Romanticism as a literary art has often been cited as an influential artistic ideology that has since been surpassed by other forms of literary engagement. And while it is rare to call contemporary poets or artists romantics, many scholars have connected the attitudes and effects of romanticism to modern day ideas about liberalism and political engagement. In the context of British romanticism, it occured at a time where the British were exporting their ideas of culture and knowledge globally. So is it so wrong to say that Romanticism as a literary doctrine could influence the ways that its followers understood and engaged with the world around it? Given the context of coloniality, the struggle for revolution, and the inability of romantics to support it, romanticism can be read as being intrinsically tied to liberal bourgeois society. In particular, the writings of William Wordsworth outline the link and failures of romantic/liberal worldbuilding because William Wordsworth the Romantic poet-prophet is objectively a liberal. In order to connect the ways that romanticism informs and infects liberalism with its basic assumptions, this essay will seek to link British romantic poet William Wordsworth to the failures of the liberal bourgeoisie order.
libs and romantics, best friends 5evr
According to cultural theorist and conservative Carl Schmitt, Romanticism as an art form and Liberalism as a governing political ideology are inherently tied based on the way that they approach affect. Affect is how communication produces certain responses in subjects; it is how desire is articulated between bodies. To Schmitt, this observation is based on three beliefs that Romanticism and Liberalism share.
The first is that both a liberal and a romantic view the world as “a purely aesthetic object on which to project the imagination” (Schmitt 5). This means that rather than understanding the world based on a set of capital T truth claims, or empiricism, the romantic understands the world through aesthetics and emotion. A romantic acts insofar as they are moved. Thus, one cannot understand an action taken by a romantic as a performance or something one does, but rather as an affect or mood; something one feels. This mirrors the way that classical liberal practice politics because the product of an action is not a result that can be evaluated by moral standards, but rather can only be understood aesthetically or emotively. This explains why the romantic, like the liberal, centers personal experience and private spheres as the mechanism through which enlightenment can be reached.
This connects to the second tenet, the tendency to “create private realities where everything is subject to the poeticization of various spheres of life” (Schmitt 11). This is because romanticism “transposed intellectual productivity into the domain of the aesthetic, into art and art criticism; and then, on the basis of the aesthetic, it comprehended all other domains” (Parker 137). This means that while romantics take art as an absolute end in and of itself, it precludes the possibility of having any concrete ending point from which to strive for. If life is composed of several individual aesthetic experiences, then the world becomes a series of occasions upon which one can “deploy a purely personal power of imagination” that never can be nor has to be truth tested by any notion of reality. This is like liberal regimes focusing on the aesthetics of liberation without defending any concrete understanding of it, like how the United States will criticize the gay rights of nations in the Middle East as a guise for imperialism rather than an actual and vested interest in protecting gay people globally.
The last tenet shared between the two is the belief that humans are naturally good, and that there is a shared and benevolent human nature. This is what justifies the notion of individual experiences being ontologically good and epistemologically sound. The belief that there is a stable and good human nature establishes the projection of poetic imagination as inspired and relevant. If the romantic and liberal subjects believe themselves to be a natural good, then any poetic or aesthetic energy radiating out of them must also be good. This is not only a denial of original sin, but is a form of secularization which displaces a hierarchical order and replaces it with the individual who might not be able to change the world, but has an unlimited ability to appreciate its aesthetic dimensions, joyful or terrible. This is like how in modern liberal regimes, the fight for social justice happens based on the experiences of individuals rather than a collective understanding of injustice.
With an understanding of the ideological and affectual similarities between romanticism and liberalism, it is now possible to apply this model to the way that Wordsworth both understands the world, and the French Revolution in particular. This essay will now move to produce the second section.
willy’s romanticism
Wordsworth’s conception of poetry and politics meets all three tenets of Schmitt’s definition of romanticism. While there are many ways to connect the two, this essay will primarily focus on “Lines: Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” and his depiction of the French Revolution as written in his masterpiece, The Prelude.
