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 going to stand 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. "Mystery" replaced reason. 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

United States

Whitman
Dickinson

Wordsworth, Blake and Keats

In the "Prefaces" to the first and second editions of their collection, Lyrical Ballads (1798, 1800), William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge made a sort of "in your face" statement to the orderliness of the Enlightenment, advocating not poetic words but everyday speech and insisting that poetry results from "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings": these feelings, not the rules and conventions of poetic form, should shape a poem, they said.