Daniel Kontorovich

Ways of Thinking – Romanticism

1. The Romantic way of thought was created as a reaction against the excessive rationalism

and intellectualism of the Enlightenment, specifically the neo-Classicism of the late 18th

century, favouring emotion and imagination over the primacy of reason. The rise of science

and technology in the 18th century as a result of Isaac Newton’s extremely influential

movement of newtonianism had restricted humanity and its surrounding world to only a

few concrete principles. This was leading to a loss of creativity and spontaneity as the

evidence-based search for truth overcame the importance of the limitless imagination and

consequently humanity began to part from raw feeling and expression. Romanticism

therefore attempted to reaffirm the innate sense of irrationality within society that had

always been a product of unpredictable and boundless human emotion. For example, the

Anglo-Irish statesmen and author Edmund Burke (b. 1729) had argued that it was ‘love’ that

actually drove reason, undermining the whole premise of the all-consuming Enlightenment

movement during the 18th century.

Romanticism also tackled the problem of the ‘mechanism’, manifested most clearly in the

aggressive and emotionless drive of the Industrial Revolution, as the adoption of the

mechanical model was leading to a complete loss of individuality and self-liberty. The

Romantics focused on immediate personal experience to create a sense of authenticity and

emphasise the importance of the organic in the new coldly scientific and perfunctory world

of the 18th century. Romanticism also focused on the sublimity of nature as a part of its

reaction to the mechanism, portraying it as the organic factor that enables man to uncover

his innate moral sense and therefore connect with God. Through nature, man can liberate

himself from the limitations of the static and heartless mechanical model and work towards

divine wisdom through experience of the organic.

The Romantics reacted against the problem of social hierarchy that lay at the heart of most

European societies in the 18th century. There was an importance placed on the ‘great chain

of being’, the belief that God had made everyone and everything to occupy its proper place,

a belief that was heavily propagated by the all-powerful church. This led to a suppression

and marginalisation of the rights and freedoms of the lower classes of society and the

Romantics attempted to solve this problem by upsetting hierarchy and emphasising unity

and equality.

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2. The Romantics attempted to solve the problem of Enlightenment as they believed that it

disregarded the faculty of emotion, which they saw as more profound than intellect and

reason as it was central to human life. The loss of sentiment would undoubtedly create a

world of monotony and uniformity as well as lead to the disillusionment of the individual

within his/her society, unable feel within their society of absolute reason and rationality. To

prevent this decline into inert objectivity, the Romantics expounded the wonders of

emotion from fear and horror, in the form of Gothicism, to awe in their portrayal of the

Sublime.

The movement towards the ‘mechanism’ in the 18th century exposed the threat of the loss

of appreciation as well as individual freedom within a society and therefore the Romantics

focused on the organic to regain a sense of authenticity. By focusing on local and personal

experiences, the Romantics were able to restore the importance of individualism and

therefore protect human inimitability from the emotionless and unremarkable drive

towards development, indicative of the mechanical model. In its focus on nature,

Romanticism attempts to retain the human tendency towards appreciation and it

subsequently humbles man, enabling us to recognise and adopt our innate and unique

moral sense in the face of a mechanising world.

The Romantics believed that the entire system of social hierarchy was hopelessly corrupt,

and was therefore corrupting culture and restricting the development of unique societies.

By undermining the predetermined hierarchies, Romanticism essentially gives a voice to the

oppressed groups in society in an attempt to develop equality within a highly disparate

Europe. The Romantics saw 18th century conservativism and its emphasis on social hierarchy

as an un-English aberration as it undermined all sense of unity as well as freedom of

expression and creativity as only the wealthy were able to thrive in the imbalanced society.

3. The Romantic emphasis on emotion and feeling over Enlightenment-based reason was

subsequently criticised for being ineffectual and frivolous as it failed to root itself in

concrete fact and evidence. The Romantics also faced the problem of over-analysis as they

often tried to look too deeply into emotions and behaviours which resulted in the

formulation of imposed meaning that did not accurately reflect the world around them. This

is evidenced by their use of overly complicated and ornamented language that often

obscured the ideas that they wished to communicate.

Daniel Kontorovich

The Romantic emphasis on the organic and the power of nature to counteract the

movement towards the ‘mechanism’ created the problem of God and the certainty of faith.

