"Romanticism" is the first installment of a series that focuses on poetic development in the United States. The second installment is a superficial examination of realism.
Preface
One aspect of history fundamental to the comprehension of Western literature is the idea that regardless how novel a cultural development may seem, it is not discontinuous from the aggregate intellectual and artistic achievements that precede it. Even Jean-Jacques Rousseau's and Soren Kierkegaard's great imaginative leaps must be viewed as a part of the intellectual environment in which their philosophies were born. Such a sense of continuity leads to two important conclusions. First, a sympathetic understanding of the past permits a more complete appreciation of current achievements. Second, the past, in contrast with being a repository, is the root of an organic process that continuously nourishes present and future achievements. The continuity of Western literature is best illustrated by the way in which writers continue to draw from the past to create original works. To demonstrate the creative continuity, we will attend to several representative figures, each recognizably romantic, their romanticism rooted in and continuous with the achievements of their predecessors.
Historical Background
The source of the romantic movement was the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Discourse on the Origins of the Inequality of Mankind (1754) and The Social Contract (1762) provoked the French Revolution. In those treatises he argues that human beings were essentially good and equal in the state of nature, but the introduction of property, agriculture, science and commerce corrupted them. People entered into a social contract among themselves, establishing governments and educational systems to correct the inequalities brought by the rise of civilization. His theory of the natural man influenced such figures as the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Goethe and his contemporaries, the philosopher and critic Johann Gottfried von Herder and the historian Justus Moser, provided the movement with more formal precepts via Von deutscher Art und Kunst (Of German Style and Art, 1773), in which they extol the romantic spirit in German folk songs, Gothic architecture, and Shakespeare's plays. Goethe attempted to imitate Shakespeare's untrammeled style in his Gotz von Berlichingen (1773), an historical drama about a sixteenth-century robber knight. The play, which justifies revolt against political authority, inaugurated the Sturm und Drang ("Storm and Stress") movement, a harbinger of German romanticism. Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) exalts romantic sentiment, justifying suicide by reason of unrequited love. Many of the British romantics incorporated the novel's tone and mood--frenzy, melancholy, world-weariness, self-destruction--into their works and into their lives.
British Romanticism (1785 -- 1830)
As the romantic movement spread from France and Germany to Great Britain and the rest of the West, certain themes and moods, often interlaced, became the concern of almost all nineteenth-century writers. Many of the libertarian and abolitionist movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were engendered by Rousseau's philosophy--the desire to be free of convention and tyranny and the emphasis on the rights and dignity of the individual.
Thus it was inevitable that political and social causes became dominant themes in romantic prose, drama and poetry throughout the West. Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote passionately in protest against social and political wrongs and in defense of the struggles for liberty in Italy and Greece. The romantic poets often conveyed their general dissatisfaction with the organization of society as specific criticism of urban society. In the preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), William Wordsworth refers to "the encreasing [sic] accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident," and in "Milton" (1804) William Blake mentions the "dark Satanic Mills" that had begun to deface the English countryside.1,2 Fundamental to such sentiments was a concern with nature and natural surroundings, which is a theme of John Denham's "Cooper's Hill" (1655), a poem that had a formative influence on English romantic poetry, specifically Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" (1802). And the romantics often regarded their environments with melancholy. A sense of imminent change is apparent in "Ode on Melancholy" (1820) by John Keats. The romantics' melancholic tendency and their imaginative freedom produced a trend toward the irrational and the supernatural. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" (1816) and Keats' "The Eve of St. Agnes" (1819) reinforce the romantics' disillusion with eighteenth-century rationalism.
