was a great admirer of the egalitarian ethos behind the French Revolution. Whether Burns would have recognised the same principles at work in the Soviet State at its most repressive is moot. This didn’t stop the Communists from claiming Burns as one of their own and incorporating his work into their state propaganda. The post-communist years of rampant capitalism in Russia have not tarnished Burns' reputation. Lord Byron was a major influence on almost all Russian poets of the Golden Era, including Pushkin, Vyazemsky, Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, Baratynsky, Delvig and, especially, Lermontov. Spain Germany and England were major influences on Romantic Spanish poetry. During the late 18th century to the late 19th century, Romanticism spread in the form of philosophy and art throughout Western societies, and the earlier period of this movement overlapped with the Age of Revolutions. The idea of the creative imagination was stressed above the idea of reason, and minute elements of nature, including as insects and pebbles, were now considered divine. Nature was perceived in many different ways by the Spanish Romantics, and Instead of employing allegory, as earlier poets had done, these poets tended to use myth and symbol. The power of human emotion furthermore is emphasised during this period. Leading Romantic poets include Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (considered the most important), Manuel José Quintana, José Zorrilla, Rosalía de Castro (in Galician and Spanish), and José de Espronceda. In Catalonia, the Romantic movement was a major trigger for the Catalan Renaissance or 'Renaixença', which would gradually bring back prestige to the Catalan language and literature (in decadence since its 15th-century Golden Age), with the leading figure in poetry of Jacint Verdaguer. Sweden In Swedish literature the Romantic period is between 1809 and 1830, while in Europe, the period is usually seen as running between 1800–1850. The Swedish version was very much influenced by German literature. During this relatively short period, there were so many great Swedish poets, that the era is called the Golden Age. The period started around when several periodicals were published that criticised the literature of the 18th century. The important periodical Iduna, published by the Gothic Society (1811), presented a romanticised version of Gothicismus, a 17th-century cultural movement in Sweden that had centered on the belief in the glory of the Swedish Geats or Goths. The early 19th-century Romantic nationalist version emphasised the Vikings as heroic figures. United States Transcendentalism was a philosophical