Romantic Literature
Gerald Lucas — Sat, 02/18/2006 - 13:30
Romantic Age, for if anything the artists of this era were individualists. Some were disillusioned by the empty promises of the French Revolution; most were disgusted with the mechanistic society they saw around them in their cities. They seemed to feel that the men before them had been too analytic, too dogmatic, too shackled to rules set up by formidable academies. Now it was time for self-expression, for a new emergence of the individual and his feelings. The following sources point to some of the directions this concern with self took.
The Man of Feeling
The paradoxical Frenchman, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), a writer, musician, and vagabond, was one of the greatest literary influences on the Romantics. In proclaiming the supremacy of the self in his autobiography, The Confessions, he gave rise to the subjective literature characteristic of the period — the lyric poem and the spiritual auto-biography.
From Germany, one of the first centers of the Romantic movement, came Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), a poet, critic, dramatist, scientist, and novelist. During Germany’s “Sturm und Drang” (Storm and Stress) literary movement, Romanticism was at its most emotional and sentimental. It was Goethe’s Werther who exemplifies one common romantic pose — the sensitive, self-pitying young man who constantly despairs over his misfortunes in life and most especially in love.
The Search for the Lost Past and the Exotic
The same Romantic age which exalted the common man, the child, the forces of nature, also found its subject in the remote and the mysterious. The world of the past, particularly of Ancient Greece and of the Middle Ages, was a prime source for many poems and stories. Yet typically, not even in the splendor of the lost past did the romantic hero find more than fleeting happiness and love, like John Keats’ “La Belle Dame sans Merci” and François-René de Chateaubriand’s René.
Goethe’s Faust, too, seeks to transcend the human condition. He is the educated, isolated romantic hero whose salvation lies at the end of his journey with Mephistopheles.
Nature Versus City Life
In Nature, the Romantic artist found the beauty that was lacking in the ugliness of the city — an ugliness which he felt was repugnant not only to man’s sight, but to his soul as well. Yet Nature at her best represents more than simply a serene contrast to the city. She is the mystery that “rolls through all things,” the “still, sad music of humanity,” and in her the poet finds the essence of life and growth: see William Blake’s “London” and William Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tinturn Abbey.”
The Romantic Manifestos
In an age of technical endeavor, the Romantics called attention to the individual — his feelings, his experiences, his imagination. It is not unusual, then, that poetry would be at the heart of romantic literature. Wordsworth and Coleridge describe poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” But convincing men that the poet’s feelings and creative imagination were “at once the centre and circumference of all knowledge” was not an easy task. Excerpts from Shelley and Wordsworth attempt to define and defend the function of the poet and his poetry against the society described by Thomas Carlyle. While not of a strictly romantic temperament, Carlyle, British historian and social critic, did align himself with the Romantics in lashing out against the materialism and mechanism in society in his “Signs of the Times.”