Romanticism

Romanticism has very little to do with things popularly thought of as "romantic," such as love.  It is an artistic and intellectual movement originating in Europe in the 18th century. Originally, 'romanticism' referred to the characteristics of extravagant literary romances. But in the 18th century the term came to designate a new kind of exotic landscape, which evoked feelings of pleasant melancholy.  The term Romantic as a designation for a school of literature opposed to that which formed the basis of a classical education was first used by the German critic Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829) at the beginning of the 19th century.

From Germany, this meaning was carried to England and France. From the start romanticism was characterized by an increased interest in nature in which a writer or artist expresses emotion and imagination.  This was a rebellion against traditional social rules and conventions, which said creativity should be based only on reason.  Romanticism redefined the fundamental ways in which people in Western cultures thought about themselves and about their world. Romantics saw imagination, not reason, as the supreme function of the mind. This contrasted with the traditional arguments for the importance of applying only reason to understand nature. They used imagination as the ultimate human power to create active views and attitudes to the environment.

These views and attitudes were therefore inevitably tied to particular places.  Places said to have a strong "sense of place" have a strong identity and character that is deeply felt by local inhabitants and by many visitors. Sense of place is a social phenomenon that exists independently of any one individual's perceptions or experiences, yet is dependent on human engagement for its existence. Such a feeling may be derived from the natural imaginative environment, but is more often made up of a mix of natural and cultural features in the landscape, and generally includes the people who occupy the place. Place is therefore as strongly bound up with architecture, and land uses as it is with natural history. The sense of place may be strongly enhanced by it being written about by poets, novelists and historians, or portrayed in art or music.  More recently, modes of codification aimed at protecting, preserving and enhancing a sense of place, have been widely adopted as the basis of making conservation management plans for places that have a universal appeal to the imagination, and therefore felt to be of value (such as the designations of "National Nature Reserve", "World Heritage Site", the English "Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty" and the American "National Historic Landmark" designation).

Imagination is, of course, the primary faculty for creating all art. On a broader scale, it is also the mental activity that helps humans to define their personal version of reality. It enables us to become aware of the world around us, and also to create it and our selfhood in response to emotional feelings. In fact, romantics unite both reason and feeling through imagination to make a personal knowledge system and also reconcile differences and opposites in the world of appearance. From time immemorial, knowledge has been preserved in symbols, usually as a secret wisdom handed down from person to person and from age to age. Specifically, imagination is presumed to be the faculty which enables us to "read" nature romantically as a system of symbols. 

Friedrich Nietzsche writing at the end of the 19th century saw natural history  as a war against fear and superstition.  Because of this importance he thought it should be narrated "in such a way that everyone who hears it is irresistibly inspired to strive after spiritual and bodily health and vigour," He praised the English who have '...taken admirable steps in the direction of that ideal ... the reason is that they [natural history books] are written by their most distinguished scholars - whole, complete and fulfilling natures."  This English encapsulation of nature for everyman blends the work of romantic poets such as Clare, Wordsworth, Hughes and Heaney with descriptive accounts of field naturalists in diaries and monographs.

The modern love of nature began as an integral part of the great modern movement toward freedom and social equality, which has led to the removal of many oppressive hierarchies. Nature conservation comes from a worldview of the values of liberal democracy. This aspect of 19th century romanticism acknowledges a moral obligation beyond the human species. Fighting to save the great whales, the tropical rain forests, or even a single acre of old farm pasture has been a logical outcome of that movement.  It now incorporates all efforts to decrease the human footprint on the planet and to use resources more justly and responsibly. The aim is to achieve a society where nature will become more than a ruthlessly exploited or even prudently managed economic resource and granted a higher value incorporating emotional, spiritual, and aesthetic responses. In this respect, it limits the politics of the earth to environmental management and sustainability as an object of hope and desire.

There are however, conservative forces that would take us back to biblical fundamentalism or other religious orthodoxies of the past. For these orthodox believers a turn to nature for spiritual inspiration represents a step toward paganism.  These beliefs are coupled with a view that Earth exists to serve the material demands of Homo sapiens, regardless of the ecological consequences an overpopulated and over-consuming human race which is threatening the greatest loss of biodiversity since the extinction of dinosaurs. The question is, can contact with nature inspire people to a higher ethic, a greater decency? Or is the human species by and large incapable of reverence, restraint, generosity, or vision?