The essence of romanticism is difficult to describe because it was more an attitudinal than a stylistic shift. For example, the romantics focused on their emotions and the expression of them. The revival of classical ideas of form in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries imposed too rigid an intellectual control on individual emotions. The romantics, rather than restricting emotional expression to a predetermined form, allowed their feelings to predominate and organize their poems. The emphasis on emotion instead of intellect led to the expression of subjective rather than objective visions. Composition was a way to examine feelings, not a means to arrive at some general truth. Their subjectivism produced another attitude: fondness for the fantastic and the exotic, making it possible to probe more deeply into one's creative imagination. Dreams, according to the romantics, released the mind from the constraints of everyday experience and brought to the surface the dark visions reason had submerged. Finally, the romantics had a mystical attachment to nature. Whereas the neoclassicists had turned to nature in search of order and reason, the romantics viewed nature as unpredictable and as a reflection of the writer's emotions.
Wordsworth
"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings": that is William Wordsworth's crucial formulation in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems by both Wordsworth and Coleridge.3 The metaphor "overflow" ("expression" or "projection") is diametrical to imitation and indicates that the source of a poem is no longer the external world but the poet himself. Furthermore, "overflow" suggests a fluid compositional process, a process that is not calculated but "spontaneous." Although the poet's emotions are the impetus, the success of composition is attendant upon contemplation, for "Poets do not write for Poets alone, but for men."4
Lyrical Ballads succeeded a century of developments in the neoclassical mode and became the most important manifesto of the emotive theory of poetry. In discussions of poetry as an imitation of human actions, the proper poetic forms had been narrative and dramatic, and the usual antithesis to poetry had been history. But Wordsworth, conceiving poetry as the language of emotion, regarded the lyric, rather than the epic or tragedy, as the exemplary form, and he interchanged history and science as contrary to poetry. Throughout the development of romanticism, imagination and emotion and intuition were acclaimed over imitation and logic and science. And the romantics expressed their freedom by rejecting such conventions as regular meter, strict form, and tragic unity.
Despite their diverse concerns, the romantics shared one attitude: optimism. The ideals of freedom and equality that the French Revolution had promised--even when subsequent developments suggested the fight against tyranny was not over--persisted in British romantic poetry. The freshness and boldness of Wordsworth's poems reflected the romantic sense of hope, which William Hazlitt deemed The Spirit of the Age (1825). "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798" exudes the mood of the period. Wordsworth divided the poem into four parts. In lines 1 through 23, the speaker sets a meditative scene; in the second part (lines 23 -- 58), he ponders the significance of the landscape. Lines 59 through 112 are the heart of the poem in which the speaker reviews the meanings the landscape had for him at different stages of his life. In the fourth part (lines 112 -- 160), the speaker attempts to convince his friend (Wordsworth's sister, Dorothy) that the landscape will restore her tranquility. The following excerpt is from the third part of the poem, lines 68 -- 103.
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led; more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by,)
To me was all in all.--I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite: a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, or any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.--That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur: other gifts
Have followed, for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompence. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.5
The speaker's direct encounter with the landscape is obvious; many of Wordsworth's poems were composed in ecstatic response to a physical confrontation with nature. His response is rapturous but lacks the descriptive details the reader needs to translate it into congruent images. In neoclassical poetry select details provide the concrete material of vivid description, but in "Tintern Abbey" Wordsworth merges perception and cognition to achieve a subjective union with a pantheistic Nature. Emotions that would otherwise be evoked by the apprehension of descriptive details are expressed directly in wholly subjective terms.
Wordsworth's reformation of poetic description and revitalization of poetic diction are linked. The complex thought process is expressed in plain language. His intention was to make his poetry accessible to everybody, "to bring [his] language near to the real language of men."6 In contrast with the language of such eighteenth-century works as Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock (1714), the words are straightforward and there are no classical or literary allusions.
