Geekin' out on poetry (and Romanticism)—my study thread

Not What I (Everybody) Thought They Were

Plus I'm learning that much of what I believed about the Romantics (and have been saying about them above) is incorrect, based on some strawman assumptions about them probably written by their rational logical detractors. Or just the simple but attractive (and wrong) answers promoted through Hollywood and popular books. Apparently (at least according to whover wrote that entry), they were a lot like me. They supposedly didn't rail in simple black-and-white all-inclusive hatred against science, logic, and progress, but were very perceptive and discriminatory about which aspects of it they railed against. I probably read this in the book by Isaiah Berlin about them I read a year or so ago, but I've forgotten.

Distance Avails Naught

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It's been bothering me, this quote by Whitman I've posted several times now. It feels off. As I thought I heard it on the video it goes "It avails naught—distance avails naught. I am with you." And I kept thinking "What about time?" And I wondered if I misheard, or maybe the reader misread? So I looked the poem up. It's Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, and the full quote goes like this:

"It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not;
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence;
I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it is."

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Wow, I could swear the reader said 'naught', but here it just says not. Maybe they were poeticizing it? Or maybe I was. No matter, I'm just glad to see the actual quote. And yep, there's time in there, hiding. Now all is right.

I KNEW it!

With all this talk of the Absolute, and of the Finite touching the Infinite, a certain ancient hermetic saying drifted into my mind—

As above, so below, as within, so without
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Above and within refering to divinity, the sacred, or the macrocosm, below and without to the ordinary mortal realm, the profane world, or the microcosm.

And now, looking for some deeper info on Romanticism and how it affected lyrical poetry and the ideas undergirding it, I run across a book about the mystical sources of Romantic philosophy. I was surprised for about 12 seconds, and then I was all like— "Oh, well of course."

Romanticism=Postmodernism—?

One of the books I almost bought posited a close link between the two, and that almost scared me off the whole Romanticism thing. If it really birthed postmodernism, then I want no part of it, or at least I want to shear off at the point where it all began to lose touch with reality. I've been looking up books and other articles etc, all while gradually working my way through that Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, and today I finally reached the end of it (after a lengthy and most gratifying perusal), to find that it's merely a rather forced analogy/theory being pushed by some modern Romanticism scholars and some postmodernists in an affort to legitimize their shaky movement. Whew!

Case in point:

In recent decades, a large number of romantic scholars have argued that romanticism, in general, and the romantic primacy of aesthetics, in particular, is a precursor of the fundamental outlook of postmodernist and poststructuralist views (see, for example, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988, Bowie 2003, Bowman 2014, and Gasche 1991). This reading is based on the skepticism the romantics raised about first principles and about systematicity, the romantic emphasis on human creation and language, historicism and hermeneutics, their view of the fragmented nature of modern life and on certain formulations of the primacy of aesthetics that may seem, initially, to erase any distinction between what is “real” and what is “poetic”, a product of the creative imagination. Friedrich Schlegel, for example, proclaims: “No poetry, no reality…. There is, despite all the senses, no external world without imagination” (AF: #350), and “Everything that rests on the opposition between appearance and reality…is not purely poetic”​

However, in the final segment of that epic encyclopedia entry, I found solace in this statment:

These proclamations may seem to suggest that “there is no way out” of creative constructions, or “texts”, or that “art…does not need to point beyond itself” (Bowie 2003: 53), as if romantic aesthetics anticipates central trends in post-modernism and post-structuralism.[8] But there are reasons to worry about such a “postmodernist” reading. Some lines in romanticism—skepticism about foundationalist philosophy and system-building, the emphasis on human creation, language, and the role of historicism and hermeneutics—are indeed related to certain strands in postmodernism. But reading romantic aesthetics as proto-postmodernist is limited for a host of reasons.​

Here's a link to the final section, to elucidate that host of reasons:

• Romantic Legacy

Ok, you twisted my arm—here are the reasons as listed:

First, the romantic faith in the imaginative and emotive capacities associated with the production and reception of art, and their skepticism of absolute principles and philosophical systems did not make them skeptical of reason, as many postmodernist thinkers are (see §2.1 and Beiser 2003: 3). Even romantic skepticism of absolute principles (see §3.1). cannot be equated with the rejection of all principles and rules. For example, though art and art appreciation cannot be reduced to any given, prior rules, they are not lawless, but the source of their own normativity (see §3.3).

Second, in spite of the romantic stress on the fragmentary nature of human experience (embodied in their choice of the aphoristic style, which is emphasized by their post-modernist readers), the romantics never gave up the striving after unity and wholeness. Art was not meant as a replacement for unity, but exactly as the best way to strive after and approximate unity in our modern and fragmentary condition.