Environmental management: art or science

The word art is derived from the Latin ars, denoting skill in execution, taken from the Greek, apeir, conveying like meaning. It involves the idea of doing, of accomplishing in a situation where every factor affecting the outcome is not known. "The employment of means to accomplish some desired end: the application of knowledge or power to practical purposes {Ibid). Now, this meaning, unquestionably, is to a certain degree, the meaning of science, that is, operative science, science in practice. Theoretically, there is a wide difference in the terms. Science implies speculative principles. Science comes from the Latin scire, to know, scientia, knowledge. Science is in point of form, the character of logical perfection and, in point of matter, the character of real truth." (Sir Wm. Hamilton.) "The comprehension and understanding of truth or facts."(Dryden.) "Specifically, science is knowledge duly arranged, and referred to general truths and principles on which it is founded, and from which it is derived.

Science is literally knowledge, but more usually denotes a systematic and orderly arrangement of knowledge. Science inquires for the sake of knowledge, art for the sake of production." (Webster.) "In science, scimus ut sciamns (we know that we may know), while in art, scimus ut ftrodu-camus, (we know that we may produce)."(Kars-lake.) Does environmental management embrace in any sense the two?  Science is either pure or applied. The former is purely speculative and apart from application; the latter is, speculative principles carried out in practice. The one is simply rules, principles and deductions; the latter, these in operation. We see, then, how science belongs to the domain of art; that is to say, science in its practical working is art. Environmental management is science in the sense of being "knowledge duly arranged, and referred to general truths and principles, on which it is founded: systematic and orderly arrangement of knowledge". Environmental management is art in the sense of these principles and the fact that this knowledge is being utilized where not all factors affecting the outcome are known or can be precisely controlled. In this it has much in common with agriculture and gardening.

 History

The strongholds of the early 'Romantic Movement' were England and Germany and it is from the historians of English and German literature that we inherit a convenient set of dates for the Romantic Period.  Beginning in 1798, the year of the first edition of 'Lyrical Ballads' by the poets Wordsworth and Coleridge and of the composition of 'Hymns to the Night' by the German writer Novalis, it ends in 1832, the year which marked the deaths of both Sir Walter Scott and Goethe. However, as an international movement affecting all the arts, Romanticism begins with visual art in the 1770's and continues strongly with literature into the second half of the nineteenth century. This extended time scale (1770-1870) includes as Romantic the poetry of Robert Burns and William Blake in England, the early writings of Goethe and Schiller in Germany, and the period of influence for Rousseau's writings throughout Europe.

The early Romantic period therefore coincides with what is often called the "age of revolutions".  This includes the American (1776) and the French (1789) revolutions in an age of upheavals in political, economic, and social traditions.  This was an age which witnessed the initial transformations of the Industrial Revolution. Revolution was also at the core of Romanticism, which transformed not only the theory and practice of poetry and in fact, all art, but the very way we perceive the world. Because the expression Romanticism is a phenomenon of immense scope, embracing as it does, literature, politics,  history, philosophy and the arts in general, there has never been much agreement and much confusion as to what the word means. It has, in fact, been used in so many different ways that some scholars have argued that the best thing we could do with the expression is to abandon it once and for all. However, the phenomenon of Romanticism would not become less complex by simply throwing away its label of convenience.  In particular, an all-embracing term is required to classify all expressions of imaginative thought about the environment to set against purely material interpretations. Some of romanticism's principles have survived into the twentyfirst century and affect our thinking about attitudes and actions towards ecology and climate change. In this connection, environmentalism comes in two primary categories: the practical and the romantic.  It is in the latter sense that we may propose that 'poetry can change the world'.

