Rediscovering the Romantics
The Lake District, Cumbria
William Wordsworth was born on this day in 1770. Wordsworth was perhaps the best known of the English Romantics and the poet laureate of England that helped usher in the movement with his opium eating friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Thanks to a wonderful senior English teacher, I devoted much of my time in college studying the English Romantics and never tired of their verse. Keats and the lesser known John Clare, both tragic figures, are my favorites.
I don’t believe any writers in any period capture the majesty of the natural world or understand its importance better than the Romantics, which in America, includes Thoreau. Wordsworth, Keats and Clare write about a very deep, spiritual connection with nature, its healing properties and the danger of being disconnected from it.
For Abbey lovers, there’s something for everyone in the Romantic period. Love of nature, even the worship of it, an assault against commercialism and industrialism, support of individual freedom and in some cases, even atheism. The Romantics were perhaps the first monkeywrenchers, using their pens and verse to rail against the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution and its erudite proponents.
Wordsworth, like Coleridge, was a champion of radical ideas for much of his life, although he did eventually became a political conservative. Much has been written about this transformation, and some, including Shelley and Browning, helped disseminate the idea that Wordsworth sold his political principles for money and the favor of his social superiors.
But during much of his early and productive years, he was devoted to destroying what he perceived to be the cause of all the “evil” in the realm, the government. He was supportive of French Republicanism until the reign of Robespierre, which taught him that violence only breeds more violence and solves nothing.
As he would consistently do throughout his life, he once again turned to nature for answers.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”-John Keats, Ode On A Grecian Urn
The pen was a powerful tool in those days, because people actually read. No tee-vees, no iPods and other gizmos to cloud your consciousness and bake your brain. But today, as a good friend recently commented, “more people today can name the contestants on American Idol than can name their children’s teachers.”
So true and how terribly sad.
Here’s a well known Wordsworth poem, with an oft quote line I’m sure you’ll recognize….
The Tables Turned
Up! up! my friend, and clear your looks,
Why all this toil and trouble?
Up! up! my friend, and quit your books,
Or surely you’ll grow double.
The sun, above the mountain’s head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.
Books! ’tis dull and endless strife,
Come, here the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music; on my life
There’s more of wisdom in it.
And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
And he is no mean preacher;
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.
She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless–
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by chearfulness.
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man;
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
Sweet is the lore which nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mishapes the beauteous forms of things;
–We murder to dissect.
Enough of science and of art;
Close up these barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
You have sent this english major back 10 years (the number of years in Vonnegut’s timequake, we’ll catch you on the flip side Kurt), talking about these romantics. An idea that I have been talking about lately with a friend of mine (to be enacted in the future when our families homestead together on the same land) is to revive the lyceum that Emerson, Throreau, and the other New England philosophysing abolitionists used as a community forum. You book the town hall for a Saturday night and bring in local thinkers and experts to talk about the war, beekeeping, pruning your fruit trees, strengthening the local economy, etcetera, ad nauseum. Finally you cap the evening off with homebrew, music and dancing. Finally, the poem above reminds me of the Whitman poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.” The learn’d astronomer can only teach us so much and the speaker leaves the lecture to walk under the stars. Thanks for the flashback.