The Longing of the Romantic: Subjective Reenchantment in 19th century culture and literature

A conversation before I woke up in the Hermetic House of Life discord server led to someone pinging me, on the topic of the Enlightenment's effects on magical worldviews and the attempts by 19th century people to push back against that. Specifically, the idea was that Romanticism was an "anti-Enlightenment movement" which is broadly speaking true. And then I wrote this essay, on the history of Romanticism, its resistance to overarching Enlightenment ideals, and its pivot to subjectivity to escape the objective materialism of the Enlightenment, and what that in turn means for people now trying to recapture some of the same things.

I'm most familiar with English and American Romanticism, so apologies in advance if I mess up some of the continental varieties. In fact, I'll just say now I know nothing about French Romanticism, so I'm just leaving it out basically.

Romanticism gets its start in a movement in Germany called Sturm und Drang, "Storm and Stress." It was a literary movement, with some philosophers writing about it as well; the basic idea was to focus on "storm and stress," big emotions and upheavals, rather than careful, clinical poetics. This was of course in reaction to neoclassical writing. More generally, it fostered a reaction against the cultural results of neoclassicism, which we typically call "the Enlightenment."

Like "The Renaissance," that term is both loaded and simplified, but I'm not an expert on that and you can kind of get the idea anyway, I'm sure. But "The Enlightenment" is usually the period we point to when we think of the "disenchantment of the West." I think that's too simplified on its own too, but setting that aside, we can kind of model the Enlightenment as a codification of the kinds of materialism we know today, including -- and this is important, I think -- modern kinds of Protestantism.

So, back to the German writers for a minute. Schiller was one of the premiere authors of Sturm und Drang, though he eventually sort of drifted away from it. Goethe was also one of those writers, and the thing I want to say that's related to Goethe is that both Sturm und Drang and his later works focused a lot on subjectivity.

So a really simple dichotomy we can use for our purposes is that the Enlightenment metanarrative included objectivity -- that it was both possible and desireable to be objective, to avoid subjectivity, while the Romantics criticized that view.

We know from all sorts of contemporary science that it's basically impossible to be totally objective, and the Romantics were talking about that centuries earlier.

So we get German Romanticism eventually, and that becomes influential enough to cause English Romanticism. Before that, in fact, there's already a pushback against the pushback.

So ok. All right. So gothic fiction becomes a force in England, right? And it's also cribbing from German literature. And eventually, you get this pushback in England against "foreign" literature, and that includes imitations. You can watch that happen in the career of Walter Scott, in fact, who begins by writing poems about witches and ghosts and ends by writing historical fiction about the English wars.

Romanticism goes on to crib from the Gothic: Coleridge wrote a lot of praise about Ann Radcliffe's writing, for instance. Coleridge and Wordsworth sort of single-handedly invent English Romanticism, though Blake was certainly hoeing the same field before them.

The catch about the way that the Romantics tried to "reenchant" the world is that they were also, as above, focused on subjectivity. The best-known "manifesto" for the English Romantic movement was "The Preface to The Lyrical Ballads". The best-known lines are probably these:

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

The idea you always hear about when discussing this is that Wordsworth is advocating for strong emotion, but strong emotion distanced from the event. Wordsworth is quite naturally saying you can't write a poem while you're running for your life or staring at clouds, because it's an activity of its own; you stop experiencing the thing that makes the emotion if you begin to write about it.

But it's really complicated -- he's not just saying that. He's saying that contemplation creates a "kindred" emotion, and one just as real -- it "does itself actually exist in the mind." Simulated emotion is as real as "real" emotion; the difference is null. Wordsworth is saying, or can be read as saying, that the mind creates, its thoughts are real things, even if "only" thoughts.

And then we get to Coleridge, whose poem "Kubla Khan" is an attempt to show what the Romantic conception of writing is really like.

