A literary and artistic movement beginning in the late eighteenth century europethat gave priority to subjective experience rather than subordinating that response to classical rational rules and forms. The romantic is sometimes considered as an "anti-enlightenment," insofar as it expressed anxieties about and or disaffection with the prevailing eighteenth-century celebration of reason and order; romantic artists and thinkers tended, however, not to seek solace in a return to christian faith and theology but instead often found inspiration in the natural world.