American Romanticism

American Literature I 2019/2 American Romanticism PuritanismRomanticismLiterature LUCIANO CABRAL TemporaryLecturer lucianocabraldasilva@gmail.com uerjundergradslit.wordpress.com/

Romanticism: the common sense

Romanticism: the common sense • “You’re too romantic to my taste”. • “I like romantic guys”. • “I do appreciate romantic girls”. • “Romantic moments”. • “Your romanticism makes you keep your head in the clouds”. • “We can’t define love. We can only feel it”. • “Imagine there's no countriesIt isn't hard to doNothing to kill or die forAnd no religion, too”

ROMANTICISM x CLASSICISM • INTUITION x ANALYSIS: Romantics relish things that seem slightly to defy rational explanations. They’re enthusiastic about feeling and wary of the intellect as a guide to life. They believe one shouldn’t always think too much [this is probably the real reason why romantic poets hardly ever define the terms they use, such as Beauty, Nature, Sublime, etc]. In their eyes, it may be unfair to probe a decision or a mood too hard. They like instinct. In particular, they think one shouldn’t always attempt to take apart emotions. • Classicists, on the other hand, are wary of intuition. They’ve learned, often through bitter experiences, how misguided and deluded their own feelings may be; and hence they look rather skeptically and caustically upon them.

ROMANTICISM x CLASSICISM • SPONTANEITY x EDUCATION: Romantics are wary of teaching and instruction. They think things should be spontaneous rather than taught. The idea that people might need to think rationally and exhaustively about what career to choose for themselves, or whom they should marry strikes the Romantic as a misguided intrusion of education into things which should be spontaneous and natural. They like the notion of a ‘calling’ and of ‘love at first sight’. • Part of Romantics’ respect for spontaneity leads them to look with particular interest at children, who seem to them to have more direct access to the kind of truths and sensibilities that adults have lost [that’s why Romantics are gonna rely on nature and natural elements as a way of life]. to the Romantic, it will always be a child who points out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. • Those of a classical temperament don’t necessarily respect the current education system as we know it, but the abstract idea of education seems to them very important. They believe that training is vital if we’re to avoid making too many mistakes in our emotional or professional lives.

ROMANTICISM x CLASSICISM • HONESTY x POLITENESS: the Romantic person is devoted to saying what they think or feel. They’re allergic to the idea of being fake or having secrets. Authenticity is vital. • But the Classical person reveres politeness as a very important lid that suppresses what might destroy us. They believe deeply in getting on around other people. They’d much prefer to have civil relations with someone rather than tell then frankly what’s on their mind. They accept an important role for secrets and white lies.

ROMANTICISM x CLASSICISM • IDEALISM x REALISM: the Romantic is excited by how things might ideally be, and judges what currently exists in the world by the standard of a better imagined alternative. Most of the time, the current state of things arouses them to intense disappointment and anger as they consider the injustices, prevarications, compromises, and timidity of the powerful. They are often furious with governments, and surprised and outraged by evidence of venal and self-interested conduct in society. • For their part, the Classical person pays special attention to what can go wrong. They’re very concerned to mitigate the downside. They’re aware that most things could be a lot worse. Before condemning a government, they consider the standard of governments across history, and may regard a current arrangement as bearable, under the circumstances. High ideals make them nervous.

ROMANTICISM x CLASSICISM • THE RARE x THE EVERYDAY: Romantics rebel against the ordinary. They’re keen on the exotic and the rare. They’re anxious about higher things being put under pressure to become ‘useful’ or commercial. They want heroism, excitement, and an end to boredom. • Classical people like daily life. they’re familiar enough with extremes as to welcome things that are a little boring. They can see the charm of staying home and doing the laundry. • Both Romantic and Classical orientations have important truths to impart. Neither is wholly right or wrong. They need to be balanced. But because a good life requires a judicious balance of both, at this point in history, when the spirit of the age is pretty Romantic, it might be the Classical attitude, whose distinctive claims and wisdom we need to listen to intently. It’s a mode of approaching life which is ripe for rediscovery, and it can be repeatedly seen in our very attitudes.

History of Ideas: Romanticism Romanticism is best understood as a reaction to the birth of the modern world, and some of its key features: industrialization, urbanization, secularization and consumerism. Central moments in the history of Romanticism:

ROMANTICISM • The Marais, Paris, 1762: Rousseau publishes the book about the raising of children Emile, or On Education. The book contains diatribes against the oppressive world of adults, and praises the natural goodness, spontaneity and wisdom of little children. In the middle of the 18th century, the world had become increasingly sensible, planned, sterile, rational and bureaucratic. Against all of these, Rousseau emphasizes the child: the original rebel, representative of everything which is pure, unschooled and outside of adult discipline. For Rousseau, children were the seat of creativity and genius. In this sense, the innocence and sweetness of the child replace the discipline and the control of the adult life.

ROMANTICISM • London, 1770: the 17-year-old Thomas Chatterton drinks arsenic and commits suicide. He kills himself because nobody wanted to publish his poems, which is concerned with beauty and wisdom. His family wanted Chatterton to be a lawyer, but he himself wanted to be a poet. Soon, a cult grows up around Chatterton’s figure. He becomes an icon of something that will be later very important for Romantics: the idea of a doomed person, often an artist rejected by a cruel, vulgar, and incomprehensible world.

