The Politics of Romantic Poetry – Discourses on Minerva
“And on the pedestal these words appear: / ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous poem “Ozymandias” captures, in my opinion, the essence of the power, glory, and fleeting vanity of the political sentiments of the nineteenth century Romantics. While the Bible and classical sources testified to the vanity of fleeting power and glory, the Romantics resurrected this wisdom in an age of haughty power, glory, and egoism with a corresponding pomp, vanity, and egoism of their own which proves ironic, all things considered.
Understanding Romanticism is difficult because of the multifaceted avenues it influenced. Isaiah Berlin, in his series of lectures on Romanticism in 1964, remarked that Romanticism simultaneously influenced reactionary movements as much as radical and progressive movements. If, however, we are to agree upon one common thread of Romanticism it would have to be the unbridled passion, pathology, that undergirded it as it rebelled against the sterile and suffocating tyranny of mechanical materialism which had risen to prominence in the so-called Age of Enlightenment. Some have taken to calling the romantic revolution not so much the Counter Enlightenment as it was the Age of Passion.
The Age of Passion, to my mind, is apt. One cannot help but feel the passionate blood coursing through their own veins and off their lips as they read the words of proto-romantics like Milton and Pope and the works of the canonical Romantics like Lord Byron, John Keats, or Shelley. And it is these three figures whom I would like to briefly discuss within the realm of the passionate politics of power, glory, and vanity which move their poems.
That the Romantics would preoccupy themselves with politics shouldn’t be surprising to us. After all, they lived in an age of intense passion and conflagration. Byron, Keats, and Shelley all matured and lived in the throes of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon, unsurprisingly, is a figure whose echoes can be heard in their poetry—explicitly or implicitly. From the storming of the Bastille up until the Battle of Waterloo, the explosive triumph of the will stirred the hearts and passions of men and women in Europe and even across the sea in America. It was also an age of exploration, excavation, and desecration; all these themes meet in Romantic poetry in their unique ways…
Read the rest of the essay, first published at VOEGELINVIEW, 21 September 2024.
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Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of Muses of a Fire, Finding Arcadia, The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.
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