Thoughts on Romanticism

 

As I’ve been reading and enjoying the English Romantic poets recently, I thought I should dig deeper into the metaphysics of Romantic poetry. This ties in with the appreciation for forms that undergird reality. That which is real is the basis for what we see and experience.

The best of the Romantic poets and prose artists depict life through the lens of imagination, which is the key to the Romantic mindset. Sometimes they portray the best of the past and what we can learn from it, not always the realistic version. Other times they portray the worst. They offer strong critique of man’s disregard and corruption of nature and the consequences of it, be it nominalism, industrialism, or the iconoclastic excesses of the Reformation.

At its best it presents man in wholeness, mind, body, and spirit. It portrays life as it should be, both internally and externally. The consequences of excessive control are presented as harmful, whereas the good that comes from living in harmony with nature is positive.

On the other hand, the anthropology of Romanticism is overly optimistic. Believing that original sin is an outward problem that can be fixed through natural means is faulty. The inward decay of man is at best neglected and at worst contradicted. This stems from an overemphasis on man being made in the image of God over and against the belief in man’s depravity. The imaginative emphasis, so beautifully portrayed in authors like Walter Scott and Coleridge, is taken to excess in one like Percy Shelley.

Another pitfall among the Romantics is idealism which leads to ideology. The critique of one (bad) system while demanding implementation of a (better) system will not lead to wise correction but militant overcorrection. The example of Procrustes is appropriate here. The perfect ideal becomes the enemy of the achievable, moderate correction. There is an inherent dualism in play here. Romantics tend to divided the real from the ideal, focusing only on the latter and neglecting the former.

The most significant problem with many Romantics is their atheism. They begin with forms given by God by neglect the One who gave them in the first place. For these atheists their religion is naturalistic pantheism; their philosophy then has no real foundation, but the forms are solely their own individual imaginations. To whatever the imagination is captivated by natural law, reason, and the Creator, the results are truly beautiful. Once the imagination is divorced these things, the result may be beautiful on the surface but underneath is brutal.