Duke Poets Society - The Romantics Edition
Including an interview with Professor Timothy Heimlich
Intense feelings, locations that seem to transcend time, connection – unmistakably features of Romantic lyrical poetry that captured the hearts of nations in the late 18thC. The world turned from investigating the internal to appreciating the external and, as the globe became more interconnected, beauty was everywhere. Nationalist pride became rooted in individuals who believed their country was the most beautiful, and one way to cement that beauty was through literature.
We all remember being forced to read the likes of Wordsworth’s “I Wandered a Lonely Cloud” or “Kuba Khan” by Coleridge but removing them from your dusty 8th grade classroom may allow you to wonder at the timeless nature of these poems. What makes these poems so easy to read again and again? And how have they managed to worm their way into the very souls of poem lovers? I venture to suggest that in some cases the way we imagine locations has a lot to do with the way they are painted in the Romantics’ poems.
I sat down with Professor Timothy Heimlich to ponder some of the bigger questions surrounding this mystical genre.
What historical context do you think is important to take into account when reading a piece of Romantic poetry?
Theoretically everything! I am a historicist in that way. Speaking on critics such as Stephen Green and Kathy Gallagher’s invention of new historicism as a critical paradigm in the 1980s, the belief that no context is irrelevant and that any piece of content can be eliminated. But, for a more practical answer, for a long time British Romanticism has been described as a reaction to the failure of the French Revolution. The current revolution is a nationwide commitment to the promises of the Enlightenment era such as facts, logic, reason etc… Today, it is more about a universal fraternity and connection to the world as a whole.
To be alive during the French Revolution would have been an incredibly heavy time for a young artist. Old ignorance and superstition and injustice was promised to die away but instead it just ended with everyone’s head’s coming off! How do you attempt to reconcile that? How does the commitment to a revolution that promised equality and justice and freedom fail so badly? How does it produce tyranny and slaughter? Was all this revolution really just for a dictatorship (Napoleon's) on a scale never seen before in the history of Europe? The thought of that is highly depressing. It is often taught that Romantic poetry started as a reaction to the failures of the French Revolution as nobody really felt like they can believe in the possibility of a better world anymore. I think there is huge value in this viewpoint. The world-shattering defeat of the French Revolution produces art that’s trying to find its way forward in a kind of post-revolutionary world. If I had to pick one context, I would pick that.
Why do you think people resonate so deeply with Romantic poetry?
That’s a great question! I’m partial to the idea that Romantic poems really speak to a liberal, modern world connection. We are all the authors of our own destiny, and in which the individual can, in a literal sense, transcend their context. An individual can escape the structuring limits of their reality, even if only in their mind. And, if only in poetry, they can confront and change those limits or at least recognise how they’re working. I think that this promise of hegemonic liberalism is incredibly compelling to people. The idea that you can change your everyday life is very promising, even if it is just mentally. Romantic poetry is also an excuse to read non-political works and turn away from the realities of the wake of the French Revolution. It becomes a natural gazing and appreciation for the world around you in inward-looking nonaction.
If you could only read one romantic poet for the rest of your life, who would it be?
My heart says Keats, and my head says Wordsworth. I love Keats – there is such beauty and an unfinishedness nature in his poems, especially in his early work. In “Endymion” there is a sense of beautiful disaster that makes me want to dwell on it, as it is such a beautiful set of images. However, I find Wordsworth to be much more mentally stimulating, and I feel like I could talk about it forever – so if I answer as a professor, I would say Wordsworth. But, if it is just for myself and my own personal delectation, I would say Keats.
If you were to write a Romantic poem based on a landscape, where would you choose?
If I were to write Romantic poetry based on a landscape, I would probably copy Wordsworth’s pattern. This means I would probably have to return to a formative childhood site. There is a tiny corner of a small place that my grandparents used to take me to called Red Sur Nature Center, and there is a little hidden path right over a little spring, and you can walk down this boardwalk. When you look down you see water bubbling up. This is probably what I would write about because that seems kind of fraught with all these ideas on youth and internal renewal.