For the philosopher…art is supreme, for it opens to him the holiest of holies, where that which is separated in nature and history, and which can never be united either in life and action or in thought, burns as though in a single flame in eternal and primordial unity. (Schelling, System of Transcendental Philosophy, 1800, in Heath 1978: 231)​

Third, the romantics’ desire for and search after the Absolute (discussed in 3) is another reason to reject the post-modernist interpretation. For such a desire is anathema to most post-modernist thinkers, who resist and shun the possibility (and desirability) of any absolute reality.

Moreover, if one opposes the idea that there is “no way out of texts”, or that reality is “nothing other than construction”, then the post-modernist reading of the romantics appears uncharitable. Fortunately, this interpretation does not force itself on us since there are many other charitable and (historically, textually and philosophically) well-grounded readings of the proclamations just mentioned and of the romantic primacy of the aesthetics. Many of these readings were proposed in this entry under the umbrella of the formal approach to romantic aesthetics. On this formal account, rather than claiming that there is no distinction between “reality” and “fiction”, or that there is “no way out of imaginative constructions”, the romantics urged human beings to fashion their ordinary life and philosophy aesthetically for epistemological, metaphysical, ethical, political and scientific reasons.​

Now I must learn about the Absolute

The main thing remaining for me to find elucidation on now is this slippery conception of the Romantic Absolute. It's key to understanding the whole edifice of their philosophy. I have vague notions about it, but I need more than that. The section of the Stanford entry about it was written in pure ungrounded abstractions piled one on top of another, which gives you nothing to latch onto or visualize. I need to find a far more solid explanation complete with things like examples or comparisons. And so far every road has led me to this book:

• The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy, 1795-1804 by Dalia Nassar

From what I've been able to read of it so far it seems excellently written and well grounded.

I've found a good article covering this ground:

• The Romantic Absolute by Alison Stone @ British Journal for the History of Philosophy

I hope I'm not copying too much of it here, but I don't think I am—

In this article I shall re-examine the Romantics’ accounts of our supposed original feeling or intuition of the absolute, based on which we strive endlessly to know the absolute discursively.4 Actually, we find in their writings at least two divergent accounts. These are suggested in the writings of Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) and of Friedrich Schlegel, who, together, are the main philosophers of early German Romanticism and whose ideas will be my focus. The first account, which Novalis suggests in his 1795–6 Fichte Studies, is that feeling gives us a kind of access to being which logically precedes any conceptualization, judgement or understand- ing. I will argue that this appeal to feeling is problematic, above all because Novalis conceives of feeling as wholly antithetical to conceptualization and understanding, such that the deliverances of feeling cannot give us any rational justification for striving to know being.

The second account of our feeling of the absolute, outlined by Schlegel, is that we feel the absolute in the sense that we aesthetically intuit it in certain natural phenomena. Drawing on but extensively modifying Kant’s aesthetics of natural beauty, Schlegel holds that certain natural features – such as a skyscape, the atmosphere of a season, or a complicated natural scene – are infinitely complex, yet that we intuitively apprehend them as wholes. However, given their complexity we apprehend their wholeness as lying beyond these phenomena. We glimpse this wholeness through the phenomena, rather than grasping them as completed wholes. Thus, we intuit that there is an infinitely complex whole that surpasses yet also animates all particular objects – an absolute, in fact.

What epistemological status does this form of aesthetic intuition have? It is not full knowledge, since it is not articulated discursively; but neither is it totally non-cognitive: it gives us not merely the idea that the absolute may possibly exist, but a more definite apprehension of the absolute glimmering through nature before us. This form of intuition occupies a curious middle ground between knowledge and non-knowledge. Since this is an uneasy status, we become rationally compelled to try to convert our intuition into full knowledge; hence our endless striving to know the absolute.​

I'm still not sure whether the Absolute consists entirely of physical things, or if there's a non-physical component to it as well. Non-physical seems likely, considering the fact that "The atmosphere of a season" is not really a physical thing but more of an aesthetic impression or something approximating a mood.

Things and Ideas (the Absolute)

Ok, well here we go:

"The absolute just is the synthetic web of all interrelated things and ideas, we cannot know the whole in advance of knowing about these things/ideas and their relations (and our knowledge of the latter can never be completed)."​

So at the very least the Absolute contains all things and all ideas. I have yet to run across anything indicating whether any notion of God or any godlike principle is involved. My suspicion is that many of them were Christians and did include God as at least a component of the Absolute, if not the entirety of it, and that the ones who weren't Christians conceived of Nature (the Universe) as something akin to a god or an Animating Principle. But I have yet to run across anything confirming, denying or modifying this notion. These philosophers have an annoying tendency to not even realize that they're not providing any concrete realities, and are instead merely compounding abstractions onto abstractions.

