pre-Romanticadj.n.

1895 Fortn. Rev. Mar. 396 Something more than invariable ‘correctness’—that too fanatically worshipped idol of the pre-Romantic era of English poetry—must be predicable.

1899 Internat. Jrnl. Ethics 9 170 There are occasional traces of the pre-romantic tendency to throw some thin protection of reason over the firm stand of the will, or to give proof that they build upon something better than pure desire.

1934 C. Lambert Music Ho! i. 57 Purcell, the most picturesque of the pre-Romantic composers.

1963 N. Frye Romanticism Reconsidered 9 It is obvious that in pre-Romantic poetry there is a strong affinity with the attitude that we have called sense... But the pre-Romantic structure of imagery belonged to a nature which was the work of God.

1982 Times 13 Nov. 5/5 Today we are likely to be more receptive to his crisp, pre-Romantic attitude to landscape than for some years.

2004 Courier-Mail (Brisbane) (Nexis) 11 Feb. 21 Two of the evening's composers, Haydn and CPE Bach, belong to the pre-Romantic era but were represented by works that looked forward to that time.

1918 Mod. Lang. Notes 33 363 The two pre-Romantics most profoundly affected were Chateaubriand and Mme. De Staël.

1938 C. Connolly in New Statesman 6 Aug. 223/1 The English pre-romantics..balanced their love of childhood by their hope of heaven.

1980 Church Times 25 July 6/4 The enormous revolution in literary taste which began in the 'twenties..demoted Spenser, the tribe of Ben Jonson, and the eighteenth-century pre-romantics.

1993 Jrnl. Mod. Hist. 65 70 Kant could see Hamann's critique of the Enlightenment feed into..what Jacobi would soon attack..as Kant's fundamental ‘idealism’ (by contrast with the ‘realism’ German preromantics saw in Hume).