A religious sense of humanity's relationship with nature is pervasive in much of Wordsworth's early work. He considered God apparent everywhere in nature, and he considered a connection between nature and soul. But Wordsworth's religious and political opinions changed to the degree that by 1810 he was staunchly conservative. His circle of friends, including the Scottish author Sir Walter Scott, influenced him in the direction of orthodoxy, and the rise of Napoleon in France disillusioned him. A series of personal disaster--the death of his brother in 1805, a bitter quarrel with Coleridge in 1810, the death of two of his five children in 1812, and the physical and mental decline of Dorothy in the 1830's--seemed to have dulled Wordsworth's vision and inspiration. Many of his later poems, although they have sparks of ingenuity, are rhetorical and moralistic. However, when he was able to recollect a moment of intense experience, he recovered some of his earlier poetic strength. He wrote the sonnet "Surprised by Joy" (1815) in his forties, and he composed "Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg" (1835) in his sixties. Both are comparable with his youthful lyrics.
American Romanticism (1817 -- 1900)7
In the United States, life in the nineteenth century was tied to nature, so the dissemination of romantic attitudes to America was inevitable. The romantic concept of the mystical unity of humans and nature was adopted by a group of American writers who called themselves the transcendentalists. They affirmed a semireligious attitude toward nature and creativity, believing there was a correlation between the universe (macrocosm) and the soul (microcosm). According to the transcendentalists, divinity permeated all objects, animate or inanimate, and the fundamental purpose of humanity was union with the Over-Soul. They regarded intuition, rather than reason, as the highest human faculty. Fulfillment of one's potential could be accomplished through an acute awareness of the beauty and truth of the surrounding natural environment. The process was inherently individual; all orthodox tradition was suspicious.
The Greek philosopher Plato proposed the concept of transcendence. He affirmed the existence of absolute goodness, which he characterized as something beyond description and as comprehensible only through intuition. Some philosophers later applied his concept to divinity, maintaining that God could not be described or understood in terms based on human experience. The doctrine that God is transcendent, is existing outside of nature, is a fundamental principle in the orthodox forms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
The Scholastics used the terms transcendent and transcendental to signify general concepts in an effort to provide a rational content to faith. The realists recognized six transcendental concepts--ens (essence), unum (unity), bonum (goodness), verum (truth), res (thing), and aliquid (something)--all of which existed independently of both the human mind and individual objects. The nominalists, on the other hand, believed such universal words had no objective reality outside the mind and only individual things and events existed objectively.
Immanuel Kant was the first philosopher to distinguish between transcendent and transcendental, reserving the term transcendent for those entities, such as God and soul, which exist outside human experience and are therefore unknowable. He used the term transcendental to signify a priori forms of thought--that is, innate principles with which the mind gives form to perceptions and makes experience intelligible. Thus transcendental philosophy became the study of pure mind and its a priori forms. Later German idealist philosophers--specifically Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, and Edmund Husserl--described their views as transcendental. Consequently, philosophers applied the term transcendentalism to doctrines of metaphysical idealism.
American transcendentalism began with the formation of the Transcendental Club in Boston in 1836. Among the leaders of the movement were the essayist and lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson, the feminist and social reformer Margaret Fuller, the preacher Theodore Parker, the educator Bronson Alcott, the philosopher William Ellery Channing, and the author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau. The Transcendental Club published a magazine, The Dial, and some of the members participated in an experiment in communal living at Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, during the 1840's. Major transcendentalist works of the American movement include Emerson's Nature (1836) and "Self-Reliance" (1841), as well as many of his metaphysical poems, and Thoreau's Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), which is an account of an individual's attempt to live simply and in harmony with nature.
Emerson
The prophet of transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, enunciated a potent American poetics so powerful that successive poets have had to affirm, qualify or deny it. After resigning his Unitarian pulpit in Boston because he could no longer adhere to the tenets of Christianity, Emerson immersed himself in German and English romanticism, issued his manifesto Nature, and disseminated the tenets via the lecture circuit. The "Sage of Concord" assimilated Neoplatonism, German idealism, and Oriental mysticism into a Yankee conviction that individuals who trusted their intuitive insight, which he called transcendental Reason, would discover by way of experience, rather than by way of doctrines or institutions, their harmony with nature and with the Over-Soul immanent in nature.
