Transcript INTRODUCTION TO THE SCOPE OF LITERARY CRITICISM

ROMANTIC LITERARY
CRITICISM
Literary Criticism
Sandya Maulana, S.S.
ROMANTIC LITERARY CRITICISM
Romanticism is a reaction towards the advances in science and technology
and, later, society and economy, seen in the late eighteenth century. These
advances were seen as degenerating people into rigid structures of society
and nature into mere commodities. Thus, the rational world, in the
Romantic point of view, was artificial, devoid of consideration of nature
and human emotions. When Romanticism first swept Europe, it rejected
the neoclassical ideas, which are full of rigid and prescriptive rules as well
as elevated language and composition.
Romanticism was thought to begin in Germany in the late eighteenth
century. The works of Goethe embody Romantic qualities, although this
conclusion came later after Romanticism was well all over Europe and
America. It is important to note that Romanticism is usually characterized
by the depiction of idealized nature, preference to everyday language, and
importance of human feelings. These characteristics were expanded by the
writers of the late Romanticism, including American writers of the middle
of the nineteenth century
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON
GOETHE (1749 – 1852)
Like most great poets, Goethe tried to stand free of labels, but the critic
Schlegel was certainly right to identify many of his views with
Romanticism. Goethe held a number of opinions that became current in
his time, and thus became identified with Romanticism, particularly the
distinction between allegory and symbolism. His “Maxim no. 279” is also
Romantic in nature. In it, Goethe prefers the poet that starts his poetry
with the particular, which “is what reveals poetry in its true nature: it
speaks forth a particular without independently thinking of or referring
to a universal, but in grasping the particular in its living character it
implicitly apprehends the universal along with it.”
Notable work: Conversation with Eckermann(1836).
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770
– 1850)
Wordsworth’s Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads shifts emphasis
from the relationship between poem and reader to that between poet and
poem. He considers the poet a teacher not of concepts but of immediate
intuitions of nature. He defines the poem primarily in terms of idea of a poet.
Wordsworth then describes the poem as the result of these powers and
activities. It is a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin
from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Wordsworth makes clear that the
poem does not simply rush forth; memory and contemplation come into play
in its composition. Nevertheless, emphasis in the definition is on the
dominance of feeling over intellect. Feeling becomes the real basis of
imagination, which is the power to grasp nature in its totality and to order
one’s experience. Wordsworth attacks the popular style of his time as
employing a “gaudy and inane phraseology” that veils nature rather than
reveals its spirit. In his view, simple, concrete language expresses a close
relationship to “the permanent forms of nature,” which he associates with
rural speech and rural life.
Notable work: Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Emerson’s essay The Poet provides a compendium of Romantic ideas
about poetry. His attitude toward symbolism helped to lay groundwork
for such theories as Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms. Emerson
thinks that language tends to wear itself out in clichés, and expression
becomes dull and inaccurate. Every thought eventually becomes a sort
of prison. It is the poet who forges a new language and new thoughts
and provides the possibility of mental liberation. In this view, language
would seem to be a primary means by which man forms reality. The
poem remains for Emerson a vehicle for transcendental thought;
nature itself is a symbol or a language that somehow can be read. But if
nature is language of symbols, then it would seem that poetic language
itself becomes only a copy of natural symbols and might best be
transcended or bypassed for immediate communion with the natural
world.
Notable work: The Poet