A clear understanding and accurate definition of romanticism is possible only in terms of its spiritual basis.
Romanticism exists in a bewildering array of manifestations.
If we focus our attention upon the manifestations and ignore the spiritual motivation underlying them, we will not be able to grasp the real meaning of romanticism. The best discussion of the spiritual basis of romanticism I have ever read is the one provided by Allan Bloom in his book Love and Friendship written in 1992 just prior to his death. To understand the significance of romanticism we need to know how its founder, Jean Jacques Rousseau, responded to the movement known as the Enlightenment. Unlike Protestantism, which revolted against the distortions of Christianity by trying to recover real Christianity, the so-called Enlightenment rejected real Christianity as well as distorted Christianity and developed a philosophy of mechanistic materialism in which God was either wholly absent or, at best, assigned a minimal role. Now Rousseau also rejected Christianity and accepted the Enlightenment's philosophy, but he wanted to avoid the consequences of doing so.