This was great of course. But I’m having trouble squaring the idea that Romanticism is a variety of socialism, or even that it’s sympathetic to socialism. The most obvious point for me is that they tended to oppose progress — Frankenstein is a clear example, but Byron in Childe Harold states outright that history is in a process of decay. (He also says that this might only be solvable if a heroic warrior of the old Greek type were to surface and lead Greece, for example, to regain its former glory.) Shelley also in Queen Mab says that civilization is a corrupting influence and that we’re meant to return to the state of nature. A return to the status quo ante isn’t exactly a type of progress.

Maybe this is just a feature of the English Romantics, but it seems to me that their primary outlook is somewhere between the aesthetic and the religious, and that their desire to reverse progress and return to a former way of life has to do with reclaiming a vitality that they saw as lost. Obviously they were interested in politics, but when they addressed it they tended, like Blake, to frame it in terms of religious, cosmic and aesthetic categories.

Anyway that’s my reading but I’m happy to admit I’m wrong.