Changing the world is clearly the domain of practical environmentalism. This is the world in which scientifically defined environmental standards are established and applied in a multitude of discrete circumstances, from petrol formulas that reduce pollution, to local land-use disputes. Two realities govern that world: first, uncertainty over cause and effect in environmental management.  For example, which factors cause what outcomes in complex ecosystems? And which measures will be most cost-effective in conserving a given species?.  The second reality is that there is a need to make logical scientifically defined trade-offs between environmental quality and other social goods. As a result, the modus operandi of practical environmentalism is negotiation and compromise among contending groups, interests, values, and levels of government.

Romantic environmentalism, on the other hand, is a strong and uncompromising imaginative/emotional attitude to environment that holds that culturally-defined environmental values should always or almost always trump other values, especially those associated with economic development and growth. The movement has strong roots in American intellectual and political history and many accomplishments to its credit.  For example, without the influence of the romantic engineer/naturalist John Muir, the Yosemite Valley National Park might today be known as the San Francisco Reservoir.

Romantic environmentalism has many adherents today. Some are people who are strongly attached to the natural world and believe that civilization grows distant from nature at its mortal peril. Others adopt the uncompromising posture towards the forces of development and are always ready to mount a strong counter attack. Often that position leads to preposterous or risible statements that alienate many people from environmental politics. On April 6, 2002, for example, the Des Moines Register quoted Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who leads the Riverkeepers Alliance, as saying that "large-scale pig producers (river polluters) are a greater threat to the United States and U.S. democracy than Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network."

Although the following characteristics of Romanticism suggest something of its nature, they are far from exhaustive. The phenomenon is too diverse and too contradictory to admit of an easy definition. As Lovejoy suggested, "typical manifestations of the spiritual essence of Romanticism have been variously conceived to be a passion for moonlight, for red waistcoats, for Gothic churches . . . for talking exclusively about oneself, for hero-worship, for losing oneself in an ecstatic contemplation of nature."

Nature

"Nature" meant many things to the Romantics. As suggested above, it was often presented as itself being a work of art, constructed by a divine imagination, in emblematic language. For example, throughout "Song of Myself," Walt Whitman makes a practice of presenting commonplace items in nature--"ants," "heap'd stones," and "poke-weed"--as containing divine elements, and he refers to the "grass" as a natural "hieroglyphic," "the handkerchief of the Lord." While particular perspectives with regard to nature varied considerably

* nature as a healing power,

* nature as a source of subject and image,

* nature as a refuge from the artificial constructs of civilization.

The prevailing views accorded nature the status of an organically unified whole. It was viewed as "organic," rather than, as in the scientific or rationalist view, a system of "mechanical" laws, for Romanticism displaced the rationalist view of the universe as a machine (e.g., the deistic image of a clock) with the analogue of an "organic" image, a living tree or mankind itself. The model is an unpredictable system with unknown elements responding to negative and positive feedback from its own activities.  At the same time, Romantics gave greater attention both to describing natural phenomena accurately and to capturing "sensuous nuance".  This is as true of Romantic landscape painting as of Romantic nature poetry. Accuracy of observation, however, was not sought for its own sake. Romantic imagery is essentially the language of meditation.

Poetry and science in the 1790s had a common aim in wanting to discover the vital powers that animated mind, matter, man, and nature.  Poets would give new insight into human nature; men of science would reveal the processes of physical nature. Their methods were different, their goal the same. Coleridge wrote in his poem 'The Aeolian Harp'

'The one Life within us and abroad, Which meets all motion and becomes its soul.'

Together poets and scientists would discover the forces that animated the 'one life' within us and without us, revealing the dynamic interplay of creative powers that comprise humankind and the world within which it was integrated physically and mentally. This was the project of Romantic science as conceived by poets including Shelley and Erasmus Darwin and by experimentalists including Joseph Priestley and Humphry Davy. It was a project that changed both literature and science, one that spawned new disciplines and genres, one that created symbols that haunt us still. But it was also a project that fell foul of opposition from conservatives who saw its ambitions as a threat to the established order.

This oneness of art and science fell apart quite early in the 19th century. The fracture line was marked in 1833 by Coleridge who proposed that a new name was needed for those who pursued experimental science.  He called them scientists. He made his proposal because he felt these new researchers, had abandoned the quest to find the vital powers, settling for more pragmatic aims like inventing processes to aid industry. Such men did not deserve the name 'philosopher'. This split between poets and scientists marked the beginning of an era we still live in, an era in which science operates very differently from literature and in which scientists and poets are poles apart.

