![]() ![]() In his 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads he describes the process of recreating the experience of nature and transforming it into poetry: Wordsworth explained this control of the sublime experience in his poetic method. The Romantic sublime in Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey casts nature as as a stern teacher ready to impart wisdom if only humanity could be still and listen carefully. Surviving the encounter, however, we are endowed with wonder and insight. Edmund Burke went a little further with his theory of the sublime, in which the teacher is more like a crazed god who might overwhelm and annihilate us. The Romantic sublime here casts nature as a stern teacher ready to impart wisdom if only humanity could be still and listen carefully. Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, Wordsworth encounters nature but in it hears the “sad music of humanity”: In his poem Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth outlines the idea of the sublime that would come to characterise the Romantic relationship between humanity and nature. Where Blake set out an idiosyncratic and radical religious revision, Wordsworth established a poetic interaction between imagination and nature in his landmark 1798 collection with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads. William Blake/Wikimedia Commons The Romantic sublime Blake skewers the wretched present and envisages a transcendent future through poetic imagination.īeatrice Addressing Dante by William Blake. Blake imagines indentured child chimney sweeps set free by angels, even as he sees everywhere the “mind-forg’d manacles” of poverty and exploitation. These English poets found a refuge for their idea of free and creative humanity in nature and the imagination.īlake achieved this with his religiously inspired poetic transformations of London. Poets such as Charlotte Smith, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Clare presented artistic critiques of what they saw as the exploitative and cold-hearted rationality of their times. These latter qualities we find in imaginative and freedom-loving Romanticism, which made a home for itself in English poetry. The modern world can still be understood as swinging between, on one side, the cool work of quantification and observation in scientific rationality and, on the other, a desire for the heat of life lived with intensity, in the experience of emotion or of the ineffable. Even the feedback loop of depression and apocalypse that appears in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, owes something to Romanticism. ![]() Or, we see a fantasy of our integration with nature (tinged with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “nascent humanity”) in James Cameron’s film Avatar. For example, the novels of Peter Carey or Tim Winton sometimes set up a type of metaphysical resonance between landscape and the formation (or dissipation) of the self. In 21st-century culture, Romantic ideas usually appear when the human and the natural worlds are brought together. When we think about the qualities of imagination, the natural world or the composition of the self, we usually call upon an idea or two from what has come to be known as Romanticism. Indeed, its influence continues in the 21st century. But Romanticism as a cultural movement and as a set of ideas influencing visual art, literature, philosophy and politics, bleeds out beyond these designated boundaries. Romanticism is often fixed within a period running from the late-18th to early-19th century.
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