‘Looking backwards in order to be forward-looking’. Or just how Modern were the Romantics?

Abstract

Although there may be little agreement on what exactly constitutes ‘Romanticism’, there is no denying that our contemporary discourse is still driven by many of those greater ‘questions’ first raised at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Goethe, Schiller and Schlegel had posited the classic homogeneous spirit of the ancient world against the ‘romantic’, that they call ‘modern’ because of its intrinsic dialectical characteristic or union of opposite or discordant qualities. We may perceive this phenomenon as a permanent and transnational aspect of the human spirit, and thus use the term in the singular (René Wellek), or rather as a plurality of ‘Romanticisms’ (A.O. Lovejoy), but we should not discard the wider non-literary aspects as indeed it affected all the other arts (Beethoven and Turner), and it was a political, religious and philosophic phenomenon. At the root of all romanticism is the belief “that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities” (T.E. Hulme). This had already been foreseen in the mid eighteenth century by the ‘Poets of Sensibility’ or the ‘Graveyard School’: The major changes from the previous paradigm are assembled in Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751) – a poem combining all the brighter, and all the darker aspects, of what Romanticism was soon to become. Thanks to the bitter-sweet fruits of this Romantic Agon, in the 21st century we have a granted, even if not always recognised, access to modernity: democratic and independent nation-states, pedagogical responsibility and universal education, ecological and zoological consciousness, creative freedom and philosophical speculation, but also religious scepticism, political disillusionment, fragmentation and alienation of the self, hallucinatory addiction, morbidity and Satanism.