But now in the contemporary world. Romantic science has re-emerged with the aim of maintaining planet Earth in a physico/chemical state fit for humanity with a reverence for all living things.  This project was first presented as 'Rescue Mission Planet Earth' by a group of  young people, sponsored by the UN in the aftermath of the Rio Environment Summit.  Known as the 'children's Agenda 21 it embellished the main strategic objectives of the world community for a sustainable future with poems and pictures.  These illustrations were meant to touch and inspire youth of the world to form a network of concerted action.

Wordsworth

For English literature, the most significant expression of a Romantic commitment to emotion occurs in Wordsworth's preface to the second edition of the 'Lyrical Ballads (1800)', where he maintains that "all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." Although Wordsworth qualifies this assertion by suggesting that the poet is a reflective man who recollects his emotion "in tranquility," the emphasis on spontaneity, on feeling, and the use of the term 'overflow' mark sharp diversions from the earlier ideals of judgment and restraint.

Searching for a fresh source of this spontaneous feeling, Wordsworth rejects the Neoclassic idea of the appropriate subjects for serious verse and turns to the simplicities of rustic life "because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature." That interaction with nature has for many of the Romantic poets mystical overtones. Nature is apprehended by them not only as an exemplar and source of vivid physical beauty but as a manifestation of spirit in the universe as well. In Tintern Abbey Wordsworth suggests that nature has gratified his physical being, excited his emotions, and ultimately allowed him "a sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused," of a spiritual force immanent not only in the forms of nature but "in the mind of man." Though not necessarily in the same terms, a similar connection between the world of nature and the world of the spirit is also made by Blake, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley.

Symbolism and Myth

Symbolism and myth were given great prominence in the Romantic conception of art. Symbolism is the use of a person, an object, a place, or an idea to represent it self and something beyond itself at the same time. Two recognizable examples of symbolism are the Stars and Stripes on the flag; this is the symbol for the United States of America. Another well-known symbol is skull and crossbones, which we all know represent something poisonous. Symbolism is often used in all forms of literature and poetry. Many use it because it helps the writer to get their expressions out more clearly.  In the Romantic view, symbols were the human aesthetic correlatives of nature's emblematic language. They were valued too because they could simultaneously suggest many things, and were thus thought superior to the one-to-one communications of allegory. Partly, it may have been the desire to express the "inexpressible", the infinite, through the available resources of language that led to symbol at one level and myth (as symbolic narrative) at another.

 Other Concepts: Emotion, Lyric Poetry, and the Self

Other aspects of Romanticism were intertwined with the above three concepts. Emphasis on the activity of the imagination was accompanied by greater emphasis on the importance of intuition, instincts, and feelings, and Romantics generally called for greater attention to the emotions as a necessary supplement to purely logical reason. When this emphasis was applied to the creation of poetry, a very important shift of focus occurred. Wordsworth's definition of all good poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" marks a turning point in literary history. By locating the ultimate source of poetry in the individual artist, the tradition, stretching back to the ancients, of valuing art primarily for its ability to imitate human life (that is, for its mimetic qualities) was reversed. In Romantic theory, art was valuable not so much as a mirror of the external world, but as a source of illumination of the world within. Among other things, this led to a prominence for first-person lyric poetry never accorded it in any previous period. The "poetic speaker" became less a persona and more the direct person of the poet. Wordsworth's Prelude and Whitman's "Song of Myself" are both paradigms of successful experiments to take the growth of the poet's mind (the development of self) as subject for an "epic" enterprise made up of lyric components. The interior journey and the development of the self recurred everywhere as subject material for the Romantic artist. The artist-as-hero is a specifically Romantic type.

