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How did Sturm und Drang contribute to German Romanticism?

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“The Tyger,” anastatic print by William Blake — Romantic literature English Romantic poet and artist William Blake wrote and illustrated “The Tyger” and other poems in his book *Songs of Innocence and of Experience* (1794).

The Sturm und Drang movement served as a foundational precursor to German Romanticism, establishing a shared emphasis on individual liberty, intense emotion, and nature as a primary source of poetic inspiration.12

The movement contributed to the development of Romanticism in several key ways:

Rejection of Rationalism: By seeking to overthrow the Enlightenment’s cult of rationalism, Sturm und Drang paved the way for the Romantic preference for intuitive modes of thought, such as dreams and the unconscious.31
Literary Themes: The movement’s focus on human individualism and its interest in the medieval past—exemplified by works like Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen—helped foster the Romantic preoccupation with history, folklore, and the "gothic" aesthetic.34
Thematic Continuity: The transition from Sturm und Drang to Romanticism is often viewed as a sequence of phases in a single literary development. Both movements prioritized the creative imagination and the expression of subjective experience over the rigid, formalized rules of Neoclassicism.14

Ultimately, Sturm und Drang provided the theoretical and thematic groundwork that allowed later Romantic writers to synthesize poetry, philosophy, and science into a new cultural movement.1