Major figures in Romanticism included William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Emily Bronte, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Hector Berlioz, Frederic Chopin, Giuseppe Verdi, and Richard Wagner. Their works emphasized emotion, subjectivity, nature, and the imagination over logic and reason. Realist writers like Gustave Courbet, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot aimed to represent contemporary life and the working class objectively. Photography was invented in 1839 and documented the American Civil War, influencing Realist art and literature.