I would like to share some of the English philosopher Roger Scruton's thoughts on Romanticism (click on the link below), a rich and complex movement in the arts. Feel free to add reflections of your own, this being a community. In relation to what was said in the post below, it is interesting to read the observation that the Romantics, unlike the Greeks being open and at home in the natural world, express inwardness, severance, sehnsucht - that longing we all know on some level for a lost home. It is the birth of a new subjectivity, and a new freedom with all its burdens. We still feel severed from the natural world and ancient custom, and search for it in art, in forms of sublime love; we are the great grandchildren of the Romantics.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mdQOENAnqxemy4KycjYvGcV9E3ivlFN-/view?usp=sharing
Théodore Géricault, Evening Landscape with an Aqueduct (1818)
Stormy sky, turbulent mood, overgrown ruins, human figures dwarfed by the immensity of the landscape: all elements of Romanticism.
Although Romanticism clearly originated in Europe and more specifically in Germany, some authors of the New World also felt the urge to emphasise emotion, imagination, individualism and the beauties of nature in their literary creation.
ReplyDeleteWhereas Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau emerged as the pioneers of transcendentalism, a distinctly American movement which developed in reaction to the religious beliefs and foci of the times, writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville produced works of fiction that assumed an almost mystical quality. American Romanticism also produced Walt Whitman, probably the most influential poet in all of American history.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) has often been considered part of the Romantic Movement. He remains, however, something of an anomaly in nineteenth-century literature. He is best-known for his *Tales of Mystery & Imagination* (which turns out to be a posthumous compilation of his short stories) and for some of his poetic pieces.
Of these, I particularly like ‘The Bells’, which Poe wrote in the final year of his life after his wife died of consumption.
This is a poem that gives you the strange impression that you could have written it yourself. It is all so obvious. The four types of bells, described in the four separate – and numbered – stanzas, each representing a different moment in life. The partial symmetry between some of the lines at the beginning of all four strophes. The progressive lengthening of the stanzas, and the darkening progression from the evocation of merriment in the short first verse to that of unutterable distress in the final fourth strophe which unmistakably, blatantly reveals the poet’s real import. The endlessly repeated words, the back vowels and the velar approximants that become vocal representations of the chiming and the tolling of the bells.
All so obvious – but can you read it and not weep? If so, you have never really heard them – the bells, singing relentlessly, their harmonics hanging in the air, the heaven resounding with their overwhelming clangour, the atmosphere throbbing with their swollen vibrations as they peal out their insane chant; their heartrending cry of woe.
**The Bells**
ReplyDeleteI.
Hear the sledges with the bells—
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.
II.
Hear the mellow wedding bells,
Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!
Through the balmy air of night
How they ring out their delight!
From the molten-golden notes,
And all in tune,
What a liquid ditty floats
To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats
On the moon!
Oh, from out the sounding cells,
What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!
How it swells!
How it dwells
On the Future! how it tells
Of the rapture that impels
To the swinging and the ringing
Of the bells, bells, bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!
III.
Hear the loud alarum bells—
Brazen bells!
What tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
In the startled ear of night
How they scream out their affright!
Too much horrified to speak,
They can only shriek, shriek,
Out of tune,
In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,
In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,
Leaping higher, higher, higher,
With a desperate desire,
And a resolute endeavor
Now—now to sit or never,
By the side of the pale-faced moon.
Oh, the bells, bells, bells!
What a tale their terror tells
Of Despair!
How they clang, and clash, and roar!
What a horror they outpour
On the bosom of the palpitating air!
Yet the ear it fully knows,
By the twanging,
And the clanging,
How the danger ebbs and flows;
Yet the ear distinctly tells,
In the jangling,
And the wrangling.
How the danger sinks and swells,
By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells—
Of the bells—
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
In the clamor and the clangor of the bells!
IV.
Hear the tolling of the bells—
Iron bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
In the silence of the night,
How we shiver with affright
At the melancholy menace of their tone!
For every sound that floats
From the rust within their throats
Is a groan.
And the people—ah, the people—
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All alone,
And who tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone—
They are neither man nor woman—
They are neither brute nor human—
They are Ghouls:
And their king it is who tolls;
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls
A pæan from the bells!
And his merry bosom swells
With the pæan of the bells!
And he dances, and he yells;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the pæan of the bells—
Of the bells:
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the bells—
Of the bells, bells, bells—
To the sobbing of the bells;
Keeping time, time, time,
As he knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the bells—
Of the bells, bells, bells—
To the tolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells—
Bells, bells, bells—
To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.