Dr. Marc D. Baldwin
Romanticism
Copyright © 2005 by Marc D. Baldwin, PhD
Introduction
A late 18th century reaction to rationalism,
Romanticism opposes the idea of man as a
thinking machine, deemphasizing reason and
emphasizing self-expression.
The Romanticist is forever looking for John
Keats’ "unheard melodies" of the imagination—
the evocative, the suggestive, the mysterious.
Romanticism’s focus turns away from God
toward humanism, with the Poet, the artist, as
the seer, the visionary, the spokesman for
humanity.
Origins
Romanticism’s origins are a complex blend of several
historical factors.
The economic rise of the middle class—with the
popularization of the self-made man—and the
individualism of the Renaissance, colluded with the
Reformation's belief in the immediate relationship
between God and man, and John Locke's philosophy
that minds are formed by environmental conditions.
Collectively, all four factors gave rise to the revolutionary
(literally) notion that all men are created equal and they
may be improved by environmental changes, i.e.
improved institutions and better societies.
Idealism
This idealism rules the Romanticists’ lives and dreams.
Believing in the possibilities of mind over matter, the
Romanticist yearns and strives for a utopian world—one
that shall evolve from a lower order of reality into a high
order.
The Romanticist is on a ceaseless quest for Truth with a
capital T. And Truth consists of finding the one in the
many—seeing each individual, each experience as
unique.
To Walt Whitman, a single leaf of grass is no less a
miracle than all the cosmos.
Ultimately, Truth is reached through the Poet having
experience with Nature by using his feelings and
Imagination.
The Two Cultures
This emphasis on Nature and the
Imagination catalyzed a historically radical
major paradigm shift.
Romanticism is the scene of the split
between high art and pop art.
Romanticism marks the spot of the onset
of C.P. Snow's two cultures: the
humanities (irrational and ideal) and the
sciences (rational and real).
Poetry and the Poet
Being ideal in the Platonic sense, Romanticism
is the belief that poetry is an imitation of life.
Wordsworth called it the "spontaneous overflow
of powerful feelings."
Yet, in the act of composing the poem, poets
must rework, reshape, and temper their feelings.
As Wordsworth puts it, the best poetry is created
through "emotion recollected in tranquility."
Poetry and the Poet (continued)
Coleridge taught that poetic composition is the
resolution of the contraries "of passion and will."
Ultimately, trusting your instinct is essential, for
the feelings of the heart are more reliable than
the thoughts of the head.
Thus, Wordsworth and the Romantics relocated
the source of poetry from the outer to the inner
world, making the poet’s feelings, not men and
their actions, the subject of poetry.
Organicism
Coleridge’s organic theory of poetry
emphasizes those feelings, positing that
like a seed in the imagination, the idea
grows out of itself—self-originating and
self-organizing—and all parts are related
to the whole.
The Poet as artist is merely the conduit of
the imagination.
The Artist
The 18th century concept of the artist is that he
is one with the culture.
The cultural spokesman, the artist gives
expression to the central consciousness, the
spirit of the counter-culture—more rebellious
and anti-social, no longer fixed in his thinking.
The Romanticists operated under Rousseau’s
philosophy that man is essentially good and is
evil only when corrupted by society's institutions.
In his seminal essay, “In Defense of Poetry,”
Percy Bysshe Shelley said that poetry "creates
anew the universe."
The Lyric Poem
Celebrating this new individuality, the 1st person
Lyric poem became a major form.
The typical Lyric of the Romantic period explores
a dichotomous set of oppositions, moving from
the real world to the unreal/ideal world and back
to the real world after learning something and/or
having been changed.
Some of these oppositions include:
earth/heaven; mortality/immortality; time/eternity;
materialism/spiritualism; finite/infinite;
known/unknown; realism/romance.
Romance
In a similar vein, the Romance novel is
more faithful to the feelings of the heart
than the cold facts of experience.
Always striving for a deeper moral or
spiritual truth, the Romantic novelist seeks
to spiritualize the grossness of real life.
Romantic Love
The subject of these Lyric poems and Romance
novels is often, as you might imagine, Romantic
Love, which is a reaction against the staid
tradition of arranged marriages, of love as a
contract.
It is the belief that the world of the lovers is a
world unto itself.
Think of Rose and Jack in the movie Titanic. For
all its perceived Hollywoodish blockbuster
characteristics, Titanic is a supremely Romantic
with a capital R movie.
The Nature of Nature
Another primary subject of Romantic poetry and prose is
Nature and its role in the lives of man.
Making connections between Nature and man, Romantic
poets strive to better understand and give free rein to
their own natures, which are in opposition to society—
man’s main adversary and enemy. "The world is too
much with us," said Wordsworth. "Getting and spending
we lay waste our powers. Little we see in nature that is
ours."
Thanks to the materialism and mechanism of society and
its institutions, Man has become blind to the nature
around and within him.
The Nature of Nature (continued)
In nature, the Romanticists saw God,
which is unlike previous ages that
considered nature to be merely
mechanical.
The spiritual, not the material, is the true
reality.
Thus, you should ground your life in long
solitary walks, communing with Nature,
focusing on solitude and introspection
Glorification of the Commonplace
Romanticism also elevates common people and
common events, dethroning kings and queens.
From the Preface to 1799’s Lyrical Ballads, the landmark
book of poetry he penned with Coleridge, Wordsworth
said they intended to use "incidents and situations from
common life...in language really spoken by men...
humble and rustic life."
