the Romantic Theory of the Work of Art Is the Theory of Its Form
Introduction to Romanticism
Romanticism has very little to do with things popularly idea of as "romantic," although love may occasionally be the subject field of Romantic art. Rather, it is an international artistic and philosophical motion that redefined the central means in which people in Western cultures thought about themselves and about their globe. Historical Considerations
It is one of the curiosities of literary history that the strongholds of the Romantic Motion were England and Germany, not the countries of the romance languages themselves. Thus it is from the historians of English and German literature that we inherit the convenient set of last dates for the Romantic period, beginning in 1798, the year of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge and of the composition of Hymns to the Dark past Novalis, and ending in 1832, the year which marked the deaths of both Sir Walter Scott and Goethe. Nonetheless, as an international movement affecting all the arts, Romanticism begins at least in the 1770's and continues into the second half of the nineteenth century, later for American literature than for European, and later in some of the arts, like music and painting, than in literature. This extended chronological spectrum (1770-1870) besides permits recognition as Romantic the verse of Robert Burns and William Blake in England, the early on writings of Goethe and Schiller in Germany, and the great menstruation of influence for Rousseau'due south writings throughout Europe. The early Romantic period thus coincides with what is often called the "age of revolutions"--including, of course, the American (1776) and the French (1789) revolutions--an age of upheavals in political, economic, and social traditions, the historic period which witnessed the initial transformations of the Industrial Revolution. A revolutionary free energy was also at the core of Romanticism, which quite consciously set out to transform not only the theory and exercise of verse (and all fine art), simply the very way nosotros perceive the world. Some of its major precepts have survived into the twentieth century and still impact our contemporary flow.
Imagination
The imagination was elevated to a position as the supreme faculty of the mind. This contrasted distinctly with the traditional arguments for the supremacy of reason. The Romantics tended to define and to present the imagination equally our ultimate "shaping" or creative power, the estimate man equivalent of the creative powers of nature or even deity. It is dynamic, an active, rather than passive power, with many functions. Imagination is the primary faculty for creating all fine art. On a broader calibration, it is also the faculty that helps humans to found reality, for (as Wordsworth suggested), we not only perceive the world around us, but also in part create information technology. Uniting both reason and feeling (Coleridge described information technology with the paradoxical phrase, "intellectual intuition"), imagination is extolled as the ultimate synthesizing faculty, enabling humans to reconcile differences and opposites in the globe of appearance. The reconciliation of opposites is a primal ideal for the Romantics. Finally, imagination is inextricably bound upwards with the other two major concepts, for it is presumed to exist the kinesthesia which enables u.s. to "read" nature as a system of symbols.
Nature
"Nature" meant many things to the Romantics. As suggested above, it was often presented as itself a work of art, constructed by a divine imagination, in emblematic linguistic communication. For instance, throughout "Song of Myself," Whitman makes a practice of presenting commonplace items in nature--"ants," "heap'd stones," and "poke-weed"--every bit containing divine elements, and he refers to the "grass" as a natural "hieroglyphic," "the handkerchief of the Lord." While detail perspectives with regard to nature varied considerably--nature equally a healing power, nature as a source of discipline and image, nature equally a refuge from the artificial constructs of civilization, including constructed language--the prevailing views accorded nature the status of an organically unified whole. Information technology was viewed as "organic," rather than, as in the scientific or rationalist view, as 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. At the same time, Romantics gave greater attention both to describing natural phenomena accurately and to capturing "sensuous nuance"--and this is as true of Romantic landscape painting as of Romantic nature verse. Accurateness of observation, however, was not sought for its own sake. Romantic nature poetry is essentially a poetry of meditation. Symbolism and Myth
Symbolism and myth were given nifty prominence in the Romantic formulation of art. In the Romantic view, symbols were the man artful 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 take been the desire to limited the "inexpressible"--the infinite--through the available resources of language that led to symbol at one level and myth (as symbolic narrative) at some other. Other Concepts: Emotion, Lyric Poetry, and the Cocky
Other aspects of Romanticism were intertwined with the above 3 concepts. Emphasis on the activity of the imagination was accompanied by greater emphasis on the importance of intuition, instincts, and feelings, and Romantics generally chosen for greater attending to the emotions every bit a necessary supplement to purely logical reason. When this emphasis was applied to the creation of poetry, a very of import shift of focus occurred. Wordsworth's definition of all skillful 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 dorsum 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 and then much equally a mirror of the external world, but as a source of illumination of the earth within. Among other things, this led to a prominence for first-person lyric poesy never accorded it in any previous period. The "poetic speaker" became less a persona and more the directly person of the poet. Wordsworth'due south 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 cocky) as field of study for an "epic" enterprise made upwards of lyric components. Confessional prose narratives such as Goethe'due south Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and Chateaubriand's Rene (1801), as well as bearded autobiographical verse narratives such as Byron'southward Childe Harold (1818), are related phenomena. The interior journey and the development of the cocky recurred everywhere as subject cloth for the Romantic creative person. The artist-equally-hero is a specifically Romantic type. Contrasts With Neoclassicism
Consequently, the Romantics sought to define their goals through systematic contrast with the norms of "Versailles neoclassicism." In their critical manifestoes--the 1800 "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads, the disquisitional studies of the Schlegel brothers in Federal republic of germany, the later statements of Victor Hugo in France, and of Hawthorne, Poe, and Whitman in the Usa--they cocky-consciously asserted their differences from the previous age (the literary "ancien government"), and declared their freedom from the mechanical "rules." Certain special features of Romanticism may still be highlighted by this contrast. We accept already noted two major differences: the replacement of reason by the imagination for primary place amid the human faculties and the shift from a mimetic to an expressive orientation for poesy, and indeed all literature. In add-on, neoclassicism had prescribed for art the idea that the general or universal characteristics of human behavior were more suitable bailiwick matter than the specially private manifestations of human activity. From at to the lowest degree the opening argument of Rousseau'southward Confessions, first published in 1781--"I am non fabricated similar anyone I accept seen; I dare believe that I am non fabricated like anyone in beingness. If I am non superior, at least I am dissimilar."--this view was challenged.
