Romanticism
But if a writer should be quite consistent,
How could he possibly show things existent?
Byron
Romanticism is idealism,
whatīs true of one may be said of the other.
Romanticismīs change and revolution,
opposed to aristocracy,
the force of a new-born generation.
It is medieval dreaming spires,
the peace and harmony of natural order
and the music of the spheres.
It is love, and not the will to power,
the natural love of natural man,
living for the moment, seizing the present hour.
Itīs the driving energy of brutal optimism,
a therapy, the cure for our disease.
It is self-assertion and primitivism
and unity at the cost of individuality.
Romaniticismīs moonlit ruins,
the transcendent desire for infinity.
It is spirit combined with chivalry,
our escape from an industrial age
to the ancient and historic, misty antiquity.
It is reverie and homesickness,
exile and nostalgia.
It is darkness and the powers of darkness, a pervasive sense of irrational terror.
Itīs a beautiful past remembered by the monotonous present,
a pastoral idyll of timelessness and innocence.
Itīs the new, the novel, the fleeting moment,
a muliplicity, chaos and violence.
Romanticism means the sane and simple pleasures
of contented country folk.
It is Celtic and Germanic,
melancholy madness, decadence and death.
Romanticism is untutored youth
and teeming fecundity, the richness of life.
Itīs a soul playing with itself in secret delight.
Yes, romanticismīs idealism, and itīs drama,
the clarion call to a great uprising
of bourgeois values against bourgeois values
when what might seem to be the clash of cymbals
turns out to be a clash of symbols.
Mike
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