A Few Doubts About Neo-Romanticism
Are you sure you want to become a Romantic?
Already before the Casper David Friedrich exhibition at the Met, many people have been predicting a revival of Romanticism in our time. The novelist and culture critic have both written memorably about it. Recently, we published an edition of CrowdSource with roundup of pro- and anti-Romanticism takes. Today, questions all this Romanticism-talk, asking whether we really would want to live like a Romantic artist.
— Santiago Ramos, executive editor
My first real directing gig, the first time I directed a play other than my own, was Bloody Poetry, a work from the 1980s by Howard Brenton, an English playwright. It’s about Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, her sister Claire, and the obscure John Polidori (the doctor and writer who traveled with them and penned The Vampyre). Together, they traipse across Europe and the Alps — outlaws, lovers, renegades, poets.
I’ve been thinking about Bloody Poetry more now that the discourse has once again turned its attention to Romanticism and the Romantics. I’ve been reflecting on my own academic training: studying as an undergraduate with a scholar of German Romanticism, Fred Beiser, and my lifelong engagement with the Romantics. At certain times in my own life — inspired by my reading — especially when I first moved to New York — I found myself trying on the persona of a Romantic, attempting to embody the spiritual, erotic, and creative adventurousness that such an identity entails. Because of my own mixed experience as a reader and practitioner, I wonder: can those of living today really ever access the radical freedom the Romantics pursued?
Certainly, on my own Substack, my writer’s diary, I’ve dabbled in answering in the affirmative; I have very often made claims that could be pronounced in the school of Romantic theology. I feel the pulse of Romantic thinking in my own brain — about God, nature, love, and the relationship of politics and industry, and other Leviathan-like things to the individual, the neighborhood, the farm, etc. But somehow, as invocations of Romanticism become more popular on Substack and beyond, I feel a little sheepish about my own Romanticism (my own Substack is named after Novalis, the great German Romantic), and want to interrogate my own critical claims.
I feel compelled to say that it’s important, and more honest, to distinguish between Romantic rhetoric, Romantic influence, and Romanticism itself. I believe a critical distinction must be made between the Romantic style of rhetorical claims (Romanticism as a meme) on platforms like Substack and Twitter and a demonstrably material and spiritual return (or even an aesthetic return) to Romanticism (Romanticism as a way of life). I worry that as soon as Romanticism transforms from a feeling mediated by contact with art, literature, music, and direct experience, and becomes discourse, a talking point, it loses something. I feel that Romanticism is a bit like Zen: to reduce it verbalisms defeats it.
So while several writers have argued that American culture — marked by the threat of AI, the omnipresence of phones and surveillance, and the demoralizing badness of mass entertainment — is entering “a new age of Romanticism,” I’m dubious that that claim is more than a broad gesture. Certain domains of American culture are influenced by the same ideas that inspired the Romantics, or ideas invented by the Romantics, but I think that’s something different than a great Romantic awakening. Admiring the best of Romantic thought, and nesting it inside of one’s own contemporary thinking, while productive, is all letter, and no spirit; Romanticism is aiding our discourse, but it’s still discourse.
Romanticism, as it turns out, historically was and remains quite hard; Romantic literature is a variation on the suicide note. A true neo-Romanticism cannot be declared; and in practice, our sensibilities may be completely unprepared for what it is or feels like (I do not find Luigi Mangione inspiring or interesting, but he is the strongest example to everything I’m saying here). Romanticism is tied to the sublime; at its worst (like with Saint Luigi) Romanticism falls into bathos and Promethean performance art. A new age of Romanticism would not take much interest in Substacks about Romanticism or take part panels about AI; it would be off in the woods, or on the highway, on a motorcycle on the run; it would be reading by the fire, taking marginal notes; Romanticism would be having more sex, too. The 1960s were much closer to the Romantics in spirit than we are — and we are no 1960s, even.
A new Romanticism would not just question compulsive post-Covid safetyism, it would reject, laugh at, the entire civilizational premise of statistics-based reasoning and the securitization of the human body. The Romantics, in no particular order, practiced or dabbled in incest, sorcery, murder and suicide. (Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther arguably incited a wave of suicides, and Gérard de Nerval walked his pet lobster on a leash before hanging himself.) They were afflicted with insane diseases like syphilis, something like a combination of mad cow disease and AIDS, risking biological dissolution every time they had sex. In some cases, like Shelley’s and Byron’s, they were watched by the state. In Shelley’s case, he was cut off from his inheritance. (Chateaubriand, another Romantic exile, had a tumultuous relationship with political authority, as did Mickiewicz, the Polish Romantic poet who was forced to leave his homeland.)
Many of them were aristocratic, rebellious, savage and tender. They didn’t live long. Keats, the most gentle and lovable of all the Romantics, was killed by tuberculosis at 25. Kleist and his lover took their own lives on November 21, 1811. Schubert, the greatest Romantic composer along with Beethoven (and alongside Chopin and Liszt, who embodied different strains of Romanticism), died of syphilis at 31. Wagner, the most baroque and supreme of the late Romantics, has been, probably rightly, accused of inciting all sorts of political and moral evil with his music and philosophy. Balzac wrote, slept around, and accrued unmanageable debts until he died young. (Pushkin, too, was fatally entangled in the aristocratic decadence of his time, dying in a duel.) Rimbaud likely sought extreme adventure after extreme adventure at the margins of civilization until he finally met the death he had been looking for. Baudelaire, when he wasn’t able to get more money out of his mother, would wander the streets of Paris in a state of total abjection. We all know how La Bohème ends.