The poet is unique in that he/she has the ability to receive and impart his/her typological experience. In the "Language" chapter of Nature (1836), he postulates an inherent similarity among words, things, and absolute truth: "1. Words are the signs of natural facts. 2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts. 3. Nature is symbol of spirit."8 The poet, according to Emerson in "The Rhodora" (1839), is the receptive and expressive medium of the Spirit in nature.
In May, when sea-winds pierce our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals, fallen in the pool,
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being:
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask, I never knew:
But, in my simple ignorance, suppose
The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.9
The rhodora is emblematic of the beauty bestowed by Spirit on the world and implanted in human beings. Poets are able to receive and transmit the deeper meaning of nature, and the beauty of nature is a necessary function for those who seek truth. Because realization requires the seer to be simultaneously a sayer, the poetic process is organic. The form of "The Rhodora" grew from the impulse of his insight that "The self-same Power that brought me there brought you." And the meaning of the poem developed through his extension of the generative experience into words.
Emerson's poems contain the core of his philosophy: transcendentalism is in "Each and All" (1839), "Bacchus" (1847), and "Brahma" (1857); the poet's function is in "Merlin" (1847) and "Uriel" (1847); organic form is in "The Snow-storm" (1841). He admitted that the works he collected in Poems (1847) and May-Day (1867) did not exemplify adequately the principles of his philosophy and that much of his best poetry was in his prose. But the rhythmic irregularity, the tonal frankness, and the thematic freshness of his poems predetermine the revolution in form and expression which Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson would initiate.
Poe
Edgar Allen Poe, whom Emerson judged as a bad poet who occasionally wrote good poems, looked to Coleridge, Wordsworth's contemporary and contributor to Lyrical Ballads, as his lodestar in his search for a literary aesthetic. The principal alternative to Wordsworth's expressive theory, to the view that poetry is the expression of the emotions or subconscious desires of an individual personality, was Coleridge's view that poetry, in its various forms, is the product of "that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination."10 God has endowed the poet with an inner source of motion, and his/her imagination's creative activity, generated by the tension of contraries seeking resolution in a new whole, parallels the dynamic principle undelying the created universe. Following the lead of post-Kantian philosophers, especially Schelling, Coleridge opposes the organic imaginative process to the mechanical operation of fancy, describing the poetic process in terms that are literal for a growing plant and metaphoric for imagination. It is a self-organizing process. The poet assimilates disparate materials and via an inherent lawfulness creates an organic unity that "reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities."11 And with that Coleridge inaugurated the organic theory of poetry as well as the aesthetic principle of inclusiveness, which became both the basic conception of poetic unity and the prime criterion of poetic excellence in New Criticism.
The influence of Coleridge's aesthetics on Poe's is conspicuous. In Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge states:
A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to
works of science, by proposing for its immediate object
pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this
object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to
itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a
distinct gratification from each component part.12
In "The Poetic Principle" (1848), Poe rejects didactic poetry, defines poetry as the rhythmic creation of beauty, and concludes that a poem is simply a poem and nothing else. He states elsewhere that a poem should appeal equally to reason and to emotion and should exhibit restraint, beauty and unity.
It was a southern strain of Calvinism which not only predisposed Poe to the Gothic but also disabused him of the transcendentalists' claims. The poem "Israfel" indicates his susceptibility to the idea of the exalted seer-sayer and his disillusionment with it.
In Heaven a spirit doth dwell
"Whose heart-strings are a lute";
None sing so wildly well
As the angel Israfel,
And the giddy stars (so legends tell)
Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell
Of his voice, all mute.
Tottering above
In her highest noon,
The enamored moon
Blushes with love,
While, to listen, the red levin
(With the rapid Pleiads, even,
Which were seven)
Pauses in Heaven.
And they say (the starry choir
And the other listening things)
That Israfeli's fire
Is owing to that lyre
By which he sits and sings--
The trembling living wire
Of those unusual strings.
