Since at least the 1940s, scholars have asked whether general terms like "romantic" have real meaning. Imagine the history and literature of the past as a huge painting on a wall. If we stand up close, what we see is not a "picture" but thousands of brush strokes going in many different directions. So it is with "big terms" like Enlightenment, Renaissance, and Romanticism: if you look at them with care, they may seem to fall apart, to have so many people and movements thinking different things that no central pattern emerges.

In this week, however, we’re standing pretty far back from the painting on the wall in an effort to discern some general tendencies. Start with the Enlightenment, which was distinguished by its belief in the universal rights of men (or, of property-holders), by a belief in reason based on science and logic, by a resistance to nationalism and localism. An "idea" in the Enlightenment should be true in all places, unaffected by the character of any local group. Aristocracy and especially monarchy seemed like irrational holdovers from a distant past; religion itself became suspect, or was transformed into a "rational" set of images: God became not an angry parent or mysterious deity, but a remote clockmaker who got things started and let them work out. Adam Smith’s Enlightenment notion that the world of business and finance were guided by an "invisible hand" that allowed all markets ultimately to make sense, fit nicely into this religious framework.

In this big general picture, we can single out the French Revolution (1789-93) as the event that changed people’s perceptions. Many who welcomed it as the triumph of Enlightenment ideals of reason—the Revolution put the royal family to death, opposed the Roman Catholic Church, sacked many religious institutions and shut down monasteries, abolished the aristocracy and replaced it with the universal egalitarian rank of "Citizen," and so on—shuddered as the Revolution turned to rampant slaughter of suspected opponents, to the abolition of the distinctions that seemed to hold society together, to what looked like "irrationality." The French national anthem, the Marseillaise, from this period still celebrates "impure blood running in our gutters."

In short, this event as much as any other brought us from the illusion of a reasonable world to the experience of a world in which emotion trumped reason. Other events of the period had similar effects: the growth of the cities and of factories spawned a "return to nature" movement that idealized the pastoral life. National revolutions against oppressive empires—particularly the Greek War of Independence against Turkey, 1821-1828—and developments in the study of language led to a "romantic" sort of nationalism, in which the character of a group was closely connected with a sense of blood ties and racial or ethnic pride. Rules—the architecture of laws that held society together—were challenged as impositions on individual genius. In music and the arts, we move from the classical structures of Mozart and Benjamin West to the stormy works of Beethoven, Berlioz and Delacroix.

What about literature? This week’s work will feature a group of poets whom we can (very roughly) call "romantics":

England

Blake
Wordworth
Keats

Whitman
Dickinson

Wordsworth, Blake and Keats

The "Preface" to the second edition of William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1800) contained this famous statement, a sort of "in your face" to the orderliness of the Enlightenment: poetry, they said, results from "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." They pressed for the use of natural everyday diction in literary works.

Blake

Dr. Marc Stier of the Intellectual Heritage Program has written very well about lambs and tigers, two key Blake animal groups, in the poem "The Tyger." Why these two groups, Stier asks?

Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Noting the "nursery rhyme" qualities of "The Lamb," its seeming "sappy" "simplicity of language, rhyme and meter," and the "double Christian imagery" in which the Lamb is both ourselves and Jesus. Then he asks a very important question: "why [would] someone might write it for or present it to an adult. And …. What does it say about us that we find it sappy and child-like":

"Reading ‘The Lamb,' then helps us recognize that our independence is made possible by that which we have been given and still receive from others, from nature and, maybe, from God. And thus it calls forth the characteristic human response to gifts, a sense of gratitude. Is that reminder, and the sentiment it gives rise to, useful? Perhaps not for rational and industrious Lockean men and women who are busy expanding their productive powers. But the poem might be pointing us to the limiting and unsalutary effects of this Lockean view on our lives. Thinking about what we have been given puts our daily struggles into some perspective and, perhaps, lightens the burdens that they put upon us. And gratitude for what we have been given leads us to respond in kind, especially to those left behind by a Lockean political community" that is, after all, based on property..

Turning to "The Tyger," Dr. Stier suggests that it, too, "points … to features of our experience that we too easily neglect" such as and terror. "[P]erhaps The Tyger is meant to shock us into recognizing and acknowledging the fearful, fearsome, dangerous, and thus awe inspiring experiences that await us." Here Dr. Stier quotes Dr. Zelnick: "in ‘normalizing the world to the convenience of our dream of safety, we drive vital energy far from us." Again, Dr. Stier turns Blake against Locke:
 

Again, we can see what Blake is pointing us towards if we contrast his view with that of Locke. Just as rational and industrious people ignore what they have been given, they ignore what they can lose. They trod the safe and narrow path. They are not the ones who most contribute to the expansion of human powers. It is no accident that in the fourth stanza of  "The Tyger" Blake has the artificer of the tiger use human tools. The power and ambition to shape the natural world, for Blake, does not come from a desire to "relieve man’s estate." Rather it comes from the desire to build something in the world that measures up to, and gains power over, the natural forces that terrify us. The great builders of humankind—like the great benefactors—are not, for Blake, the rational and industrious but the visionaries and gamblers.

So, here we have two short poems that can be posed against all of our reading in Locke. This is a productive way to look at them.

If we turn to "The Chimney Sweeper," we see another side of Blake, concerned about social justice. You should ponder the poem’s last line: What is the message of this line? What poetic device is the poet using? Who is the speaker?