What Stirs the Heart
One cannot appreciate the value of something possess until it is no more. Memory keeps alive the fleeting moments of time that touch the soul and shape the personality. Life begets love, passion, dread, fear, and hope. What is made of that life is in the moment; that moment when there is no longer isolation from the outside, but the urge to fall into it and become one with the natural world as it presents itself. This was a common aim of the Romantic poets. They embraced the natural world whole-heartedly and loved it. Breaking every predetermined restriction was a requirement to write as a Romantic. They sought to shatter the ideals and strict structure that dominated the previous centuries of writing. Honest writing could not be expressed properly if bound by strict code, for it degraded the emotional expression and powerful feelings that could be experienced in a single moment. Romantic poetry was something meant to be personal and performed in solitude. The experiences were meant to be collected when one was opening their mind to possibilities and collecting their thoughts from silent contemplation, searching for those ever elusive answers to unknown questions. For how else would one handle their world crumbling around them?
To truly understand the mentality of the Romantics, it is important to be aware of the circumstance in which they found themselves. The Romanticism movement began in Europe during the last years of the 18th century and lasted until 1852. This period was a time of early industrialization and constant war. The French Revolution shook all of Europe when it began in 1789. Napoleon also made an appearance during the Romantic Period and rose to crown himself emperor in 1804. The United States was in the midst of fully dividing themselves from Great Britain and declared war on them in 1812. To make matters worse for Romantic poets, who loved experiencing the natural world, Industrialization was in full swing and cities were quickly expanding. Steam and coal changed the look of the landscape and paved the way for further development. It was in this period of seemingly unending change which Romanticism was born, but whether such change was for better or for worse eluded the Romantics. Speculation of what the world was coming to was often postulated by the poets though their writing. This is likely why Romantic poems took on a darker undertone towards the end of the Romantic Period, for they dreaded what would become of a world which they had already seen turn sour.
As the Romantic Period progressed, the focus of the poets changed drastically but there were many ideals expressed throughout that are now associated specifically with the Romantic Era. At the beginning, Romantics severed themselves from the rigid structure of earlier poetry by focusing on their interaction with the natural world and the spontaneous flood of powerful emotions. Often times this involved the poets themselves addressing issues they hand to confront by focusing on their mind, emotions, and personal growth during struggles in their personal lives. Early Romantics found solace in their writing, but later Romantics turned tragic and embraced the ideas of the supernatural and psychological extremes. The climax of the Romantic Period was the Byronic hero, which embodied many of the ideals that had been created throughout the Romantic Period. As the progression of industrialization and war changed the face of the world, the Romantics responded by changing their tune throughout the Romantic Period to reflect the current state of the world as seen from the eyes of a poets mourning the loss of an old world and finding the will to accept the new one.
Entering early Romanticism, many sprouting poets were hopeful and experienced the world through new eyes. The natural world was a phenomenon of Nature which was slowly being consumed by the monster known as industry. Wordsworth spent much time alone in contemplation and admiring the green beauty of the flowers and the leaves and the animals while mourning the reality of mankind’s destruction of the blessed beauty. How could man destroy when, “to her fair works did Nature link/ the human soul that through me ran” (Wordsworth 280)? Such destruction was a betrayal of the heart. In William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written in Early Spring” he contemplates the serenity and beauty of the world and simultaneously mourns its passing. Due to the conflict of the times and the progress of city development, he knew it was only a matter of time before most of the countryside was converted into another part of the city. Like many early poets, Nature played a significant role in poetry as a whole. But early Romantics not only focused on Nature as a character of the world, but as the driving force of humankind and a representation of their ultimate inevitability. Yes, it is the natural world that mankind seeks to destroy, but it is to the natural world which all of life returns. Human nature is self-destructive, and in this realization, silent mourning for the world became a necessity. For as a race, man has painted its own bleak reality which is why Wordsworth asks at the end of his poem: “Have I not reason to lament/ what man has made of man?” (Wordsworth 280). To what end the story of humanity will reach cannot be known, even if every person waits with bated breath and is convinced of our own self-destruction.
Concerning terms of self destruction, Samuel T. Coleridge was a prime example. He was one of the early Romantics who struggled with a severe opiate addiction and as a result, many of his poems were based on lucid dreams and vision that occurred under the influence of opium. It was not uncommon for poets and writers of the Romantic Era to take inspiration from their own lives. No experience is better expressed with the written word than your own. Not to mention poets often used their poetry to sort issues that they were having trouble solving in hopes that muttering to themselves on the written page would somehow organized their thoughts enough to bring an answer to the surface. Coleridge wrote a rather infamous poem titled “Kubla Khan” which has undergone heavy debate in academic circles to this day. He stated quite plainly that he had experienced a vision while sleeping and upon waking, sought to write all he could remember and seal the vision in ink. Coleridge was distracted with business for a time and when he returned to finish, he had all but forgotten his dream and it left his mind as if such a vision had never come to pass. Many believe the demonic inspiration of the piece to be deeper than that of simple psychological curiosity. “Kubla Khan” describes a Paradise like no other that is haunted by a demonic presence and resting on the brink of war, but the demon in the dream is frightful “for he on honey-dew hath fed,/ and drunk the milk of Paradise” (Coleridge 460-462). The quoted line finishes the unfinished tale. It is possible that the demon could be deceptively tempting and the demon is a mental representation of Coleridge’s opiate addiction. This dream could have been his mind attempting to cope with Coleridge’s personal disdain towards his insatiable need. Part of early Romanticism involved a focus on the mind, emotions, personal growth, and struggles of the poet. Coleridge is more successful at expressing his problems through his poetry than most other early Romantics. It would have been interesting to see what the result of the brewing war described in the poem. Perhaps Coleridge, in his dream, painted himself as Kubla Khan, experiencing the vision from his perspective, and would go on to vie with the demon for control of Paradise. But alas, no one will ever know. “Kubla Khan” ironically embodies the very idea of a fleeting moment. Once the moment has passed, it does not return.
