This chapter considers Romanticism as a key historical period in the development of the discourse of creativity. It begins by questioning the representation of the Romantics as turning away from the political and the social. Instead, the chapter argues that the Romantic celebration of the poet’s creative capacity was both a counterpoint to economic-rationalism and a social and political critique. The chapter illustrates how the political economy of culture and the emerging cultural market resulted in the intensification of a distinction between the creator and the imitator and the emergence of a protected creative space, unsullied by the market. The chapter argues that this paved the way for a subsequent misappropriation of Kant’s theory of transcendence, where the universal and the social are jettisoned and aesthetics becomes aligned to purely personal experience and subjective expression. The chapter ends by considering two key tropes within creative discourse which emerged from the Romantic period: the creative child and creative play. Through a close reading of Rousseau’s Emile, the chapter traces how these understandings inform a radical epistemology within education which views creativity as subverting rational thought.