The Romantic Rebellion

In several European languages, a romance is a prose narrative, that is, a novel. (We should also note the phrase Romance languages, a term that refers to languages descended from Latin.) In English, the word romance denotes passionate love and romantic designates conditions leading to it. But in cultural history, High Romanticism was more, a rebellion against Classicism.

Age of Neo-classical Reason

After nearly two centuries of social chaos and bloodshed triggered by the Protestant Reformation, European culture in the 18th Century embraced a vision of restraint that is often called the Enlightenment. The era celebrated Reason as the highest of human virtues, and sought to bring its order to bear on nature and on society.

In this age, empirical science staked its claim to authority. In Britain, Sir Isaac Newton applied mathematical rigor to the study of the cosmos, and Adam Smith invented economics to analyze the function of financial markets. Political philosophers in France, England, Scotland, and Germany analyzed the structure and ethics of states and government. In the English colonies of North America, revolutionaries drew on these theories to justify the radical idea of human rights. In Paris, Edinburgh, and other cities, classical models guided the purposeful re-organization of city streets and architecture.

Raguenet, J-P. (1763). A View of Paris from the Pont Neuf. Oil on canvas.

During this Neo-Classical age, traditional social and aesthetic rules strictly governed social behavior and provided standards of assessment. Arts throve insofar as they followed rules and affirmed the new versions of classical society. Of course, strict rules lead to rebellion.

The Romantic Rebellion

You may be surprised to hear that the Romantic Era formulated core cultural orientations that dominate contemporary Western society even today. During the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, artists and thinkers began to push back against the idea that wisdom is to be found solely in reason and tradition.

High Romanticism

A sweeping … profound shift in Western attitudes to art and human creativity that dominated much of European culture. … Its chief emphasis was freedom of individual self-expression: sincerity, spontaneity, and originality [as] new standards … replacing the imitation of classical models. … Rejecting the ordered rationality of the Enlightenment as mechanical, impersonal, and artificial, the Romantics turned to the emotional directness of personal experience and … the individual imagination. … The restrained balance valued in 18th-century culture was abandoned in favor of emotional intensity, … horror, melancholy, or sentimentality. … Romantic writers … showed a new interest in the irrational realms of dream and delirium or of folk superstition and legend. Creative imagination [centered] Romantic views of art, which replaced “mechanical” rules of conventional form with an “organic” principle of natural growth (Romanticism).

Nature, Folk Experience, and the Imagination: William Wordsworth

William Shuter. (1798). Portrait of William Wordsworth.

Have you ever chafed at a classroom expectation that you read ponderous texts written long ago by dead wizards who make no sense to you? (I mean, not in this class, right?) If so, you may appreciate a poetic dialogue in which William Wordsworth’s Persona responds to a friend who had been chiding him about wasting too much time exploring the woods and failing to devote enough time to study.

William Wordsworth. (1800) The Tables Turned; An Evening -Scene, On The Same Subject

Up ! up ! my friend, and clear your looks.
Why all this toil and trouble ?
Up ! up ! my friend, and quit your books,
Or surely you’ll grow double.

The sun above the mountain’s head,
A freshening lustre mellow,
Through all the long green fields has spread.
His first sweet evening yellow.

Hooks ! ’tis a dull and endless strife,
Come, hear the woodland linnet, in
How sweet his music ; on my life
There’s more of wisdom in it.

And hark ! how blithe the throstle sings!
And he is no mean preacher;
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man;
Of moral evil and of good.
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things;
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up these barren leaves
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

William Wordsworth championed the Romantic rebellion in English verse because he loved nature. I mean, he really loved Nature (capital N!). This champion of the individual imagination lived most of his life in the English Lake District. In his day, Cumbria was an isolated, neglected rural region. Yet Wordsworth tramped across its fells for a lifetime, watching and listening to what he saw as a natural wisdom that could inspire in ways dusty books could not. He virtually invented the tourist industry in the region, and today tens of thousands of travelers from near and far flock to the Lake District each year. (For more information on Wordsworth, explore this article: Wordsworth, William.)