This is all reminding me very strongly now of my "Everything Is" revelation that I've written about elsewhere:

• Hallucinogenics and the Eleusinian Mysteries
• Everything Is...

My mini-revelation included all things and ideas as parts of Everything. That section went like this:

All things exist (another way to say Everything Is)—things that do not exist are not things, therefore they're included instead in the corollary Non-Things Do Not Exist. My excited mind grapsed onto the example of Unicorns to explain this (see, even when I'm tripping I provide grounding in concrete examples—it isn't that hard people! ). Unicorns don't actually exist, so they go into the category of Nonexistence (Non-Being as some of those philosopher-dudes would have it). However the IDEA of unicorns does exist, therefore it qualfies as a thing and comes under the heading Everything Is. This would include all fictional and mythological unicorns, as well as cartoonicorns, drawings, stuffed animals, scuptures etc of unicorns, and other ideas about them such as dreams, daydreams, fantasies, wishes, fears, and books and movies about them.​

Obviously what this means is that if I get high enough I become a Romantic Philosopher...

Back to the Poetry (enough with all this philosophy!)

Ok, as I read and try to absorb all this about the Absolute and the Many Emerging From the One etc, it's time to turn my attention away from philosophy and back toward Poetry. The question occurred to me—"Did the Romantic poets study Romantic philosophy?"

I think it's too complicated for a search engine—has too many variables (and too many Romantics). But it did net me a couple more excellent articles:

• Romanticism @ Britannica
• INTRODUCTION TO POETRY—The Romantic Era @ BCcampus

I don't even know the name of the second website. It's BCcampus, but I can't determine what that stands for. Some college I would assume—British Columbia maybe? Who knows? (Turns out it is indeed). The first few paragraphs of that page:

Poetry is the most important thing in the universe. It is the voice of the universe—or the voice of God for some poets. They believe poems are the translation of that voice into words. God does not speak in words. But God is always speaking. God speaks in all things, at all times. But only some people can hear. Those people are poets—or more broadly artists. The job of the poet is therefore to translate God’s voice into words for those of us (the vast majority) who can’t hear it.

This is pretty much what you believe if you are a Romantic poet. You are special. You have a gift that sets you above ordinary people, the gift of perceiving and then transferring the voice of God (but Romantics prefer the word “Nature”) in the natural world as well as the gift of translating that sound so we ordinary people can have a sense of it.

How do you know you’re “hearing” the voice of the divine? You know it from the pleasure it gives you. As you will remember from our discussion of the Ode, Romantic poet William Wordsworth said:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.​

And here's the beginning of the Britannica page:

Romanticism—attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular. It was also to some extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.​

Among the characteristic attitudes of Romanticism were the following: a deepened appreciation of the beauties of nature; a general exaltation of emotion over reason and of the senses over intellect; a turning in upon the self and a heightened examination of human personality and its moods and mental potentialities; a preoccupation with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional figure in general and a focus on his or her passions and inner struggles; a new view of the artist as a supremely individual creator, whose creative spirit is more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures; an emphasis upon imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth; an obsessive interest in folk culture, national and ethnic cultural origins, and the medieval era; and a predilection for the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic.​

British Romanticism @ Poetry Foundation

An introduction to the poetic revolution that brought common people to literature’s highest peaks.

"To borrow the central dichotomy of critic M.H. Abrams’s influential book The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), Romantic poets broke from the past by no longer producing artistic works that merely mirrored or reflected nature faithfully; instead, they fashioned poems that served as lamps illuminating truths through self-expression, casting the poets’ subjective, even impressionistic, experiences onto the world. From philosophers such as Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, the Romantics inherited a distinction between two aesthetic categories, the beautiful and the sublime—in which beautiful suggests smallness, clarity, and painless pleasure, and sublime suggests boundlessness, obscurity, and imagination-stretching grandeur. From the German critic A.W. Schlegel, Coleridge developed his ideal of “organic form,” the unity found in artworks whose parts are interdependent and integral to the whole—grown, like a natural organism, according to innate processes, not externally mandated formulas."

