My interest is not in establishing the essence (or not) of a putatively unified movement or describing family resemblances with a view to connecting disparate figures and movements in a constructed unity. Rather, mine is the more narrow aim of noting how certain cultural dispositions were manifested, communicated, and reinforced in the period after Rousseau. Thus, it is one particular strand of Romanticism—that of expressivism, and that as manifested in the poetry of the time—that is of interest here.