In “Tintern Abbey”, the first tenet of Schmitt’s definition is overtly clear. In the poem, he revisits a spot he liked to sit and contemplates life with a new more mature attitude. Wordsworth, the poet prophet looks out at the landscape and “behold[s] these steep and lofty cliffs, that on a wild secluded scene impress thoughts of more deep seclusion” (Wordsworth 116). This establishes the first part of the Schmitt’s first definition. Before Wordsworth is able to think critically about and process the world, he has to experience an emotional event and appreciate the aesthetic beauty of nature. This is developed throughout the poem, in which the visualization of different aesthetics along the view prompts Wordsworth to lament about other subjects. Indeed, “these beauteous forms, through a long absence, have not been to me as is a landscape to a blind man’s eye” (Wordsworth 119). These visuals prompt “unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps…his little, nameless, unremembered, acts” (Wordsworth 119). This represents the tendency within Wordsworth to apply different emotive and aesthetic connections onto the landscape around him. Each different visual connects to a different memory. The “cliffs” bear to mind “childhood”, and “Hermit’s wreath” connects him to his sister (Wordsworth 118). This landscape is not meant to be appreciated holistically, but rather each scene presents the narrator with a different experience from which he can “see into the life of things” (Wordsworth 119). Wordsworth can act only insofar as he is moved.
Now that Wordsworth has set the mood through which he can experience the world, his mind begins to wander to other subjects, connecting him to the second tenet of Schmitt’s comparison. Wordsworth’s “blessed mood, in which the burthen of the mystery, in which the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world, is lightened” (Wordsworth 119). To Wordsworth, aesthetic appreciation is a prerequisite to comprehend other forms of life. In order to understand the rest of the world, Wordsworth needs to feel an emotion through a particular aesthetic in order to apply that to other worldly situations. The feeling of being interconnected with nature is a prerequisite to the intelligibility of his world view. This application of the aesthetic and emotive responses to color the mechanism through on can understand “life and food for future years” (Wordsworth 119). Wordsworth’s understanding of reality is dominated by the aesthetic.
Wordsworth’s connection to the third tenet of liberalism is also apparent throughout “Tintern Abbey.” He constantly thinks about the future, and about the “unremembered acts of kindness” that he believes underpins the experiences of modern men. He also laments that through this aesthetic experiences, the “real and good” measures of human life are made apparent to him. This necessarily is underlied with the assumption that nature is inherently good, and the thoughts that come from “seclusion” are also good, which frames the way in which Wordsworth is able to engage the world around him (Wordsworth 120). His memories, opinions and observations are all colored by emotive and aesthetic prompts that he does not question, only experiences. This is like the ways that liberal regimes understand themselves to be good. Wordsworth cannot achieve his emotive state in the dirty throngs of “industrial societie” because it denies nature, and the human goodness that is a part of it (Wordsworth 20). Liberal regimes understand their historic circumstances and beliefs to be the only good or legitimate ones, and can offer a human experience not possible under any other forms of government. Look to the red scare as an example of America’s inability to conceptualize life outside its own circumstance.
stfu liberals
For Schmitt, the basic beliefs and tenets of romanticism and liberalism are not neutral. The ways that romanticism worldbuilders have material impacts on the ways their subscriptors approach ethical and political situations. Thus it is unhelpful to understand romanticism as an obsolete approach to literature, but rather as an attitude and disposition that is also found in political orientations today. Under a Schmittian analysis, romanticism and liberalism share two theoretical flaws in conjunction with their three basic tenets.
The first critical implication one can draw from Wordsworth’s romantic attitude is that of subjective occasionalism. This is the understanding of the world through individual experiences separated by aesthetic and emotion. Romanticism is the same in literature as politics. It turns the world into mere “occasions” one individually experiences. This is as seductive as it is useless: the romantic is able to take “any concrete point as a departure and stay into the infinite and the incomprehensive” either through positive emotions or negative ones (Schmitt 4). This necessarily precludes the possibility of distinguishing actual morality because the hyper-focus on individual experience represents a turning away from understanding the world in terms of a concrete political reality from which one can understand or criticize, but rather the inconsequential realm of fantasy. Political realities become mystified in romantic terms to individual experiences the romantic subject can interpret outside other contexts.