Individualism: The Romantic Hero
The Romantics asserted the importance of the individual, the unique, even the eccentric. Consequently they opposed the grapheme typology of neoclassical drama. In another way, of form, 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 fifty-fifty Hester Prynne, and in that location was Faust, who wins salvation in Goethe'due south corking drama for the very reasons--his characteristic striving for the unattainable beyond the morally permitted and his insatiable thirst for action--that earlier had been viewed as the components of his tragic sin. (It was in fact Shelley'south opinion that Satan, in his noble defiance, was the existent hero of Milton'south Paradise Lost.) In mode, the Romantics preferred boldness over the preceding age's want for restraint, maximum suggestiveness over the neoclassical ideal of clarity, free experimentation over the "rules" of limerick, genre, and decorum, and they promoted the conception of the artist as "inspired" creator over that of the creative person as "maker" or technical master. Although in both Frg and England there was continued interest in the ancient classics, for the most part the Romantics centrolineal themselves with the very periods of literature that the neoclassicists had dismissed, the Heart 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 flow, the Romantics generally rejected absolute systems, whether of philosophy or religion, in favor of the idea that each person (and humankind collectively) must create the arrangement past which to live.
The Everyday and the Exotic
The mental attitude of many of the Romantics to the everyday, social world around them was complex. Information technology is true that they advanced certain realistic techniques, such every bit the use of "local color" (through down-to-earth characters, like Wordsworth's rustics, or through everyday language, as in Emily Bronte'south northern dialects or Whitman's colloquialisms, or through popular literary forms, such equally folk narratives). Yet social realism was usually subordinate to imaginative suggestion, and what was almost important were the ideals suggested past the above examples, simplicity mayhap, or innocence. Before, the 18th-century cult of the noble fell had promoted like ideals, just now artists frequently turned for their symbols to domestic rather than exotic sources--to folk legends and older, "unsophisticated" art forms, such as the ballad, to gimmicky land folk who used "the linguistic communication of commen men," not an artificial "poetic diction," and to children (for the kickoff time presented equally individuals, and often idealized equally sources of greater wisdom than adults). Simultaneously, as opposed to everyday subjects, various forms of the exotic in time and/or place also gained favor, for the Romantics were also fascinated with realms of existence that were, past 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 labors co-ordinate to two subject areas, the natural and the supernatural: Wordsworth would endeavor to exhibit the novelty in what was all too familiar, while Coleridge would attempt to show in the supernatural what was psychologically real, both aiming to dislodge vision from the "sluggishness of custom." The concept of the beautiful soul in an ugly trunk, equally characterized in Victor Hugo'south Hunchback of Notre Dame and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, is another variant of the paradoxical combination.
The Romantic Artist in Order
In another way also, the Romantics were ambivalent toward the "real" social earth around them. They were often politically and socially involved, only at the same time they began to distance themselves from the public. Equally noted before, loftier Romantic artists interpreted things through their ain emotions, and these emotions included social and political consciousness--as one would expect in a period of revolution, one that reacted and then strongly to oppression and injustice in the world. So artists sometimes took public stands, or wrote works with socially or politically oriented bailiwick matter. Nonetheless at the same fourth dimension, another trend began to sally, equally 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 heart class a bailiwick of intense interest, but likewise sometimes of horror. ("Nothing succeeds similar excess," wrote Oscar Wilde, who, as a fractional 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. Withal a significant Romantic theme became the contrast between artist and heart-course "Philistine." Unfortunately, in many ways, this distance between artist and public remains with us today. Spread of the Romantic Spirit
Finally, it should be noted that the revolutionary energy underlying the Romantic Movement affected not merely literature, but all of the arts--from music (consider the rise of Romantic opera) to painting, from sculpture to compages. Its accomplish was also geographically significant, spreading every bit it did eastward to Russia, and west to America. For example, in America, the great landscape painters, peculiarly 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. Recent Developments
Some critics have believed that the 2 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 non this is then, it is clear that Romanticism transformed Western civilisation in many ways that survive into our own times. It is only very recently that any really pregnant turning away from Romantic paradigms has begun to take place, and even that turning away has taken identify in a dramatic, typically Romantic way. Today a number of literary theorists have chosen into question ii major Romantic perceptions: that the literary text is a split up, individuated, living "organism"; and that the artist is a fiercely independent genius who creates original works of art. In electric current theory, the dissever, "living" piece of work has been dissolved into a bounding main of "intertextuality," derived from and part of a network or "archive" of other texts--the many unlike kinds of discourse that are part of any civilisation. 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 ability structures. Information technology is an irony of history, yet, 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.
Adapted from A Guide to the Study of Literature: A Companion Text for Cadre Studies 6, Landmarks of Literature, ©English Department, Brooklyn Higher.
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