When we think of the romantics, at least in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, we often consider careful lovers in lace and ruffles, lovers primarily of love itself, as a noble, worthy aesthetic. We think of the poetry of Wordsworth (‘I wandered lonely as a cloud…’), Shelley (‘O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being’) and Coleridge (‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A Stately pleasure-dome decree…’), or of Edmund Burke’s concepts of the sublime and the beautiful. Situated in late eighteenth century Europe, however, and juxtaposed with Continental romanticism, the picture becomes altogether more political, theological, and – though fractured into myriad interpretations – more substantial. It becomes, in essence, a reaction to the Enlightenment, to the new scientism, a rejection of dogma.