 Individualism: The Romantic Hero

The Romantics asserted the importance of the individual, the unique, even the eccentric. Consequently they opposed the character typology of neoclassical drama. Consequently, the Romantics sought to define their goals through systematic contrast with the norms of "Versailles neoclassicism." In their critical manifestoes such as the 1800 "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads, the critical studies of the Schlegel brothers in Germany, the later statements of Victor Hugo in France, and of Hawthorne, Poe, and Whitman in the United States.  They self-consciously asserted their differences from the previous age (the literary "ancien regime"), and declared their freedom from the mechanical "rules." Certain special features of Romanticism may still be highlighted by this contrast. We have already noted two major differences: the replacement of reason by the imagination for primary place among the human faculties and the shift from a mimetic to an expressive orientation for poetry, and indeed all literature. In addition, neoclassicism had prescribed for art the idea that the general or universal characteristics of human behaviour were more suitable subject matter than the peculiarly individual manifestations of human activity. From at least the opening statement of Rousseau's Confessions, first published in 1781--"I am not made like anyone I have seen; I dare believe that I am not made like anyone in existence. If I am not superior, at least I am different."--this view was challenged.

In another way, Romanticism created its own literary types. The hero-artist has already been mentioned; there were also heaven-storming types from Prometheus to Captain Ahab, outcasts from Cain to the Ancient Mariner and even Hester Prynne, and there was Faust, who wins salvation in Goethe's great drama for the very reason, his characteristic striving for the unattainable beyond the morally permitted and his insatiable thirst for activit, that earlier had been viewed as the components of his tragic sin. It was in fact Shelley's opinion that Satan, in his noble defiance, was the real hero of Milton's Paradise Lost.

In style, the Romantics preferred boldness over the preceding age's desire for restraint, maximum suggestiveness over the neoclassical ideal of clarity, free experimentation over the "rules" of composition, genre, and decorum, and they promoted the conception of the artist as "inspired" creator over that of the artist as "maker" or technical master. Although in both Germany and England there was continued interest in the ancient classics, for the most part the Romantics allied themselves with the very periods of literature that the neoclassicists had dismissed, the Middle Ages and the Baroque, and they embraced the writer whom Voltaire had called a barbarian, Shakespeare. Although interest in religion and in the powers of faith were prominent during the Romantic period, the Romantics generally rejected absolute systems, whether of philosophy or religion, in favour of the idea that each person (and humankind collectively) must create the system by which to live.

The 'Everyday and the Exotic'

The attitude of many of the Romantics to the everyday, social world around them was complex. It is true that they advanced certain realistic techniques, such as the use of "local colour".  This was presented through down-to-earth characters, like Wordsworth's rustics, or through everyday language, as in Emily Bronte's northern dialects or Whitman's colloquialisms, or through popular literary forms, such as folk narratives. Yet social realism was usually subordinate to imaginative suggestion, and what was most important were the ideals suggested by the above examples, simplicity perhaps, or innocence. Earlier, the 18th-century cult of the noble savage had promoted similar ideals, but now artists often turned for their symbols to domestic rather than exotic sources--to folk legends and older, "unsophisticated" art forms, such as the ballad, to contemporary country folk who used "the language of common men," not an artificial "poetic diction," and to children (for the first time presented as individuals, and often idealized as sources of greater wisdom than adults).

Simultaneously, as opposed to everyday subjects, various forms of the exotic in time and/or place also gained favour, for the Romantics were also fascinated with realms of existence that were, by definition, prior to or opposed to the ordered conceptions of "objective" reason. Often, both the everyday and the exotic appeared together in paradoxical combinations. In the Lyrical Ballads, for example, Wordsworth and Coleridge agreed to divide their labours according to two subject areas, the natural and the supernatural: Wordsworth would try to exhibit the novelty in what was all too familiar, while Coleridge would try to show in the supernatural what was psychologically real, both aiming to dislodge vision from the "lethargy of custom." The concept of the beautiful soul in an ugly body, as characterized in Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, is another variant of the paradoxical combination.