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up these barren leaves
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

Well, there you are, the Romantic Era in a nutshell. Notice the themes compressed in these four lines:

  • A suspicion of academic and scientific lore
  • A reliance upon one’s own sense of truth
  • A conviction that the individual’s heart channels wisdom
  • A resolution to “go out” to encounter the world, especially of nature

The lyric above appeared first in an anthology that Wordsworth edited in 1798. Lyrical Ballads not only changed English verse but helped shift broader cultural norms and values. By including the word Ballad in his title, Wordsworth challenged the assumption that great poetry had to emulate classical models such as the ode or the elegy. The learned might dismiss ballads as trivial verse amusements of the lower classes, but Lyrical Ballads insisted that poems of ordinary life were worthy of publication.

In the Preface to the 1800 edition, Wordsworth challenged everyone’s idea of what poetry is. He observes that people expect from poetry a certain kind of exalted language and nobility of content. (That is, a focus on the affairs of social elites.) He acknowledges that readers may “have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness”  when reading “Ballads” that use commonplace language to celebrate the experiences of humble folk. But he pronounces the collection’s principles in ringing tones:

William Wordsworth. (1800).  Preface to the Lyrical Ballads

The principal object [of these poems]… was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them… in a selection of language really used by men,[1] and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind … in a state of excitement. Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil … and speak a plainer and more emphatic language. … For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.[2] 


[1] Italics added by your editor. Sadly, the language of the day tended to forget that women deserved to be mentioned.
[2] Again, italics added. This definition of poetry became a rallying cry of the age. Yet the claim that all good poetry is a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings is very questionable and speaks for a Romantic perspective by no means shared universally.

Wordsworth’s language may be a bit daunting 200 years later. But the claims of the Preface today seem so conventional that we may struggle to see how revolutionary they are:

  • The experience of humble, working class people is worthy of art and poetry.
  • Verse that draws on the language of everyday life can have a powerful impact.
  • Poetry reflects on passions found in the individual heart.
  • Great poetry breaks conventional rules to express the individual poet’s imagination.

Do you shy instinctively away from poetry? If so, I’ll bet that your concerns reflect the assumptions about what poetry is that Wordsworth explores in the Preface. And I’ll bet that many of your concerns would fade away facing poems that speak plainly about the experiences of real people. Wordsworth’s verse may or may not strike you as familiar—after all, they were written over 200 years ago. But, if we correct for the gender exclusion of Wordsworth’s formulation,  don’t we all respond to the language of people speaking to people? Isn’t that what the poetry in pop songs does so well?

American Romanticism: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Romanticism translated very well to the new nation of America. The early 19th Century educator and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson embraced a transcendental vision of the human self, as expressed in essays such as “The Oversoul” and “Self-Reliance”:

  • Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
  • Whoso would be a man[3] must be a nonconformist.
  • Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
  • For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.

If you want to understand the mainstream American perspective on life, you need to have at least a sense of the way Romanticism celebrated and explored the individual. Emerson’s essay lays down the themes of individualism that drive American society and values to this day.

Bonus coverage: if you’d like to read more of the perspective that, along with life on the frontiers, shaped the American mind, read Emerson’s essay, “Self-Reliance.”


[3] Whoso would be a man: again, sadly, women are effaced, though Emerson’s ideas apply well to women in a patriarchal society.

A Gentle Reminder

Tips on reading Poetry

Some of the most outspoken leaders of the Romantic Era expressed themselves in poetry. One more time, let’s recall our tips for keeping your head above water reading verse.

  • Read aloud, listening for rhythms, patterns.
  • Recognize the plain sense of the words before looking for hidden meanings.
  • Who talks to whom about what? Clearly seeing this dynamic can open many poems.
  • Track themes and patterns of meaning that flow from the above.

Free Verse

Wordsworth imagines his readers asking, In what sense is this poetry?  A kind of poetry even more revolutionary than Wordsworth could imagine debuted in America during the latter decades of the 19th Century:

Free Verse

(in French, vers libre) achieves verbal rhythms through repetitive, often parallel figures of speech, Tropes and Schemes. Free verse does not establish set patterns of syllables, stresses, or rhymes.

Even today, many assume that English poetry will feature Rhyme and Meter. But what if we find neither? Actually, we have been reading free verse for several weeks: the rhythms and patterns of rhetorical oratory found in Hebrew poetry: Anaphora, Catalogue, Parallelism. All contribute to the subtle rhythms of Free Verse. Now let’s add one more figure:

Alliteration

a figurative scheme in which multiple words in a series repeat initial sounds—usually consonants: e.g. “I hear Lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore” (W. B. Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” 1888).

