If you’re like me, your first trip to Paris was all about seeing the iconic sights: the Eiffel Tower, Versailles, the Louvre, Notre Dame. On your second visit, you explored the boutiques and cafes discovered haphazardly on your first trip. But by the time you returned to Paris yet again, you intended to cultivate a relationship with the city — to really get to know it. For my fifth trip to the city, I was after a more intimate experience than I’d had before. I wanted to find its heart.

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Want to learn more about the Romantic movement? Here are some sources with critical essays, art, and online editions of works.

Romantic Resources

Ask someone what they think of Romantic literature, and chances are you’ll get either a brusque dismissal of Harlequin books or a breathless endorsement of the newest Danielle Steel novel. But when it came to the arts of the mid-19th century, “Romantic” had another meaning — but unfortunately not one easy to define.

One of the most succinct explanations of Romanticism comes in A Handbook to Literature, Sixth Edition, by C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon. They describe it as “a movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that marked the reaction in literature, philosophy, art, religion, and politics from the Neoclassicism and formal orthodoxy of the preceding period” — but then follow that definition with the disclaimer that “Romanticism arose so gradually and exhibited so many phases that a satisfactory definition is not possible.”

This ambiguity has been the bane of many a student taking a college-level course on the subject. For the student who’s struggling with an end-of-term essay on the Romantic period — or perhaps an instructor looking for new insights into the subject — Romantic Circles (rc.umd.edo) is indispensable. Archived essays, original Romantic works, and academic journals explore the Romantic period from many perspectives. Be sure to check out the archived essays in the Romantic Gastronomies section, which highlights “the myriad ways in which the surprisingly neglected (and critically undigested) Romantic culture of gastronomy influenced artistic production of nineteenth-century Britain and France — at the same time as it raised new philosophical challenges.” Hmmm...not sure about the metaphysical aspects of Beef Tenderloin Saint-Germain, but you’ll have to read it for yourself to find out.

England was a hotbed of Romanticism: Lyrical Ballads, the 1798 book containing the poetry of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is generally regarded as the movement’s seminal work. An excellent resource to learn more about the British influences on Romantic literature is “The Romantics,” a radio documentary available from the BBC (bbc.co.uk/arts/romantics). Features include an introduction by British author Peter Ackroyd explaining the undeniable links between Romanticism and today’s culture; streaming and downloadable versions of readings of works by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, Byron, Shelley, and Keats; and an info-rich timeline tracing Romanticism from the publication of Diderot’s Encyclopédie to Keats’ The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream and beyond.

A visual feast of Romanticism awaits at the Eugène Delacroix entry at WebMuseum (ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/delacroix/). A brief biography will bring you up to speed on one of the Romantic movement’s most famous painters, and 17 images of Delacroix’s works will help you appreciate his talent and understand why he was so successful. While the resolution for many of the images isn’t as crisp as you might like, they’ll still give you a taste of his style and sensibilities.

Romanticism wasn’t limited to Europe: Its ideals spread to the United States, where they were ignited by the transcendentalist writings of Emerson and Thoreau. For today’s reader, the works of those two thinkers can make for some tough slogging. Not so with Edgar Allan Poe, who produced some of the most gripping and intensely personal fiction of the first half of the 19th century. If you have only a passing knowledge of Poe, you should settle in at The House of Usher (houseofusher.net) for an extended stay. This fan site is a treasure trove of all things Poe, with links to online editions of his works, critical essays and criticisms, and to a myriad of things somehow related to the author, from audio and animation to beer and clothing.

Perhaps no one embodied the freedom and rebelliousness of the Romantic age more than George Sand. Her life was filled with the stuff of great drama — which is precisely why the 1974 BBC mini-series Notorious Woman is so compelling. Rosemary Harris won an Emmy for her performance as the audacious Sand, whose habit of wearing men’s clothes and taking on a steady stream of lovers might be considered scandalous even by today’s standards. Unfortunately, tracking down a copy of the production, which aired in four parts in the U.S. on Masterpiece Theatre in 1975, can be a bootless task. But keep your eyes open for any reruns: If you’re successful, it will be five-plus hours well spent. On second thought, perhaps a coordinated email blast to PBS or the BBC demanding a re-airing is in order....

Photography by Guy Bouchet