The Romantic Artist in Society

Romantics were ambivalent toward the "real" social world around them. They were often politically and socially involved, but at the same time they began to distance themselves from the public. As noted earlier, high Romantic artists interpreted things through their own emotions, and these emotions included social and political consciousness--as one would expect in a period of revolution, one that reacted so strongly to oppression and injustice in the world. So artists sometimes took public stands, or wrote works with socially or politically oriented subject matter. Yet at the same time, another trend began to emerge, as they withdrew more and more from what they saw as the confining boundaries of bourgeois life. In their private lives, they often asserted their individuality and differences in ways that were to the middle class a subject of intense interest, but also sometimes of horror. "Nothing succeeds like excess," wrote Oscar Wilde, who, as a partial inheritor of Romantic tendencies, seemed to enjoy shocking the bourgeois, both in his literary and life styles. Thus the gulf between "odd" artists and their sometimes shocked, often uncomprehending audience began to widen. Some artists may have experienced ambivalence about this situation--it was earlier pointed out how Emily Dickinson seemed to regret that her "letters" to the world would go unanswered. Yet a significant Romantic theme became the contrast between artist and middle-class "Philistine." Unfortunately, in many ways, this distance between artist and public remains with us today.

Finally, it should be noted that the revolutionary energy underlying the Romantic Movement affected not just literature, but all of the arts, from music (Romantic opera) to painting, from sculpture to architecture. Its reach was also geographically significant, spreading as it did eastward to Russia, and westward to America. For example, in America, the great landscape painters, particularly those of the "Hudson River School," and the Utopian social colonies that thrived in the 19th century, are manifestations of the Romantic spirit on this side of the Atlantic.

Natural goodness

One of the fundamentals of Romanticism is the belief in the natural goodness of man, the idea that man in a state of nature would behave well but is hindered by civilization.  Rousseau said that "man is born free and everywhere he is in chains". The "savage" is noble, childhood is good and the emotions inspired by both beliefs causes the heart to soar. On the contrary, urban life and the commitment to "getting and spending," generates a fear and distrust of the world. If man is inherently sinful, reason must restrain his passions, but if he is naturally good, then in an appropriate environment, his emotions can be trusted.

The idea of man's natural goodness and the stress on emotion also contributed to the development of Romantic individualism, that is, the belief that what is special in a man is to be valued over what is representative (the latter oftentimes connected with the conventions imposed on man by "civilized society." If a man may properly express his unique emotional self because its essence is good, he is also likely to assume also that its conflicts and corruptions are a matter of great import and a source of fascination to himself and others. So, the Romantic delights in self-analysis. Both William Wordsworth (in The Prelude) and Lord Byron (in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage), poets very different from one another, felt the need to write lengthy poems of self-dramatization. The self that Byron dramatized, a projection not identical with his own personality, was especially dear to the Romantic mind: the outcast wanderer, heroic by accursed, often on some desperate quest, in the tradition of Cain or the Flying Dutchman. S. T. Coleridge's Mariner and Herman Melville's Ahab are similar Romantic pilgrims.

Recent Developments

Some critics have believed that the two identifiable movements that followed Romanticism, Symbolism and Realism, were separate developments of the opposites which Romanticism itself had managed, at its best, to unify and to reconcile. Whether or not this is so, it is clear that Romanticism transformed Western culture in many ways that survive into our own times. It is only very recently that any really significant turning away from Romantic paradigms has begun to take place, and even that turning away has taken place in a dramatic, typically Romantic way.

Today a number of literary theorists have called into question two major Romantic perceptions: that the literary text is a separate, individuated, living "organism"; and that the artist is a fiercely independent genius who creates original works of art. In current theory, the separate, "living" work has been dissolved into the concept of "intertextuality," derived from and part of a network or "archive" of other texts which define the many different kinds of discourse that are part of any culture. In this view, too, the independently sovereign artist has been demoted from a heroic, consciously creative agent, to a collective "voice," more controlled than controlling, the intersection of other voices, other texts, ultimately dependent upon possibilities dictated by language systems, conventions, and institutionalized power structures. It is an irony of history, however, that the explosive appearance on the scene of these subversive ideas, delivered in what seemed to the establishment to be radical manifestoes, and written by linguistically powerful individuals, has recapitulated the revolutionary spirit and events of Romanticism itself.

http://www.sauer-thompson.com/junkforcode/archives/2008/06/romantic-curren.html

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