Romanticism

A darling idea among the Romantics had been taken from Plotinus (typically via Thomas Taylor’s paraphrased translation, ‘An Essay on the Beautiful, from the Greek of Plotinus’, 1792). Coleridge would cite it in a footnote to chapter six of his Biographia Literaria (1817): ‘Never could the eye have beheld the sun, had not its own essence been soliform, neither can a soul not beautiful attain to an intuition of beauty.’ This would become a key concept for the contemporary poetic dreamer, and it would inspire intuitive and beautiful poems (some of them unfinished), to enchant and infuriate readers (such as Coleridge’s famous fragment, ‘Kubla Khan’, Keats’s abandoned ‘Hyperion’, or the lacunae left in many of Shelley’s lines). Romantics would generate gnomic expressions to set some of their readers dreaming and leave others perplexed. Keats’s conclusion to his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ comes to mind: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

‘It may seem wonderful,’ said Thomas Taylor in his introduction to his translation of Plotinus’s ‘Essay on the Beautiful’, ‘that language, which is the only method we have of conveying our conceptions, should at the same time be a hindrance to our advancement in philosophy: but the wonder ceases when we consider, that it is seldom studied as the vehicle of truth, but is too frequently esteemed for its own sake, independent of its connection with things.’ For Taylor, the greatest thinkers such as Plato and Plotinus ‘studied things more than words’, and ‘Truth alone was the ultimate object of their search.’ For Taylor, the roots of the very best writers go far, far down below any merely literary efflorescence. They search for what is essential. They tend to object to language being used in an outward and mechanical way at the expense of depth and emotion. Keats famously put it in these lines:

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow… (Lamia).

It is therefore ironic that the Romantics – in such ardent pursuit of the essential – are alleged to have left behind them so many merely literary expressions sitting extraneously on the page. Such words might help their user build a sort of shelter from life’s less pleasing energies, or a system within which to lock oneself and preach from at one’s ease. But that shelter or system can only ever be temporary. As Baudelaire would put it, ‘a system is a kind of damnation; it is always necessary to be inventing a new one, and the drudgery involved is a cruel punishment.’ Baudelaire is keenly sensible that his means are finite and his needs infinite. He might at one point in his life put into words a system that seems ‘beautiful, spacious, vast, convenient, neat, and above all, water-tight’. But at a later point in his life the beauty will evaporate, the spaciousness will shrink, the convenience will become inconvenience, and above all, the water-tightness will be lost. This will happen because ‘always some spontaneous, unexpected product of universal vitality’ (Baudelaire, The Mirror of Art) will throw into ruin the false configuration. Baudelaire conveys something of how draughty and uncomfortable it can feel – analogous perhaps with being half in and half out of the womb – to know that one’s shelter, or system, is no longer providing the support it did at first, and that one must somehow thrust through it in search of something else.
Earlier, Blake too, had caught the emotional rawness of the predicament:

Into the dangerous world I leapt,
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud. (‘Infant Sorrow’, Songs of Experience)

Blake’s speaker – or seeker – can only exert himself so much before becoming spent, silent and resentful, as many do:

Struggling in my father’s hands,
Striving against my swaddling bands,
Bound and weary, I thought best
To sulk upon my mother’s breast. (‘Infant Sorrow’, Songs of Experience)

Wordsworth put it in a memorable nutshell in his ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy…

Having found himself driven out of his artificial paradise, Baudelaire has garlanded himself with the artificial flowers of evil, a grotesque though psychologically familiar sort of consolation. He is an outsider in the sense that we all are, finding ‘no end in wandering mazes lost’ (as Coleridge put it, quoting Milton’s Paradise Lost), feeling isolated from wisdom, from Eden, from the One, from ourselves, and obliged, as Thomas Taylor put it, to ‘pursue matter in its dark labyrinths’ (Collected Writings of Plotinus). Lost and living on our wits, we can only find ourselves oscillating on an arc of attitude between playfulness and warfare. Shelley too put the problem fiercely and memorably:

’Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit’s knife
Invulnerable nothings. – We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay. (Shelley, Adonais)

Incomplete, eccentric, confused and interrupted as Romanticism can seem, to adventure into its achievements is to pass into a sphere of completeness and continuity, but also a realm of risk and rebellion:

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

Baudelaire (hating the world with his fires, ices and artificial paradises), Taylor (hating ‘the lucre of traffic and merchandize’) and Shelley (hating the ‘moral desert’ in which he routinely found the good and the beautiful scorned, and himself humiliated) were all capable of attacking in writing what they hated.
Wordsworth, however, is in some ways a more interesting case, and in the end perhaps even more deeply defiant in his solitude and aloofness. No verbal arsonist, and not inclined to the same vehemence of expression as the other writers inspired by Taylor, Wordsworth took a while to find his voice. But when he did, he spoke a self-knowledge not to be levelled, and not to be too easily understood – and indeed not to be published until after his death in 1850 (when his long, autobiographical poem, The Prelude, would finally enter the public domain). He would speak to the depths so resoundingly as to involve the roots of his own life with the beginnings of other writers’ lives…