“what I see first of all in Romanticism is the effect of a profound change, not primarily in belief, but in the spatial projection of reality. This in turn leads to a different localizing of the various levels of that reality. The drunken boat: the revolutionary element in romanticism. Northrop Frye p. 5
---aristotelian thinking---connection to nature—the sublime
From a tumul of anguished doubts, new convictions, which could not be reduced to simple formulai, began to emerge-belief in the primacy of imagination, the potentialities of intuition, the importance of the emotions and emotional integrity, and, above all, the uniqueness and unique value of every human being in a constantly changing cosmos.
Romanticism Hugh Honour pg.21 1979 Harper & Row.
-aesthetics move to the forefront, mimesis replaced by expressiveness.
-after appropriation, which is a kind of mimesis, of romantic imagery i.e. animals in nature etc. we have a representation of dissolution. The mimetic romanticism is more a yearning or call to romantic modes of thought rather than a conjuring statement of them. This is because most of the imagery is either nostalgic old thrifty paintings or or mass produced, like clip art, or flattened like Ryan Mcguiness’.
1755 Dr. Johnson defines Romantick (sic) as:’resembling the tales or romances; wild…improbable; false…;fanciful; full of wild scenery.’
--romanticism as transcendental decorative painting as meditative mandala.
-transcendental pantheism
Blakes myth of Urizen the sky god is a fuller and more sophisticated version of the myth of Frankenstein. In Europe. W. blake.
Quotations from: Romanticism Reconsidered selected papers from the English institute
1963 Columbia University Press:
The Drunken Boat by Northrop Frye
“It is obvious that in pre Romantic poetry there is a strong affinity with the attitude that we have called sense. The poet, in all ages and cultures, prefers images to abstractions, the sensational to the conceptual. But the pre-Romantic structure of imagery belonged to a nature which was the work of God; the design in nature was, as Sir Thomas Browne calls it, the art of God; nature is thus an objective structure or system for the poet to follow.”
“Rousseau represents, and to some extent made, a revolutionary change in the modern attitude…in his assumption that civilization was a purely human artifact, something that man had made, could unmake, could subject to his own criticism, and was at all times entirely responsible for. Above all, it was something for which the only known model was in the human mind…The effect of such an assumption is twofold. First, it puts the arts in the center of civilization. The basis of civilization is now the creative power of man; its model is the human vision revealed in the arts. Second, this model, as well as the sources of creative power, are now located in the mind’s internal heaven, the external world being seen as a mirror reflecting and making visible what is within. Thus the ‘outside’ world, most of which is ‘up there,’ yields importance and priority to the inner world, in fact derives its poetic significance at least from it. ‘In looking at objects of Nature,’ says Coleridge in the Notebooks, ‘I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking for, a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists, than observing anything new.’… Hence the emphasis is not on what we have called sense, but on the constructive power of the mind, where reality is brought into being by experience…Romantic poets sought to defy external reality by creating a uniformity of tone and mood…Such a poetic technique is , psychologically, akin to magic, which also aims at bringing spiritual forces into reality through concentration on a certain type of experience.” P. 10,11
-characters become psychological projections and the setting a period in the past just recent enough to be re-created rather than empirically studied. P. 11,12
Keats : “Man should not dispute or assert but whisper results to his neighbor… and Humanity… would become a grand democracy of trees!” p. 13
Blake’s Vehicular Form- that which carries the message in metaphor usually: frequently it is an image of a boat being driven by a breeze or current. See Shelley’s Ode and the figure of the “correspondent breeze”.
-the myth typically is a story of a god who's character lays within the human as well as non-human worlds.( axis)
“I have remarked elsewhere that the romance,, in its most naive and primitive form, is an endless sequence of adventures, terminated only by the author’s death or disgust.” P.16
English Romanticism by M.H. Abrams from Romanticism Reconsidered
“the Romantic period was eminently an age obsessed with the fact of violent and inclusive change,” referencing Hazlitt p.28
“Old things seemed passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race.”