W’s subjects included peasants, outcasts, delinquents,
and idiots; thus, W democratized poetry, reinvigorating
the reader’s wonder at the everyday, trivial, and familiar.
Another Romanticist, Thomas Carlyle, has his
protagonist in “Sartor Resartus” rescued from despair by
his sense of the "Natural Supernaturalism" in ordinary
experience.
The Supernatural and
"Strangeness to Beauty"
As Walter Pater noted, the Romantic sensibility
adds “strangeness to beauty" through writing
about unusual types of experience.
The occult, dreams and nightmares, and a
fascination with the forbidden are commonplace
in Romantic poetry.
Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and
“Kubla Khan” employ folklore and superstition to
create an other-worldly atmosphere.
In America, Edgar Allan Poe’s horror stories
resonate with dark and supernatural events and
characters.
The Imagination
Thus, to the Romanticists, the Imagination
makes the world new again.
The act of imagination, as Coleridge argued,
requires a leap from merely putting together
images to crafting a unified metaphoric design.
Imaginative figurative language forms a
complete "vision," as William Butler Yeats would
later assemble with his highly developed
symbolism.
The Individual Mind
All of the preceding elements are part of the
Romanticists search for self.
Celebrating process and growth, movement and
energy, Wordsworth believed that the mind is
"an agent of the one great Mind": that the mind
has access beyond sense to the infinite through
the Imagination.
This post-Kantian philosophy—that the mind of
man (as "subject" and "ego") is the creator of the
universe it perceives—posits that words precede
ideas.
Bakhtin’s Dialogic
This provocative notion set the stage for
the great Russian philosopher of the early
20th century, Mikhail Bakhtin.
His theory of dialogic argues that in
dialogue, in speaking, we create the self in
“myself,” both for others and for ourselves.
In other words, we as individuals do not
exist prior to our own spoken words about
ourselves.
Romance in America
Interestingly enough, in a very profound sense,
America did not exist prior to the thinkers and
writers first willing her into being with their
words, which then inspired the action of
revolution.
Romanticism became the first "-ism" America
adopted.
Being a rugged, vastly rural and frontier country,
the U.S. was tailor-made for Romance.
Romance Fading
However, after the Civil War, the optimism and romantic
individualism of Emerson faded into a Darwinian
biological and economic determinism.
As the esteemed critic Richard Chase contends, the
American creative imagination "has been shaped by the
contradictions and not by the unities or harmonies of our
culture" (Chase, Richard. The American Novel and its
Tradition. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co, Inc., 1957.
p.1)
Chase further posits this thesis: American literature is
best described as a "profound poetry of disorder" (2).
American vs. British Romanticism
American Romanticism differs from British Romanticism
in several key aspects.
Being a predominantly agrarian society, America had a
frontier optimism and sense of unlimited potential for
development and even a utopian possibility.
The heroism of early Americans in confronting the
wilderness head-on permeated the sensibilities of poets,
philosophers and the public alike.
As Chase notes, "although most of the great American
novels are romances, most of the great English novels
are not" (xii).
Romanticism in American Lit
Here’s just a handful of concrete examples of Romanticism evident
in some of the greatest works of American literature.
The Historical Romances of James Fenimore Cooper, in which he
idealizes the primitive, uncorrupted common man.
This “noble savage” appears also in the works of Herman Melville
and Mark Twain, who direct their heroes on mythic quests through
remote places of the globe and the human mind.
Such introspection and interest in the individual fighting a corrupt
society is everywhere in 19th century Am Lit: in Cooper and
Emerson and Thoreau, in Hawthorne and Poe and Irving and Twain.
Everywhere also is the celebration of nature, natural beauty and the
simple life.
American literature at its origins and core is intensely, personally
Romantic.
Romanticism’s Excesses
This radically higher estimation of man's
potential, aims and worth is not without its
serious downside.
Such hyper-individualism treads dangerously
close to the Faustian sin of pride, self-love,
megalomania, and narcissism.
The darkest characters in Hawthorne
(Chillingworth), Poe (you pick em), Melville
(Captain Ahab), and Twain (the Sheperdson’s
and Grangerford’s) want to be God and don’t
know their own human limitations.
Romanticism’s Excesses (continued)
Disturbingly, many artists even boasted of this
propensity. The British poet William Blake argued that
the mind must reject the material world to create its own
world, stating that "Less than everything cannot satisfy
man."
Coleridge and Wordsworth believed passionately that
the poet collaborates with nature in becoming a creator
unto himself.
This refusal to submit to God’s will and accept your
mortal limitations had been considered man's original sin
by previous generations.
Yet, the Romantics considered this egotism their triumph
and glory.
Romanticism vs. Realism
Of course, there existed then and still exists
today a tension between the ism’s of
Romanticism and Realism, which is always right
there, in the logical mind, attempting to make
perfect, objective sense of one’s stubbornly
imperfect and subjective perspective on life.
Thus, it should be helpful and fruitful to close this
Lecture with a succinct comparison of R & R.
Romanticism vs. Realism
Artistic and poetic
outlook on life
Subjective: warm,
personal,
confessional
Intuition and insight
Visions, dreams,
questions
Spiritual
Scientific, sociological
outlook on life
Objective: cool,
impersonal, detached
Laboratory
observation
Facts, documentation
Material
Romanticism vs. Realism
Indefinite, suggestive
Rich tradition, legend,
past, myth
Definite, tangible
Now and everyday