If you go to look for "Kubla Khan" online, you're going to find mostly pages that have the poem; they don't include the preface. This is a mistake. Coleridge is telling the reader what to do with the poem, in his preface. Additionally, for a long time, academics took it at face value: they used to actually sit and try to work out where he stopped to answer the door. That is to say, which lines were inspired and which were dull imitations?

That's bullshit. The entire thing is the work, and I don't just mean that theoretically. Coleridge is selling us the idea of poetic inspiration that Shelley discusses in "Ode to the West Wind.".

Here's an aside, from Shelley's poem:

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Note, too, when you follow that link, that Shelley originally included a note about experiencing "tempestuous wind" that inspired the poem. We know these poets drafted. We have their first drafts, which often look nothing like the final pieces. But they believed poetry contacted God, the divine itself, and so they dramatized poetry as something "inspired," which to be clear was not unique to their movement or their moment in time. Poetry has been considered divinely inspired for much of human history, all over the planet. But this is the specific way the English Romantics conceived of it and executed their works based on that conception.

Back to Coleridge. "Kubla Khan" opens with a preface claiming Coleridge was dreaming and found himself writing a poem, which was interrupted by a rude knocking at the door.

Biographers widely believe this was the landlord, trying to get the money he was owed.

The textual reason I argued above that we can't take this seriously is that the end of the poem is where the meaning is. This poem claims to be about a place seen in vision, and ends with a cry:

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she play'd,

Singing of Mount Abora,
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread:
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drank the milk of Paradise.

In other words, if I could only "revive within me" the song of the damsel I saw in a vision, I would be a prophet: people would cry beware, people would cast spells to ward themselves from my puissance. Because I would have therefore drunk the "milk of Paradise."

Coleridge is overtly drawing on magical imagery to say the poet is divine, and a magician.

But, for the Romantics, this is mediated magic. It's subjective. Here's Wordsworth again, in full, but quoted from this site

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Wordsworth is lamenting here, in the good old English poetic tradition. What he's lamenting, like the Wanderer, is a world that's gone. Wordsworth is complaining about the materialistic "Enlightenment" world he lives in, and wishes that he could look at nature the way "a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn" did. But note that it's "outworn" -- deserved or not, true or not, he accepts that the time of the Pagan is past.

And what he wants from that is perception: he wishes to see the way the Pagans saw, to experience Nature the way they did.

In the conversation that started all this, HarryC asked about "the Enlightenment drained out wonder and magic from the world and the 19th century folk were desperate to reconnect?" Source

Yes. Basically. Sort of. They had an idea of subjectivity that influenced their works, making them deeply internal, markedly personal, in ways previous writers didn't do. And, in fact, in ways their chosen pagan models didn't do.

So, the Romantics appealed backwards just as the neoclassical authors had, but their purpose for doing so was different: the neoclassical authors were citing tradition. The Enlightenment authors were bucking traditon. Nothing says "fuck your tradition" than nailing objections to a church door, after all. The Romantics were fighting back against that by, once again, going backwards, looking for precedents, but with that understanding of subjectivity, the magic and wonder of the natural world changed from something that was in the world to something that was in the mind.

You could probably argue, feasibly, that fantasy, as much as it's a product of the Gothic, also springs from the Romantic assumption of subjectivity, because it posits we need to imagine wonderful worlds, that the world we're in is not wonderful on its own.

We still have Romantic ideals today -- Derrida wrote once that, give or take a word, we're still living in the shadow of the Romantics. And we certainly believe art is divinely inspired -- because people think you have it or you don't, and if you don't, you should just use an algorithmic bot trained on stolen work to "make art" instead of just practicing and doing it yourself. Wordsworth would of course hate that, but he accidentally set the cultural assumption that helps to lead to it, historically.

The Romantics didn't quite seek to reenchant the world, not in the way we think -- they sought a way, like all nostalgic people, to feel the way they felt back then. Or, really, the way they imagined folks felt back then, based on their reading and their own ideas.