ROMANTICISM • Leipzig, 1774, Goethe: the publication of the quintessential romantic love story The Sorrows of Young Werther. It’s a story of a passionate doomed love affair between a young poet called Werther and a beautiful clever young woman called Charlotte. Unfortunately, for Werther, Charlotte is married, what makes their love impossible from the very start. But this setback doesn’t stop Werther. Like Chatterton, Werther’s family is also applying pressure on him to have a sensible and bourgeois career. However, Werther can think of only one thing: to follow the impulses of his heart. Eventually, Werther cannot take it anymore and kills himself [like Dead Poets Society, when the character Neil kills himself because he wants to be an actor, but his father wants him to be a doctor]. However, Goethe doesn’t condemn Werther as a lunatic or hothead. Conversely, Goethe directs all our sympathies towards the young passionate poet. Goethe, especially for this book, is considered to be one of the founding fathers of Romanticism. We readers are then invited to side with Werther, feeling sorry and sorrowful for his impractical and dreamy attitude to love.

ROMANTICISM • Madrid, 1798, Francisco Goya: the production of Goya’s most iconic images, “The Sleep of Reason Brings Out Monsters”. The image is the capture of the quintessential romantic interest in the limits of reason and the power of the irrational over human minds. To be romantic was to reject science, rationality and logic.

ROMANTICISM • The Lake District, England, 1798: William Wordsworth writes poems about something that’s very under threat: the natural world. So, he’ll write about daffodils, oak trees, clouds, butterflies and rivers. Wordsworth’s poems are an abiding hatred for everything mechanical and industrial. To be Romantic is to take the side of nature against industry. In a period in which bridges, trains, and factories were making England rich, Wordsworth spoke of the natural and simple life. • Lyrical Ballads, with other poems (1798), in 2 volumes

ROMANTICISM • Niagara, USA, 1829: Thomas Cole paints one of the most characteristic image of the mighty Niagara Falls with a couple of native Americans in the foreground. Cole paints the sublime scenes: vast landscapes of the American territory portrayed as impressive, overwhelming, stunning, and terrifying. In nature, man would be dwarfed by nature’s grandeur and magnificence. To be a Romantic is to be away from all the concrete and competition of urban life and find relief in the natural magnificence that transcends all human achievements and concerns.

ROMANTICISM • Romanticism is a refuge for those who couldn’t stand a world growing ever more technological and rational. Romantics then stick to: (a) irrational, supernatural; (b) untrained, unschooled; (c) exotic; (d) childlike, naïve; (e) natural.

On ROMANTICISM: Introduction • According to Northrop Frye, for Blake, “the imagination destroys the antithesis of subject and object”. But to the later Romantic the imagination, the unavoidable essence of man, constructs the object and relates the subject to the object but cannot comprehend or encompass the object; to the later Romantic the imagination reveals the antithesis of subject and object, which the Enlightenment also thought it had destroyed in favor of the object, not, as in Blake, in favor of the subject. (p. 220)

ROMANTICISM • Brunetière, for instance, called Romanticism the discovery of the ego. Others have said that is was the discovery of nature; still others, the return to medievalism. Watts-Dunton believed the discovery of wonder, and an American clergyman-critic of the transcendental period praised it as the literature of aspiration. More recently, Professor Babbitt has been disgusted by its approval of the irrational; Mario Praz accuses it of having been the hotbed of decadence; whereas critics of sociological interest deplore its stimulus to escape from reality. (p. 480)

ROMANTICISM • We need not be alarmed if differences in critical standards lurk among these variations of descriptive effort. The descriptions are all correct when applied to individual authors. Byron and Hugo are clearly egoistic. Chateaubriand and Wordsworth are absorbed by description of the scenery. Scott in England and Tieck in Germany represent a medieval revival. But there is aspiration, the hope for a better world, in Shelley and in Hugo also, while in the later work of Chateaubriand and Shelley many persons have found an escape from reality into a world beyond our time and space. (p. 480) • Every English Romanticist, whatever else he is, is also a poet of nature. But the important feature of the English nature poetry is that, save in Byron, it is not Byronic. To Wordsworth, nature is an objective reality, virtually synonymous with God, to which the poet reverently subordinates himself. It is a discipline imposed upon individualism rather than an encouragement to the expanding ego. Wordsworth merely returns to and transforms the Enlightenment naturism of the 17th century. (p. 481)

ROMANTICISM: Lyrical Ballads • (2) In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth repeatedly declared that good poetry is ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’. According to this point of view poetry is not primarily a mirror of men in action; on the contrary, its essential element is the poet’s own feelings, while the process of composition, since it is ‘spontaneous’, is the opposite of the artful manipulation of means to foreseen ends stressed by the neoclassic critics . . . The philosophical-minded Coleridge substituted for neoclassic ‘rules’, which he describes as imposed by the poet from without, the concept of the inherent organic ‘laws’ of the poet’s imagination; that is, he conceives that each poetic work, like a growing plant, evolves according to its internal principles into its final organic form.

American Romanticism