Romanticism Not a set of consistent conventions, but a range of concerns – sometimes overlapping, sometimes contradictory – that emerge in poetry, art, and philosophy from the later eighteenth into the nineteenth century.

Potted timeline of modern intellectual history Renaissance (approx. C15-C17) Period of cultural – artistic, technological, scientific, economic – foment. Birth of “modern” capitalism Birth of “modern” science/scientific method & attitude Birth of “modern” literature (?) Birth of “modern” painting (geometric principles start to inform, e.g., perspective in painting) Birth of “modern” conception of the human (as subject with will; subject with some sort of control over who/what s/he might be/become) Iago (Shakespeare’s Othello): “Our bodies are our gardens, to which our wills are gardeners.”

Enlightenment: roughly C17-C18 Expansion of the modern scientific attitude Rationalism (roughly: all things are subject to reason; the answers to all things lie in reason and have rational/logical explanations; nature operates according to laws [“law of nature”]) Empiricism: view that physical experience is the starting point for all explaining all phenomena Rationalism and empiricism seem to be opposed However, both are ways by which something like logic/science militate against religious weltangshauung (German for “worldview”)

Romanticism: roughly C18-C19 Starts in Europe a little earlier than in Britain German philosophy and poetry especially influential (especially Kant, whose transcendental idealism tried to resolve, rather than decide between, rationalism and empiricism) Not all Romantics are romantic in the same way Not all Romantics are atheists. However, while the Enlightenment does offer a way “out” of a religiosity that places God up in the heavens, and sees him as a controlling force, or a grand “author” of us and the world, it also – for some – reduces the world to rules and laws.

The cultural developments of the Renaissance and Enlightenment opened up new possibilities for thinking about human freedom, the power of the will (“willpower”), and creativity Some Romantics wish to challenge the traditional religious view of the world, while saving a space for the free play of the imagination.

Beautiful & Sublime The distinction between the beautiful and the sublime was formulate by Edmund Burke in 1757. Both terms have to do with aesthetic experience The beautiful and the sublime are to do with feeling/sensory perception, and are two sides of the same aesthetic coin.

The Beautiful “By beauty I mean, that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it. I confine this definition to the merely sensible qualities of things…” “…delicacy, and even fragility, is almost essential to it. […] The beauty of women is considerably owing to their weakness, or delicacy, and is even enhanced by their timidity, a quality of mind analogous to it.”

The sublime “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature […] is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.” “Whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime too…” “I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power.”

Which poems have we considered that present us with visions of either the beautiful or the sublime?

“There is a wide difference between admiration and love “There is a wide difference between admiration and love. The sublime, which is the cause of the former, always dwells on great objects, and terrible; the latter on small ones, and pleasing; we submit to what we admire, be we love what submits to us; in one case we are forced, in the other we are flattered into compliance.”

So: what is Romanticism? Seamus Perry recognizes that Romanticism is a contested term, and has meant different things to different people at different times. (True? Obvious? Helpful?) A number of overlapping concerns, coupled with a shared history – late C18 through to the C19? A move from mimesis (copying/representing) to expression (e.g. I don’t want to show you a picture of the sea; I want to make you feel what it feels like to be faced with the sublime nature of the sea…) An interest in the wonder of the everyday/of nature Blake: “to see the world in a grain of sand” An interest in the transcendent power of the mind/imagination An interest in sensual/physical experience An interest in the “inner” life (idealism: the world exists for me as I experience it)

Romanticism and Science (Ian Wylie) Stereotyped view: Romantics had a distrust of science. Why? Science kills art, wonder, magic... In fact, the Romantic response to science is a little more complex: Late C18: philosophy (same as science) offers new possibilities – nature as chaotic, full of possibility, lawless, expression of God C19: science more specialized; the world reduced to laws/formulae Blake (late C18): if (true) science and (true) religion aim to discover/express the truth, then they cannot be opposed to one another

10 minute test on Romanticism context tomorrow.

Representation/expression Everyday/supernatural Sensation/idealization