Consider the way Pope, that archetypal neoclassical author, handled magic spirits, in The Rape of the Lock:

Some secret Truths from Learned Pride conceal'd,
To Maids alone and Children are reveal'd:
What tho' no Credit doubting Wits may give?
The Fair and Innocent shall still believe.
Know then, unnumber'd Spirits round thee fly,
The light Militia of the lower Sky;
These, tho' unseen, are ever on the Wing,
Hang o'er the Box, and hover round the Ring:
Think what an Equipage thou hast in Air,
And view with scorn Two Pages and a Chair.
As how your own, our Beings were of old,
And once inclos'd in Woman's beauteous Mold;
Thence, by a soft Transition, we repair
From earthly Vehicles to these of Air.
Think not, when Woman's transient Breath is fled,
That all her Vanities at once are dead:
Succeeding Vanities she still regards,
And tho' she plays no more, o'erlooks the Cards.
Her Joy in gilded Chariots, when alive,
And Love of Ombre, after Death survive.
For when the Fair in all their Pride expire,
To their first Elements the Souls retire:
The Sprights of fiery Termagants in Flame
Mount up, and take a Salamander's Name.
Soft yielding Minds to Water glide away,
And sip with Nymphs, their Elemental Tea.
The graver Prude sinks downward to a Gnome,
In search of Mischief still on Earth to roam.
The light Coquettes in Sylphs aloft repair,
And sport and flutter in the Fields of Air.

Know farther yet; Whoever fair and chaste
Rejects Mankind, is by some Sylph embrac'd:
For Spirits, freed from mortal Laws, with ease
Assume what Sexes and what Shapes they please.
What guards the Purity of melting Maids,
In Courtly Balls, and Midnight Masquerades,
Safe from the treach'rous Friend and daring Spark,
The Glance by Day, the Whisper in the Dark,
When kind Occasion prompts their warm Desires,
When Musick softens, and when Dancing fires?
'Tis but their Sylph, the wise Celestials know,
Tho' Honour is the Word with Men below.

Pope is satirical here of course, but these spirits are simply mechanical things, entities in the world. From one point of view, this is a more magical description of spirits, as it simply -- again, for satirical purposes -- assumes they exist. Wordsworth, for all his longing, can't imagine that, even for his poem.

This is kind of a thing for us, since the Romantics are clearly the English-language poets we're going to want to turn to for ideas about magic, at least in contrast to neoclassical and Enlightenment authors. And their ideas about subjectivity and the divinity of art are valuable for practitioners. However, their implicit belief that the souls and spirits of "Nature" (with a capital N) were products of subjectivity leads us into peril, leads us to decide "it's all in our head."

The Romantics wouldn't necessarily agree. They were certainly religious, in one way or another. Blake saw angels, and probably wouldn't have much time for Wordsworth's woe in "The World Is Too Much With Us." He also probably knew Iolo Morganwg and once swore himself into court as a druid, though I don't believe he was really doing druidic stuff. Especially given that at the time that was mostly whatever Iolo was making up.

And Wordsworth's other poems certainly evince spiritual beliefs.

In The Prelude (which Wordsworth didn't publish before he died), he remarks on the "immortal spirit" early on:

Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows
Like harmony in music; there is a dark
Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, makes them cling together
In one society. How strange that all
The terrors, pains, and early miseries,
Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused
Within my mind, should e'er have borne a part,
And that a needful part, in making up
The calm existence that is mine when I
Am worthy of myself! Praise to the end!
Thanks to the means which Nature deigned to employ;
Whether her fearless visitings, or those
That came with soft alarm, like hurtless light
Opening the peaceful clouds; or she may use
Severer interventions, ministry
More palpable, as best might suit her aim.

The spirit is a thing and life grows it. We're not totally fated at birth, but there is a kernel of soul there, which "[t]he terrors, pains, and early miseries" shape, and not always negatively. So Wordsworth does have his own beliefs independent of the materialism of the world he finds himself in. They just exceed their grasp, a bit.