But the skies that angel trod,
Where deep thoughts are a duty--
Where Love's a grown-up God--
Where the Houri glances are
Imbued with all the beauty
Which we worship in a star.
Therefore, thou art not wrong,
Israfeli, who despisest
An unimpassioned song;
To thee the laurels belong,
Best bard, because the wisest!
Merrily live, and long!
The ecstacies above
With thy burning measures suit--
Thy grief, thy joy, thy hate, thy love,
With the fervor of thy lute--
Well may the stars be mute!
Yes, Heaven is thine; but this
Is a world of sweets and sours;
Our flowers are merely--flowers,
And the shadow of thy perfect bliss
Is the sunshine of ours.
If I could dwell
Where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody,
While bolder note than this might swell
From my lyre within the sky.13
Poe emphasized his poetic creed with the following motto which he included either above or below the text in a number of editions: "And the angel Israfel, [whose heart-strings are a lute,] and who has the sweetest voice of all God's creatures.--Koran" He had adapted the quotation, excepting the phrase within brackets, from George Sale's translation of the Koran, Section IV (1734), in which Israfel is one of four angels beside God's throne. Israfel, who symbolizes Emerson's Spirit, remains in heaven. So what can we, as poets, do if "our flowers are merely--flowers," that is, are not types (figures) but material phenomena? According to Poe, good poets transform flowers into tropes and create from disorderly nature an orderly art form. The role of imagination is not to discover typological (figural) truth but to devise metaphorical connection. In other words, a rhodora should not function as an allegorical emblem (the ecstatic inspiration of Spirit); rather, the rhodora should be a rhodora yet become something more via tropes, metrics, tone and mood. Beginning with Goethe and Coleridge, the distinction between allegory and symbol became a value judgment, with allegory being didactic and artificial and symbol being natural and organic. The difference between allegoric and symbolic works is that allegory begins with an abstract idea (a tenor) and a concrete word or phrase (a vehicle) is constructed to fit, whereas symbolism begins with a vehicle and the tenor is educed from it.
By explicating the text of "The Raven" as a rational construction of an irrational narrative, Poe, in "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846), discredits the supposition of intense stimulation in the poetry of the transcendentalists. The Raven and Other Poems (1845) is the embodiment of his aesthetic. Poems such as "The Conqueror Worm" and "The Haunted Palace" are attempts to invent the beauty and harmony life lacks. The woman who died for her purity and beauty in "Ulalume" (1847) is the symbol of nature's failure to match the poet's ideal. In the following poem, "Annabel Lee" (1849), one finds the same sensibility and symbolic expression.
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;--
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
She was a child and I was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love--
I and my Annabel Lee--
With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud by night
Chilling my Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulcher
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
Went envying her and me:--
Yes! that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud, chilling
And killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we--
Of many far wiser than we--
And neither the angels in Heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:--
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride,
In her sepulcher there by the sea--
In her tomb by the side of the sea.14
Inspired by the loss of a beautiful woman, "Annabel Lee" is a lyric masterpiece. Repetition, end rhyme, and refrain contribute to the poem's musicality, and the e-sound that pervades the poem creates a somber tone. "Annabel Lee" reflects the emotional control, scrupulous diction, and imaginative unity that Poe insisted are essential to a creative act.
The woman is a figure of speech for the reason that she has a double meaning; there is tension between what the speaker is saying (vehicle) and what the speaker means (tenor). But the woman is different from a metaphor because what the speaker is saying is also what the speaker means. The vehicle is also a tenor. Thus the woman is a symbol, a metaphor in reverse. Poe expands the vehicle to the extent it replaces the tenor, leaving the tenor to implication. The recurrence of "Annabel Lee" suggests a complex relationship; she is not simply a dead figure.