Many of the Romantics were devoutly religious and their faith manifested itself in different

aspects such as John Milton and his use of the bible or Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his use

of nature as the connector between man and the divine. This raised a problem for atheists

as the Romantic focus on the organic was very much based in personal religious experience

and the idea of moral sense was defined as God’s image within man.

In their challenge of social hierarchies, the Romantics had to be very vague and secretive as

during the 18th century, it was considered treason to criticise the government. The

government had suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus, meaning anyone could be arrested

without justification, and so the Romantics were forced to moderate their works and

disguise their attacks on social hierarchy. During the Romantic period, the wealthy

aristocracy were still essentially in power all over Europe and therefore Romantic works that

expounded equality and unity were often ignored and the composers faced problems with

having the poorer majority’s voices’ actually heard and contemplated by those in power.

4. This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison (1791):

Coleridge’s conversation poem represents the Romantic ideal of imagination and

extemporaneity through its free, spontaneous and original blank verse form. It is formed

from varying, elastic paragraphs with no rhyme and iambic pentameter, which was also

used by highly influential writers like John Milton and William Shakespeare who also wrote

about emotion and imagination rather than reason and fact. The poem portrays imagination

as our liberator from the tyranny of fact and continually seeks activity and energy, seen in

the use of active verbs like, “Flings”, “burn”, “live” and “kindle”. This energy that the

immense sun radiates across the landscape emphasises that we as beings are vital and

therefore have an innate propensity for emotion.

Coleridge’s focus on the domestic experience, namely his musings in a bower while stranded

at home with an injury, highlights the Romantic idea of the authentic organic. The poem

shifts from present experience to a deep understanding of the world, climaxing with the

perception of, “his presence” suggesting a divine revelation. It is this idea of “seeing the

universe in a grain of sand”, as stated by fellow Romantic William Blake, that enabled the

Romantics to challenge the heartless nature of the ‘mechanism’ and defend the individual

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and divine meaning. Coleridge’s devotion to nature is also starkly evident throughout poem,

seen in his portrayal of the ash tree, the radiant landscape and even in his use of a footnote

to specify a species of plant. Coleridge sees nature as the “eternal language” with which

man connects with the divine and frees himself from the ‘mechanism’ by immersing in the

sublime.

Coleridge undermines social hierarchy by elevating the lyric form of this poem, which was

traditionally seen as common and lowly. He aimed to complicate and extend this poetic

form to challenge the pre-accepted hierarchy of genres (with the epic poem at its peak) and

his use of a local experience creates a sense of universality, unifying and equating the

readers of the poem.

Rhime of the Ancient Mariner (1798):

The influence of Gothicism is clearly seen in Coleridge’s mystery poem and it serves to evoke

the emotions of fear and horror according to the Romantic exploration of the individual and

his imagination. There is a clear obsession with the supernatural throughout, evident in

characters such as “Death and Life-in-death” and the spirits of the Mariner’s crew as well in

the mysterious settings of the desolate icefields and the “silent sea”. The reaction to

Enlightenment is also seen in t he form of the poem, as it is in ballad stanzas, which were

originally used in folk poetry. This represents a pre-Enlightenment style with a return to

structures of the medieval period that were very much based in emotion and imagination

rather than reason and fact.

In terms of the organic, the poem actually portrays one of the problems with the Romantic

idea of authenticity and individuality. Where his conversation poems are grounded in

religious faith (based in nature), in this poem Coleridge experiments with removing God and

trying to make sense of the essentially random world. The removal is portrayed through the

Mariner’s shooting of the Albatross, killing the pious good omen that was guiding the crew

in the desolate environment, which also contrasts to the Romantic emphasis of the

sublimity of nature. This poem challenges the whole concept of moral sense and divine

truth and contrastingly throws the individual into a mechanical world devoid of any emotion

or faith.

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Through his use of a contrasting epigraph and gloss that follows the poem, Coleridge

challenges the hierarchy of literary genres. The core text is written in an archaic form and it

seems to be sedimented, as if layers of meaning have been added over time as each new

generation modifies the mythical story. The gloss, however, is written in a refined, late 17th

century Enlightenment style and the writer seems to impose his own meaning on the

ancient poem. The writer of the gloss is meant to sound like a pedantic fool and Coleridge is

clearly undermining the traditions of literature established by the Enlightenment period.

This contrast introduces the idea of doubt that is central to the poem and isolates it from

any other traditional style that would have been widely accepted in the 18th century.