The Romantics were not cultural commentators. They were not at their laptops in a coffee shop writing about the damning effects of technology, as I myself often am. They are haunting figures who have grown steadily more tragic with historical hindsight, more sinned against than sinning — and sometimes more sinning than sinned against. They are villain-victims, both protagonists and authors, historically situated in the passing darkness of feudalism and the oncoming darkness of capitalism, illuminated by brief rays of hope that allowed them to form messianic and utopian visions of the future in which nature and science could coexist. (This can be seen in the works of Novalis, who imagined a magical, spiritualized world, or Fourier, whose Romantic socialism posited utopian communities of erotic and economic harmony.)
Their poetic prophecies, while moving and influential — staples of literature classrooms for two centuries — have, with the exception of the 1960s, failed to have any meaningful impact on politics and political economy. (Even the Surrealists, who considered themselves heirs to Romanticism, struggled to turn aesthetic rebellion into political transformation.) The most permanent influence of the Romantics is on the modern understanding of imagination, existentialism, and other forms of 20th-century individualism. But it’s fair to say that, as far as I can tell, there are no ultra-sexual, super-genius aristocrats riddled with venereal disease running around New York, London, L.A., or Miami. Of course, there are people who embody aspects of a Romantic personality, who possess certain component parts, but I don’t think the material and social conditions exist to truly recreate the love, violence, and massive energy of the late 18th and early 19th centuries — the conditions under which a few dozen artist-thinkers could warp their entire civilization through their convictions about freedom.
Stated frankly, Romanticism is genius plus criminality in an attempt to make the outer world resemble the inner world — beautiful, wild, insane, primitive and unconscious, and yet highly refined at the same time. Maybe for good reason, Romanticism has not proven to be sound or adaptive. It’s been weeded out of civilization. We rational, armchair, laptop Romantics are lapdogs to their wolves.
(Another way to put this is that we shouldn’t really want a Romantic age. A Romantic age is one of destructive revolution and, in a sense, absolute ruin. Goethe, the greatest of all the Romantics, saw this very quickly. So did Wordsworth, who ended his life as a kind of conservative.)
I think it’s important for us to consider whether we really desire to embody chaos, rebellion, insanity, and whether the belief or intuition that an art requires that dose of poison to achieve greatness is a productive one. And whether, in final calculation, our comfortable, safe, and predictable technocentric lives have rendered it fundamentally impossible for us to follow the path of Byron, Shelley, Rimbaud, Wagner — to cast our bodies and spirits into the volcano of modern civilization.
I’m going to attach a postscript, or what you might call a Romantic fragment. What I’ve meant to say is that Romanticism isn’t easily detachable from the experimental, dangerous, and cosmologically rebellious historical behaviors of the people who incepted the tradition. But I don’t actually think that neo-Romanticism would mean dressing like a 19th-century aristocrat or riding about on horseback.
The broader point is that we are so deep into internet-mediated experiences — I mean, I’m writing this on the internet for you, internet readers — that most neo-Romantic behavior necessarily becomes inauthentic. So, we shouldn’t worry about whether the age we’re living in is Romantic. The best of Romanticism is highly private. It’s not on the internet. It’s not discourse. It’s not a vibe. It’s in the mind, in the body; it’s a frequency of the soul — at its best and purest. The Romantics were willing to die for love. Yes, they were willing to die for revolution, but they were also willing to die for poetry. What is best in the Romantics is the intensity with which they sought private experience — an experience they actively sought to create. If there’s one stable, useful truth we can extract from them, it is that what matters is experience, and that love is the highest experience.
Why should someone be a Romantic today? Why would someone be a Romantic today? Because being a Romantic means, perhaps, that you’ve felt a transformative love — a love worth dying for. Or a love worth just … changing for. It doesn’t have to be grand or public. Romanticism exalts feeling; feeling deepens life.
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This is a wonderful post and, frankly, a very welcome distraction at a difficult and stressful time. If it were to be expanded, I would add the observation that "romanticism" and its cult of intense feeling may better be viewed as part of a larger thing, or alternatively, was big enough to contain more than aestheticism and doomed sex. Certainly it was associated with philosophical idealism and its attempts to meet/justify/ground human needs for cultural identification and expression and (in a way that did not depend on revealed religion) human thirsts for transcendence. Herder and Fichte and Emerson and Thoreau lack the louche appeal of the crowd you mention, but they share something with them. (Last year's WoC podcast with Charles Taylor gets at some of this.)
And then there is this one incredibly romantic thing about idealism: it fails as a philosophy but succeeds as anthropology. Like romanticism, idealism get us. (Sigh.)
It's interesting to me that Wordsworth and Coleridge, usually considered the first of the British Romantics, were both, even at their early career Romantic heights, were both quite pious Christians and lived relatively quiet small-c conservative lives; certainly they did not indulge in the Byronic excesses later associated with the movement.