The Persistence of Romanticism

Two reviews in the April 30 edition of the TLS highlight the continuing influence of Romanticism. Colin Falck’s American and British Verse in the Twentieth Century characterizes romanticism as the effort “to build a spiritual work in the context of a religious dogma that has failed, and a scientific and mechanistic world-picture that has succeeded all too well,” and defined this way romanticim’s dilemmas are still ours. Interest in spirituality (inevitably, vaguely defined), in Eastern Religions, and so on indicates that the same dynamics remain in our culture.

Elsewhere in the same issue Ann Gaylin reviews John Beer’s Post-Romantic Consciousness , in which Beer argues that Romanticism is “a line of thought that is fundamentally anti-Cartesian” and that stretches from “the English Romantics to twentieth-century literature and philosophy.” Challenging the assumption that “rational analysis was adequate to comprehend the workings of the human mind,” the Romantics “considered Being as ‘the real key to human nature.’” Being here provided a way, in Beer’s language, of connecting “processes of natural life and the subconscious work of the human psyche.” Or, as Wordsworth put it, “We feel that we are greater than we know.”