Walt Whitman Sings of Himself

Armed with a grasp of these figures of speech we are ready for the American pioneer of Free Verse.

Samuel Hollyer. (1854). Engraving of Whitman.

Walt Whitman was an American poet. That is, he wrote verse that expressed the American spirit in an American voice that could not have arisen anywhere else. (For more information on Whitman, explore this article: Loving.)

Walt Whitman. (1891). A Noiseless, Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile[4] anchor hold
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.


[4] Ductile: a property attributed to metals—flexible, pliable, capable of being drawn into thin strands without breaking.

Now this poem does not establish a Metrical pattern. You won’t find any metrical Feet or Iambs or Spondees. But it has strong albeit subtle rhythms based on patterns of Scheme. Try to hear them in this reading:


By now, the poem’s rhythms should be familiar to you. They are the same as those of Hebrew verse. Whitman’s style of free verse is steeped in Old Testament poetics. But notice as well the poem’s central Simile: a comparison between the poet’s soul and a spider sending forth filaments of webbing to try to organize the vast world. In the second stanza, the simile becomes a Metaphor, the soul addressed as a spider being sending out reflective and spiritual filaments to try to gain a foothold in the wide world. This is one of American poetry’s most resonant characterizations of the Romanticism’s conception of human inwardness as a spiritual channel for finding wisdom in communion with the outer world, with time, space, and infinity.

The 52 cantos of Song of Myself comprise perhaps Whitman’s most famous poem. Before proceeding, however, let’s pause on that title. Song of Myself?  What sort of colossal ego would choose such a narcissistic title and begin “I celebrate myself, and sing myself”?

The answer is, a democratically minded American mind which had adopted the Romantic conception of the self as a standard more authentic than social norms. And this, of course, is how many Americans think today, prioritizing their own viewpoints over “society’s” or over those of “the experts.”  Whitman represented the democratic spirit of a nation eager to shrug off the traditions of the old world and follow the banner of rugged individualism.

And it isn’t just egoism. In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson sees the “self” as a spiritual opening onto infinity. Whitman’s self lies within him and within everyone: “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Today, social media venues teem with thousands of voices singing of themselves under the assumption that their thoughts, behaviors and meals are worthy,

Walt Whitman. from Song of Myself  (1892).

1  I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loaf and invite my soul,
I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy. …


52  The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fiber your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

References

Emerson, R. W. (1841). “Self-Reliance.” In Essays, 1st Series.  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16643/16643-h/16643-h.htm#SELF-RELIANCE.

Hollyer, S. (1854). Walt Whitman. Steel engraving by Samuel Hollyer from a lost daguerreotype by Gabriel Harrison. Used as frontispiece in 1855 (1st) edition of Leaves of Grass.  Washington D.C.: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, https://www.loc.gov/item/2002710162/.

Loving, J.  (2005). Walt Whitman. In J. Parini, J. and P. W. Leininger (Ed.s), The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature. Oxford University Press.  https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195156539.001.0001/acref-9780195156539-e-0318.

Romanticism [Article]. (2015). In C. Baldick  (Ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford University Press.  http://www.oxfordreference.com.ezproxy.bethel.edu/view/10.1093/acref/9780198715443.001.0001/acref-9780198715443-e-131.

Shuter, W. (1798). Portrait of William Wordsworth. [Painting]. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Library.  https://library-artstor-org.ezproxy.bethel.edu/asset/SS35197_35197_19441122.

Whitman, W. (1891). “A Noiseless Patient Spider.” In Leaves of Grass.  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45473/a-noiseless-patient-spider.

Whitman, W. (1892). Song of Myself. In Leaves of Grass.   https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version.

Wordsworth, W. (1800). “The Tables Turned.” In Lyrical Ballads.  https://www.bartleby.com/333/494.html.

Wordsworth, W. (1800). Preface. Lyrical Ballads. London: N. Longman And O. Rees.  https://www.bartleby.com/39/36.html.

Wordsworth, William. (2009). [Article]. In Birch, D. (Ed.), The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford University Press.  http://www.oxfordreference.com.ezproxy.bethel.edu/view/10.1093/acref/9780192806871.001.0001/acref-9780192806871-e-8208.

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Encounters With the Arts: Readings for ARTC150 Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Mark Thorson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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