Although Poe devoted much effort to the creation of unique poems, analyzing the effects of every detail, economic necessity forced him to turn to prose. As a book reviewer, he produced a significant body of criticism. His witty essays were famous for their exposure of literary pretension, and his theories on the nature of fiction, especially the short story, have had a lasting influence on American and European writers. Whether or not Poe invented the short story, it is certain that he originated the mystery. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Mystery of Marie Roget" (1842), and "The Purloined Letter" (1844) are predecessors of modern mystery.
Whitman
Walt Whitman regarded Poe as the antithesis of what he wanted to become, so he immersed himself in Emerson's works, the result of his scrutiny being the most complete poetic expression of transcendentalism, Leaves of Grass. Adhering to Emerson's call in Nature for a prophet with a "transparent eyeball," Whitman created a persona whose expansive yet personal voice advocates humanity, brotherhood and freedom; adhering to Emerson's call for organic form, Whitman initiated a technique known as free verse: lines irregular in length and stresses, patterned not by meter or rhyme but by repetition and rhythm.15
By regarding rhythm as a fluid instrument of versification, Whitman was able to express freely and suggestively the importance of the individual. He rejected genteel tradition and made use of colloquial language--a blend of everyday speech, journalistic jargon, and foreign words and phrases. The combination of the universal voice of nationhood with the expression of personal experience is paradoxical, and Whitman acknowledges such in the opening lines of the final edition of Leaves of Grass (1892): "One's-self I sing, a simple separate person, / Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse."16 The juxtaposition emphasizes the romantic nature of Whitman's mission: to delineate his thoughts, emotions and reactions in order to communicate a sense of the essential oneness of the human condition. "Song of Myself," an epic of the democratic individual's consciousness, makes clear his expansive intention:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.17 (1 -- 9)
Those opening lines announce Whitman's American idealism and enthusiastic trust in the innate value of the individual. The "I" or "myself" is sometimes personal but more often generic and cosmic. The "you" creates an imperative relationship between poet and reader which continues through the poem. Whitman abandons the use of conventional figures and draws his symbolism from his experiences, which become our own via the flow and energy of his language.
The first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) comprised 12 untitled poems, all of which contain long cadenced lines that resemble the unrhymed verse of the King James Bible. The symbolic "I" in the longest poem, which Whitman later titled "Song of Myself," appears in "The Sleepers," in which the "I" symbolizes life, death and rebirth.
To compensate for the shocked response of reviewers, Whitman published anonymously several adulatory reviews and sent complimentary copies of Leaves of Grass to literati. Emerson's prompt and positive response affirmed Whitman's vocation, but his enthusiasm cooled, however, when Whitman continued to emphasize the body as much as the soul and to identify the life force with the sexual impulse. Nevertheless, Whitman maintained his independence and devoted his life to the organic expansion of his seminal work.
Stimulated by Emerson's letter of congratulations, Whitman rapidly compiled another edition (1856) with revisions and additions, the most significant being "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," in which the poet vicariously joins his readers and all past and future passengers on the ferry. Whitman began to structure his poems by way of allegory for the third edition (1860). In "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," a mockingbird (the voice of nature) teaches a little boy (the future poet) on the coast of Long Island, New York, the meaning of death. Italian opera, of which Whitman was fond, is the basis of the poem's musicality. Two clusters of poems, "Children of Adam" and "Calamus," concern sexual love and male friendship. Drum-Taps (1865, later added to the 1867 edition) reflects his awareness of the significance of the Civil War (1861 -- 1865) and his desire for reconciliation between North and South. Sequel to Drum-Taps (1866) contains "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," one of four elegies for President Abraham Lincoln (1861 -- 1865), whose life and death become the central symbol of democracy in the 1867 edition. Modern communications and transportation are symbols in "Passage to India" (1871), a transcendent vision of the unions of East and West and of the soul with God. Whitman finally arranged his poems to his satisfaction for the 1881 edition, but he continued to add new poems until the final edition (1892). A posthumous cluster, "Old Age Echoes," appeared in 1897.