The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles, ed. Edward Dowden (Dublin, 1881), p. 52
M.H. p.31
"The formative age of Romantic poetry was clearly one of the apocalyptic expectation, or at least apocalyptic imaginings,” p. 37
It’s a common misconception that Romanticism is often described as a mode of escapism. The poets were obsessed with the realities of their era.
“ Whatever the form, the Romantic Bard is one “who present, past, and future sees”; so that in dealing with current affairs his procedure is often panoramic, his stage cosmic, his agents quasi-mythological, and his logic of events apocalyptic. Typically this mode of Romantic vision fuses history, politics, philosophy, and religion into one grand design, by asserting Providence-or some form of natural teleology-to operate in the seeming chaos of human history so as to effect from present evil a greater good…from which will emerge a new man on a new earth which is a restored paradise.” P.46
The Fate of pleasure by Lionel Trilling in Romanticism Reconsidered
“This we of our time can quite understand. We are repelled by the idea of an art that is consumer-directed and comfortable, let alone luxurious. Our typical experience of a work which will eventually have authority with us is to begin our relation to it at a conscious disadvantage, and to wrestle with until it consents to bless us. We express our high esteem for such a work by supposing that it judges us. And when it no longer does seem to judge us, or when it no longer baffles and resists us, when we begin to feel that we possess it, we discover that its power is diminished.” P. 89
Romanticism Re-Examined by Rene Wellek from Romanticism Reconsidered
Morse Peckham introduces “negative romanticism” despairing, nihilistic romanticism
Peckham influenced by Ernest Tuveson’s The Imagination as a Means of Grace: Locke and the Aesthetics of Romanticism (1960)
“Reading Peckham, one is tempted to give up the problem in despair. We might come to agree with Lovejoy or even with Valery, who warns us that it ‘is impossible to think seriously with words such as Classicism, Romanticism, Humanism, or Realism. One cannot get drunk or quench one’s thirst with labels on a bottle.’ But of course these terms are not labels: they have a range of meaning very different from Pabst Blue Ribbon or Liebfrauenmilch. Modern logicians tell us that all definitions are berbal, that they are ‘stipulated’ by the speaker. We certainly cannot prevent Communists from calling dictatorship ‘popular democracy,’ a baby from calling any strange man ‘daddy,’ or even Phckham from calling romanticism ‘Enlightenment.’ But ‘there is a sense’- I am quoting Wilbur Urban-‘in which the distinction between verbal and real definition is a valid one. There comes a point at which variation ceases to be merely inconvenient and unpragmatic; it becomes unintelligible. It leads to contadictio in adjecto, in which intrinsic incompatibility between subject and predicate destroys the meaning by an implicit denial.’
Urban quote from the intelligible world (New York, 1929), p. 124
P. 111, 112
German Romanticism operated more with dichotomies, thesis and antithesis
Max Deutschbein, in Das Wesen des Romantischen Coethen,(1921)
Aims at a phenomenological intuition of the essence of Romanticism by showing the agreement between English and German Romanticism in their concept and use of the synthetic imagination: the union of opposites, the finite and infinite, eternity and temporality, universality and individuality. The scheme serves the conclusion that English poetry translated German theory into practice,…this neglected little book has stressed one central and valid concept: the reconciling, synthetic imagination as the common denominator of Romanticism.” P. 113
Adolf Grimme, in Vom Wesen der Romantik Braunschweig, 1947 defines Romanticism as a breakthrough of what he calls “the vegetative strata of the soul” : the preconscious rather than the subconscious. The preconscious includes the imagination, which is raised to consciousness by Romanticism.” P. 117
Jesuit Philosopher Romano Guardini comes to a similar conclusion: Romanticism is ‘an upsurge of the unconscious and primitive.’p. 11 7
“Erscheinung und Wesen der Romantik,” in Romantik: Ein Zyklus Tubinger Vorlesungen, ed. Theodor Steinbuchel (Tubingen, 1948), pp. 237-49.
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