Theories about Romanticism have a tendency to fracture when crystallized as rules that have to be policed. That is because the concept has no exact correlative in historical time, unlike the Elizabethan age and the Restoration period. During the Romantic period, ‘romance’ was meaningful only as a term by which certain kinds of novels or poems were taxonomized. The author views Romanticism as the consequence of cultural developments that occurred during the Enlightenment. It is impossible to stick a precise date on when anyone (either individually or separately) started to think and act Romantically, but those who did were unlike their forebears. If Romanticism is thought as mobile, localized, impermanent, and filtered through the prism of the individual, it becomes easier to see why attempts to restrict it to a definable moment remain perpetually open to debate.