Dickinson
Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson represent complementary aspects of Emerson's American poet: the democratic projection of the self into nature and city and the hermetic absorption of the world into oneself, respectively. Adapting the quatrain of the hymnal, Dickinson recorded with unwavering attention the drama of consciousness. Each lean poem concisely expresses, word by word, a single moment of perception and emotion; her work as a whole reveals the extremes of her experiences: God as present or absent, love as satisfaction or renunciation, nature as harmonious or alien. The following poem (1896) is typical of her manner: the first act of consciousness is the recognition of an experience, after which the consciousness seeks completion either through its relation to the other--God, lover, nature--or through its own integration.
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading--treading--till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through--
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum--
Kept beating--beating--till I thought
My Mind was going numb--
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space--began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here--
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down--
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing--then--18
Her style is deceptively simple, marked by an economy of language; the voice is passionate, expressing sensory experience and psychological actualities with frankness and force. The poem contains many modernist characteristics--intense imagery, ellipsis of thought, verbal ambiguity--and it predetermines the modern expansion of sonic texture via slant rhyme, consonance, and dissonance.
The contrast between Dickinson's style and Whitman's style is apparent. And their techniques diametrically affect their audiences. His long lines, irregular rhythm, and infrequent rhyme ease the audience; her short lines, metrical deviations, and variable rhymes unsettle the audience. Dickinson condensed her lines via defamiliarization, a strategy that involved the use of common language in uncommon ways, such as intense metaphors and emphatic ellipses. Her comparisons transcend physical resemblances and intimate complex emotions. Most of Dickinson's poems formally resemble the quatrains of traditional Christian hymns, with two lines of four-beat meter alternating with two lines of three-beat meter. But she managed manifold variations within her simple form--employing idiosyncratic syntax and punctuation, breaking subtly the rhythm, and disrupting end rhymes with slant rhymes--creating complex word puzzles which have been producing divergent interpretations.
Dickinson's early style exhibits the influences of George Herbert, John Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Robert Browning. Her handwritten lyrics imitated the formalities of print, and her poetic techniques were conventional. Later, however, Dickinson began to attend to the visual aspects of her work, breaking and arranging lines of verse in ways to emphasize meaning and writing letters of the alphabet in lavish ways to stress or to alter a poem's sense. She also incorporated cutouts from novels, magazines, and the Bible to augment her own use of language.
In the late 1850's, Dickinson began making copies of poems and binding them with thread into packets. In 1862 Dickinson was sufficiently confident to write to the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson, sending three poems and asking for advice. He promptly replied with caution against publication, but that did not deter her from writing, for between 1862 and 1864, she composed 681 poems. Although few of Dickinson's poems were published formally during her lifetime, she self-published nearly one-third of her poems, sending them in the more than 1,000 letters she had written to at least 100 different correspondents. Though collections began to appear after her death, The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955) and The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958) assured her place as the only female among the seminal romantic poets.
Conclusion
It is important to note that the source of romanticism was the Sturm und Drang ("Storm and Stress") literary movement of the 1770's, when German poets rejected neoclassical poetics, specifically the adherence to rules of composition. Neoclassicism (1660 -- 1785) and romanticism (1785 -- 1830) were diametric movements, the latter being an antithetical response to the former's preoccupation with rationalism, traditionalism, objectivism, decorum and humanism.
Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning (1605), Rene Descartes' Discourse on Method (1637), Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687), and John Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1690) initiated a period of rational criticism, during which reason became scientific method. The intellectuals of the Enlightenment advocated the application of the scientific method to the comprehension of all life. All institutions and all systems of thought were subject to the rational, scientific way of thinking. Thus, neoclassical poets regarded poetry as an art requiring a set of skills to achieve foreseen results. Their method was to learn and to practice those techniques so that their works inconspicuously contained the essential properties of classical (Greek and Roman) literature. Such properties were the reason classical literature had survived. The neoclassical poets strove for correctness with respect to imitation and followed the established rules of their art. The adherence to traditional forms--the couplet, which they closed--for example, meant that the poets were following the natural literary laws discovered by the ancients.