John Keats was a poet that is associated with the later Romantics which embrace a darker outlook on the world and find a different kind of appreciation for the temporary nature of a moment. Keats, in particular, suffered from tuberculosis and knew, for most of his life, that he would die young. As a result, many of his works encounter the idea of mortality and the frailty of humanity and possess a certain envy of immortality. He expressed this through a number of “immortal ideas” of sorts such as in his “Ode to a Nightingale” when he was jealous of the immortality of the idea of the Nightingale versus the bird which he looked at when writing the poem. He exclaimed, “thou wast not born for death immortal Bird!” (Keats 929). Though Keats expressed his jealousy towards the immortal Nightingale, he resigned himself to death long before it came to claim him. Keats said, “I have been half in love with easeful Death,/ call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme” (Keats 929). The mentality of those resigned to death is different from those who do not fear death because the meeting is still unknown. Keats jput out a surprising amount of works considering he did not live past twenty-six years of age. The Romantic Era provided him the tools and freedom necessary to be able to write and publish as much as he did.
Death and the supernatural became regular pastimes with the late Romantics. It was during this time when Mary Shelley confounded the world with a conundrum of humanity by spinning the mother of all the horror genre, Frankenstein. The presentation of the monster being more human than the human creator presented an uncomfortable consideration of how monstrous a human could be and the destructive power of obsession. Morality was a key theme in the Frankenstein novel and the question of right and wrong. Towards the end of the novel the monster stands over the deceased Frankenstein, whom the monster killed, and tells Walton, “Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding” (Shelley 209). But the monster found no such person and was driven to kill and maim due to the obsession of his creator. He confesses that “evil henceforth became my good” (Shelley 209). The monster was forced to experience a hell from which he had no means of escape. Repeatedly the monster tells Walton that Frankenstein did not understand the suffering the monster underwent and that he knows his only redemption is death. The last requirement is to bury himself in an icy tomb and he pleads that no other will know an abortion such as he. With this confession at the end of the novel, it is made clear that the monster, capable of love, was found to be more human than the creator, Victor Frankenstein, who pursued his quest for the secret of life out of greed and malice. The Human became the monster and the monster became human. In the construction of her tale, Mary Shelley pulled inspiration from Lord Byron and her husband in addition to including a quotation on the title page from Milton’s Paradise Lost. She treats Frankenstein’s monster as a modern Prometheus, making many of the same basic mistakes as the Prometheus in Greek legend. His intention was to help people, but is attacked and driven away due to his hideousness, a feature beyond his own control. This results in him betraying what he knows to be good and becomes evil instead, as quoted earlier. Throughout the story, it became difficult to identify the true hero in Frankenstein.
Concerning heroes, the Byronic hero, named after its creator, Lord Byron, became the climactic embodiment of Romantic ideals. The character archetype was so successful, that it can still be found in characters in modern television and film. But what constitutes a Byronic hero? Most often these characters are lone wolf type males that possess some sort of psychological extreme, while keeping an air of mystery about them. They often believe they are doing a typically immoral deed in the name of virtue and it is not uncommon for them to be geniuses with exceptional perception into their surrounding and other people. This leads to the character regularly being critical of themselves and often introspective, but at the same time they are extremely charismatic. A Byronic hero is able to adapt to any situation and can be sophisticated and educated. Additionally, a factor not necessarily seen as much in the modern interpretations of a Byronic hero is the power of seduction, sexual, and social dominance. These factors were more heavily debated during the Romantic Period. Lord Byron often painted himself as the quintessential Byronic hero. In his poem “Darkness”, he gazes out over an apocalyptic world and describes what it would be from his perspective. At the same time he confessed his personal views on what the world could likely come to, especially in the first line when he states, “I had a dream, which was not all a dream” (Byron 618). Byron went on to fight with the Greeks to support them in their rebellion against their Ottoman overlords, deciding that action was more important than writing. But in a tragic turn of events Lord Byron contracted a nasty case of malaria and died before he ever saw Greece, becoming his own tragic hero. The Greeks mourned his loss deeply and painted Byron into legend.
Much of the ideals of the Romantic Period persist into modern times and those who sought to capture the temporary gave permanence of a sort to their work and the ideologies of the time period. Just as Keats sought immortality he never thought he could have, his work lives on. Byron’s hero is deeply embedded in modern storytelling. Coleridge and Wordsworth preserved their feelings of what was to disappear and the nature of the world the so loved. Everything is temporary, but the beauty of the written word is a sense of permanence and untainted truths passed on by the authors who wrote them. It is the duty of future generations to appreciate the treasures left behind.
Bibliography
Byron, George Gordon. “Darkness.” Comps. Deidre Shauna Lynch and Jack Stillinger. The Norton Anthology of English Literature 9th Edition: The Romantic Period. London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012. Print.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Kubla Khan.” Comps. Deidre Shauna Lynch and Jack Stillinger. The Norton Anthology of English Literature 9th Edition: The Romantic Period. London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012. Print.
Keats, John. “Ode to a Nightingale.” Comps. Deidre Shauna Lynch and Jack Stillinger. The Norton Anthology of English Literature 9th Edition: The Romantic Period. London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012. Print.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York: The New American Library, Inc., 1965. Print.
Wordsworth, William. “Lines Written in Early Spring.” Comps. Deidre Shauna Lynch and Jack Stillinger. The Norton Anthology of English Literature 9th Edition: The Romantic Period. London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012. Print.