ROMANTIC LITERARY CRITICISM

1. ROMANTIC LITERARY CRITICISM Literary Criticism SandyaMaulana, S.S.

2. ROMANTIC LITERARY CRITICISM Romanticism is a reaction towards the advances in science and technology and, later, society and economy, seen in the late eighteenth century. These advances were seen as degenerating people into rigid structures of society and nature into mere commodities. Thus, the rational world, in the Romantic point of view, was artificial, devoid of consideration of nature and human emotions. When Romanticism first swept Europe, it rejected the neoclassical ideas, which are full of rigid and prescriptive rules as well as elevated language and composition. Romanticism was thought to begin in Germany in the late eighteenth century. The works of Goethe embody Romantic qualities, although this conclusion came later after Romanticism was well all over Europe and America. It is important to note that Romanticism is usually characterized by the depiction of idealized nature, preference to everyday language, and importance of human feelings. These characteristics were expanded by the writers of the late Romanticism, including American writers of the middle of the nineteenth century

3. JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE (1749 – 1852) Like most great poets, Goethe tried to stand free of labels, but the critic Schlegel was certainly right to identify many of his views with Romanticism. Goethe held a number of opinions that became current in his time, and thus became identified with Romanticism, particularly the distinction between allegory and symbolism. His “Maxim no. 279” is also Romantic in nature. In it, Goethe prefers the poet that starts his poetry with the particular, which “is what reveals poetry in its true nature: it speaks forth a particular without independently thinking of or referring to a universal, but in grasping the particular in its living character it implicitly apprehends the universal along with it.” Notable work: Conversation with Eckermann(1836).

4. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770 – 1850) Wordsworth’s Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads shifts emphasis from the relationship between poem and reader to that between poet and poem. He considers the poet a teacher not of concepts but of immediate intuitions of nature. He defines the poem primarily in terms of idea of a poet. Wordsworth then describes the poem as the result of these powers and activities. It is a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Wordsworth makes clear that the poem does not simply rush forth; memory and contemplation come into play in its composition. Nevertheless, emphasis in the definition is on the dominance of feeling over intellect. Feeling becomes the real basis of imagination, which is the power to grasp nature in its totality and to order one’s experience. Wordsworth attacks the popular style of his time as employing a “gaudy and inane phraseology” that veils nature rather than reveals its spirit. In his view, simple, concrete language expresses a close relationship to “the permanent forms of nature,” which he associates with rural speech and rural life. Notable work: Preface to the second editionof Lyrical Ballads

5. RALPH WALDO EMERSON Emerson’s essay The Poet provides a compendium of Romantic ideas about poetry. His attitude toward symbolism helped to lay groundwork for such theories as Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms. Emerson thinks that language tends to wear itself out in clichés, and expression becomes dull and inaccurate. Every thought eventually becomes a sort of prison. It is the poet who forges a new language and new thoughts and provides the possibility of mental liberation. In this view, language would seem to be a primary means by which man forms reality. The poem remains for Emerson a vehicle for transcendental thought; nature itself is a symbol or a language that somehow can be read. But if nature is language of symbols, then it would seem that poetic language itself becomes only a copy of natural symbols and might best be transcended or bypassed for immediate communion with the natural world. Notable work: The Poet