The paradox that conventional forms are closest to nature is resolved when one considers the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century interest in science. Nature became the object of scrutiny: something to be observed, itemized, tested and understood so that it could be manipulated and used. That attitude led many neoclassicists to believe that the dynamic processes in the natural world were in the human world. Nature became truth in the sense that it held the ultimate meaning and value of human existence. Human beings, especially those in the upper class, were regarded as the primary subject matter of literature. Poets directed their attention to nature--that is, to human experience--and rendered their observations in ways which instructed and pleased their audience. Although much neoclassical poetry is didactic, critical of conduct that threatened to undermine traditional social behavior, it is satirical. The predilection for satire reveals a central ideal of neoclassical humanism: poetry is not art for art's sake; poetry is art for humanity's sake.
It is a mistake to describe the romantic poets as simply nature poets. The presentation of an external scene is not for its own sake; rather, it is a stimulus for the poet to engage in thought. Representative romantic poems are meditations that, though often stimulated by natural phenomena, focus on human experience. But whereas neoclassical poetry is about other people, romantic poetry invites the audience to identify the speakers with the poets themselves, either directly or indirectly. And whether the speakers are the poets themselves or other people, they are solitary figures engaged in a long, sometimes elusive, quest. Often they are social nonconformists or outcasts.
Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads is a poetic manifesto in which he declares that good poetry is not a mirror, it is an imitation of humanity. The source and content of a good poem, according to Wordsworth, are the strong emotions of the poet and/or external objects after they have been transformed by sentimental reminiscence. The creative act, if a poem is to be genuine, must be unforced and free of the rules and conventions of neoclassical poetics. Coleridge modified that theory and introduced an organic process: a poem is similar to a plant in that both evolve in accordance with their own internal principles into their final organic forms.
The romantics, especially the early romantics, did not disparage reason; they tried to balance reasoning with feeling and imagination. To them the scientific method left no room for the imagination and for the soul.
The American romantics reacted similarly to the empirical revolution. The basis of the transcendental movement was, as Emerson states in his lecture "The Transcendentalist" (1841), Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism, a view that the form of our knowledge of reality derives from reason but its content comes from our senses. Emerson, however, extended the concept of transcendental knowledge, in a way the validity of which Kant specifically had denied, to include an intuitive cognizance of moral and other truths that transcend the limits of sensory experience.
What the American romantics had in common was less what they proposed than what they were reacting against: formal religion, social conformity, materialism, and commercialism. To counter dogmatic religion, Emerson advocated a faith in a divine Spirit or Principle or Soul in which both humanity and the cosmos participate. That omnipresent Spirit manifests itself to human consciousness as influxes of inspiration, which are the source of profound truths and the necessary condition for moral and spiritual development. The transcendental poets who accepted Emerson's epistemological ideal grounded their comprehension of reality in feeling and intuition, even when doing such led to contradictions. Those poets also adopted an ethics of individualism that stressed self-trust, self-reliance and self-sufficiency. And they turned their attention from contemporary society toward the natural world, which corresponded to the human spirit.
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1William Richey and Daniel Robinson, eds., Lyrical Ballads and Related Writings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002) 395.
2William Blake, Blake's Selected Poems, eds. David and Virginia Erdman (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1995) 68.
3Richey and Robinson, 407.
4Ibid., 404.
5Ibid., 112-113.
6Ibid., 408.
7William Cullen Bryant published his romantic poem "Thanatopsis" in 1817.
8Brooks Atkinson, ed., The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Random House, 2000) 13.
9Ibid., 689.
10Richey and Robinson, 422.
11Ibid.
12Ibid., 420.
13Edgar Allen Poe, Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1984) 742-743.
14Ibid., 738.
15Atkinson, 6.
16Francis Murphy, ed., Walt Whitman: The Complete Poems (New York: Penguin, 2004) 37.
17Ibid., 63.
18Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1961) 280.
