a pretty romantic post

…for the next week and a half we shall bask together in the period of romance, or the romantic time period…

Before we get started- foundational knowledge:

Romanticism:

- late 18^th and early 19^th century

- Precise characterization or specific definition…unfortunately there really isn’t one

- Some scholars view romanticism as:

1. continuous with the present
2. an inaugural movement in modernity
3. a counter Enlightenment, or resistance to the Enlightenment
4. an aftermath of the French Revolution

- largely about intuition, imagination, feeling as opposed to deductive reason

Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882:

- poet, philosopher, leader of transcendentalist movement (ideal spiritual state transcends the physical and empirical and is realized through intuition rather than doctrines of established religions)

* Once upon a time Harold Bloom declared, “Emerson is God”. I’m not so sure I would suggest that this statement is theologically sound, but nonetheless I offer it as food for thought.

I can’t begin without writing about one issue, among others, that I take with transcendentalism, namely the idea that all of creation is inherently good. Hold up, what about human depravity? This one discrepancy between Emerson and me leads to countless discrepancies. I detest what this idea further amounts to, that intuition is the source of truth, that individual perception illuminates and structures the world. Sounds to me like egocentrisicm to the max, like we become our own god as our minds determine that which Truth is. Besides this would mean that there are multiple truths, as if our world isn’t chaotic enough as we seek truth. Clearly, I come to literature and largely life with a lens far different from the lens of Emerson.

In Emerson’s The Poet, he suggests that all experience is meaningful, sounds reasonable to me. However, he goes to write that to be a poet is to be alert to meanings that saturate all of existence, sound a bit iffy, and it gets more obscure. According to Emerson everyone has the ability to hold the special office of poet, but few do, and those who do are sovereign. Sovereign, you have got to be kidding me Emerson?! Unless I have a completely different understanding of the denotation of the word sovereign; I do not for one minute believe that poets reign over others as emperors, or liberating gods, as he suggests. Perhaps I cam completely taking Emerson out of context, I think I might hope that I am!

Lets give Emerson some credit- the following is a quality quote that I highlighted from Emerson’s From The American Scholar:

“The writer was a just and wise spirit; henceforward it is settled the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statute. Instantly the book becomes noxious: the guide is tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these works. Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence the booklearned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a story of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees.”