Although the Romantics rock group deserve to be honored after giving the world the best song to dance to at 1:45 in the morning after you have polished off a pitcher of beer by yourself, that's not who emerson refers to.
Instead we’re hearkening back to the 18th century and the rise of Romanticism.
Wikipedia’s got a pretty good definition, at least a definition that works for us:
"Romanticism is an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated around the middle of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution. It was partly a revolt against aristocratic, social, and political norms of the Enlightenment period and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature in art and literature. The movement stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror, and the awe experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature. It elevated folk art, nature and custom, as well as arguing for an epistemology based on nature, which included human activity conditioned by nature in the form of language, custom and usage. It was influenced by ideas of the Enlightenment and elevated medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be from the medieval period. The name "romantic" itself comes from the term "romance" which is a prose or poetic heroic narrative originating in medieval literature and romantic literature. The ideologies and events of the French Revolution and Industrial Revolution are thought to have influenced the movement. Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as misunderstood heroic individuals and artists that altered society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability in the representation of its ideas....
...Many intellectual historians have seen Romanticism as a key movement in the Counter-Enlightenment, a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment. Whereas the thinkers of the Enlightenment emphasized the primacy of deductive reason, Romanticism emphasized intuition, imagination, and feeling, to a point that has led to some Romantic thinkers being accused of irrationalism."
One Romanticist of the time, of course, was William Blake, who said: “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.”
So the New Romantics represent an interest in resurrecting this movement, this school of thought and way of looking at the world. A renewed love of nature, a wish to meld science with the humanities, but always with a contemporary, even cutting-edge sensibility.
Just discovered your website. ;-D
I have the Library of America Edition of Emerson's Collected Poems and Translations.
I guess I've got to start reading the both of you, huh?
Hee, hee! ;-D
Posted by: The Mad Macedonian | April 20, 2008 at 01:13 AM