott) has very specific reference to the genre of romance and to a new respect for the medieval. Much continuity here with the ambiguities of the ‘gothick’.