"Drawing on unrestrained imagination and a variegated cultural landscape, a Romantic-era poem could be trivial or fantastic, succinctly songlike or digressively meandering, a searching fragment or a precisely bounded sonnet or ode, as comic as Lord Byron’s mock epic Don Juan or as cosmologically subversive as Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. If any single innovation has emerged as Romanticism’s foremost legacy, it is the dominance among poetic genres of the lyric poem, spoken in first-person (the lyric "I") often identified with the poet, caught between passion and reason, finding correspondences in natural surroundings for the introspective workings of heart and mind."​

• British Romanticism @ Poetry Foundation

Coleridge on Organic Form:

"Taking a lead from the German critic A. W. Schlegel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge distinguished between mechanic form and organic form in an essay on Shakespeare:

"The form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material — as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form on the other hand is innate, it shapes as it develops itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward Form. Such is the Life, such is the form. Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms."​

"Coleridge made a strong distinction between the mechanical fancy and the living imagination, and suggested that the work of art is like a living organism, especially a plant, which originates in a seed, continues to grow (in Shakespeare, “All is growth, evolution, genesis,—each line, each word almost, begets the following”), assimilates and “enters into open communion with all the elements,” and evolves spontaneously from within,” effectuating “its own secret growth.”

"The metaphor of organic or appropriate form, something that develops naturally from within, has been crucial to the development of romantic and certain crucial strands of American poetry."

• Organic Form @ Poets.org

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The Sublime (The New Critical Idiom) 2nd Edition by Philip Shaw, John Drakakis

Related to ideas of the great, the awe-inspiring and the overpowering, the sublime has been debated for centuries amongst writers, artists, philosophers and theorists and has become a complex yet crucial concept in many disciplines.

In this thoroughly updated edition, Philip Shaw looks at:

• Early modern and post-Romantic conceptions of the sublime in two brand new chapters
• The legacy of the earliest classical theories, through those of the long eighteenth century to modernist, postmodernist and avant-garde conceptions of the sublime
• Critical Introductions to major theorists of the sublime such as Longinus, Burke, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lyotard, Lacan and Žižek
• The significance of the concept through a range of literary readings, including the Old and New Testaments, Homer, Milton and writing from the Romantic period to the present day
• How the concept of the sublime has affected other art forms such as painting and film, from abstract expressionism to David Lynch’s neo-noir
• The influence of the sublime on recent debates in the fields of politics, theology and psychoanalysis.

Offering historical overviews and explanations, this remarkably clear study is essential reading for students of literature, critical and cultural theory.
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The Cambridge Companion to the Romantic Sublime (Cambridge Companions to Literature) by Cian Duffy

This is the only collection of its kind to focus on one of the most important aspects of the cultural history of the Romantic period, its sources, and its afterlives. Multidisciplinary in approach, the volume examines the variety of areas of enquiry and genres of cultural productivity in which the sublime played a substantial role during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. With impressive international scope, this Companion considers the Romantic sublime in both European and American contexts and features essays by leading scholars from a range of national backgrounds and subject specialisms, including state-of-the-art perspectives in digital and environmental humanities. An accessible, wide-ranging, and thorough introduction, aimed at researchers, students, and general readers alike, and including extensive suggestions for further reading, The Cambridge Companion to the Romantic Sublime is the go-to book on the subject.​

Decided to Get Specific

The search engines can't handle "Did the Romantic Poets read Romantic Philosophy?", so I tried "Percy Shelley Philosophy" instead and ran across this:

"The life and works of Percy Bysshe Shelley exemplify English Romanticism in both its extremes of joyous ecstasy and brooding despair. Romanticism’s major themes—restlessness and brooding, rebellion against authority, interchange with nature, the power of the visionary imagination and of poetry, the pursuit of ideal love, and the untamed spirit ever in search of freedom—all of these Shelley exemplified in the way he lived his life and live on in the substantial body of work that he left the world after his legendary death by drowning at age 29."

"The strongest adult influence on Shelley during this time was not one of his masters but Dr. James Lind, the physician to the royal household at nearby Windsor, whom Shelley admired for his knowledge and free spirits and idealized as a kind of substitute father figure. As Newman Ivey White notes, Dr. Lind was the prototype of the benevolent old man who frees Laon from prison in The Revolt of Islam. Shelley’s access to Dr. Lind’s extensive library enabled him to pursue his earlier interests in science and magic as well as to begin a wide range of reading in philosophy and literature."

• Percy Bysshe Shelley @ Poetry Foundation

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I was sure many of them were fully aware of Romantic philosophy in one way or another, at least through secondhand talk in their circles, but I wanted some kind of corroboration. Apparently Shelley was considered a philosopher himself as well as a poet and writer.

I now feel like I've got my bearings. My crash course in the fundamentals of lyric poetry is done, and I have a feel for the territory now, the ground of it all. Interesting how much of it connected up unexpectedly with my own deepest interests such as mysticism, the ecstatic bliss of meditation in a natural setting, and even my Everything Is revelation. And now it seems (fingers crossed) all these insane heat domes and heat waves are past and autumn is in the air. The Season of the Witch has arrived. Let the writing commence.