Whatever the romantic experiences in the occasion is not really questioned, because that at its base is the point at which romanticism produces coherent epistemologies. This leaves the romantic with no ability to adequately make distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘rights’ and ‘obligations.’ This is because “the overt focus on the aesthetic necessarily precludes the possibility” of determining truth claims because all events exist in a vacuum to be interpreted emotionally (Schmitt 15). This is why it is difficult to determine the political opinions of Wordsworth even in essays that are political, such as the leech-gatherer’s position in society or the orphaned child. Wordsworth only provides his audience with his emotive response and their aesthetic symbolization rather than constituting itself among any allegiance. Wordsworth, like most romantics, cannot pick a side because it is subject to a variety of emotions and aesthetics experienced in a vacuum.
This explains Wordsworth’s relationship to the French Revolution. When it initially began, Wordsworth was excited about the “freedom and joy and harmony” associated with revolutionary energy (Wordsworth 210). Wordsworth’s fundamental principle requires the security of the private realm to make individual observations. But because Wordsworth is unable to actually hold political opinions and stances beyond that of the individual, his ideas about the world are ultimately unpredictable and unreliable. So because Wordsworth at his core holds no political beliefs to be applied to various situations outside occasion, his support for radical politics immediately waned and he and other romantics quelled the possibility of a similar revolution occurring in England. Wordsworth went from a political revolutionary to an apolitical reactionary conservative more or less supporting the Royalists. Romantics “cannot be trusted to engage in political activism” because the lack of actual beliefs and privatized experiences do not lend themselves to engaging the social order in any reliable or coherent way (Schmitt 11). Wordsworth can support revolution in France but not in England because the lack of a coherent political frame means the subject’s experience are overly personal but also give the subject absolute power. It’s just about how the subject feels given the occasion.
It also explains how a “nation in romance!” turns murderous (Wordsworth 336). With no ability to articulate an end goal, an over-emphasis on individual occasions and aesthetics, anybody can be an enemy to the revolution, and thus anybody can be executed at any time. This is magnified based on the romantic’s understanding of their own innate goodness. It is impossible to question the outcomes of the revolution because it is always already aesthetically justified. This is the third implication of romantic ideology: the inability to question the circumstances one finds itself in. This displacement of the questioning of human motives denies original sin, and thus makes it possible for romantic liberals to avoid questioning their own conclusions because their poetic inspirations are innately good.
The second trap Wordsworth bites into is indecision. The use of the aesthetic to make sense of memories, roads into the future, and political revolutions like the French Revolution ends up being an inadequate way to engage the world. The problem with aestheticizing and personalizing experiences is that Wordsworth cannot make sense of the world in terms of cause and effect. The world is the way it is simply because of chance, rather than concrete material conditions. This prevents the romantic from being able to make any sort of decision because political truths are aesthetic truths to be interpreted. Thus, in Wordsworth’s imagination, questions of morality and truth are decided by the “all-seeing eye” of the ego who watches the world unfold and views it as an object of beauty (Wordsword 120). But this world construction leaves no clear path from which to proceed. How can one determine one’s own political motives when one is unable to go beyond individual occasions and see the bigger picture?
Just like Wordsworth can support and not support revolution, reject and pay allegiance the aristocracy, modern liberal society is unable to make coherent political decisions in similar ways. To apply this to modern liberal society, the United States, operating under a politik of romanticism constantly supports rebel causes on the affectual justification of ‘good’ vs ‘evil.’ Whether it be the “Cuban rebellion against the spanish, or anti-communist Cuban rebels at the bay of pigs to the Contras in Nicaragua, UNITA in Angola, the Kosovo Liberation Army” and others (Martinez 1). In every instance, the United States depicted claims to morality based on a case-by-case basis through no objective idea of morality in the first place. This explains how the United States was “just as likely to back” a dictatorship like the Contras in Nicaragua with fledgling democracies like the Kosovo Liberation Army (Martinez 1). Morality, action, and reality is not consistent under this worldview and it necessarily precludes the possibility of actually achieving and actualizing justice. The relentless pursuit of self interest “is inevitable given this approach to worldbuilding” because a subject’s knee-jerk reaction to stimuli sets the basis through which one understands ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (Martinez 1).
The ways that William Wordsworth turncoated the French Revolution and constructed his worldview echos the way that modern liberal regimes engage in and disengage in political situations. William Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey” and United States in modern geopolitical situations strives to write about, experience, and actualize justice. But with no stable understanding of the world and no coherent end goal to action, how can an endpoint of justice ever be actualized if it is only ever aestheticized?