Donny Wankan

12 October 2008

Remodeling Doorways: The Sublime in Romantic and Modern Poetry

            Romanticism became unpopular toward the late nineteenth century.  Modernism rejected many of the Romantic trends but continued the fascination with sublime experiences.  In poetry specifically, though the lines moved from over-arching spiritual significance to a decidedly concrete exploration of life, Modernism's ideals sought out—as Romanticism had—a path to a new understanding of life.  In a sense, the change from Romantic to Modern was nothing more than the remodeling of the poetic doorways. 

            In a 2003 midterm April Patrick described the sublime urge as “a yearning to be totally swallowed up by another person or life force, all divisions dissolved completely.” I will try to apply this definition to two poems from the American Romantic period and two poems from the later end of the Modern period, exploring ways in which the Romantic involves a desire for the sublime and a drive toward a transcendent experience.  Exploring this thread that ties the Romantic to the Modern, I hope to trouble the concept of the Romantic Time Period by questioning ways in which a particular Romantic element may be seen as a still-developing literary value. 

            The Romantic movement was perhaps a reaction to the shock of changes occurring in the nineteenth century.  Industrialization seemed a bleak replacement for the older, more spiritualized world.  There was a definite escapist element to the American Romantic movement, evidenced in the transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau, both of whom had sought out and encouraged meditations in the woods as a search for sublime experience. 

            The new growing industrial paradigm was a cold and simplistic philosophy that reduced human life and the universe to measurable, produceable, and salable commodities.  Old ideas about universal purpose from religious and philosophical sources had now been replaced by scientific explorations of measurable facts. 

            Whitman's “When I heard the Learn'd Astronomer” illustrates the reaction to how science and industry had broken down even the stars.  His description of “the proofs, the figures . . .  ranged in columns before [him]” paints a sterile picture of the astronomer's understanding.  This contrasts with the image of “how soon, unaccountable [he] became tired and sick,” as if his true nature was rebelling against the numbering of the stars.  His weariness at the figures and proofs, unlike the stars in the astronomer's calculations, cannot be measured.  This “unaccountable” emotion seems to far outweigh the “charts and diagrams” in power.  The poet's response to walk outside and look at the stars comes as a poultice to the experience of the lecture.  The scientific explanations of the sky—an object of wonder and mystery previously—have threatened to de-mystify a sublime experience.  He runs to the comfort of an “unaccountable” vision of distant lights in the sky.  He does not quantify the latter experience of the stars, nor does he explain it except to say that it was a relief from the sterility of the astronomer's words.  Not the most Romantic of the nineteenth century poets, Whitman still seems to be exploring the desire to be  “swallowed up by another” to which April referred.  

            Poe's poem, “Romance” similarly reaches toward a sublime experience.  His descriptions of a “Romantic” education and his dark obsessions manifest themselves in an excess of emotional significance.  His drive in youth is toward an orgiastic enactment of the emotions he inferred from Anacreon's poems.  In old age he mourns the loss of emotional extremities rather than of youthful vigor.  Even the in-between of adulthood, which he calls “the eternal Condor years” is characterized by a raging dramatization of troubles (never clearly identified) that “so shook the very heavens on high / with tumult as they thundr'd by”.  His excesses of leisurely emotional meditations have been replaced by the excessively burdensome responsibilities of adulthood. Again the Romantic drive takes the poet to an escape from finite physicality.  Though he acknowledges the growing impotence of his passions, in old age he still wishes “to dream [his] very life away”.  There is a hint of realism in the trope of waning passion, but his final statement excuses the childish dreams he once had.  The divisions between youth and old age are dissolved by the greybeard's acceptance of the youth's dreaming.   

            Though Poe's poem is darker than Whitman's, both locate transcendence beyond the physical world.  Whitman moves from the scientific explanation of astronomy to an un-studied experience of the stars.  He prioritizes “the mystical” over the scientific, and his interaction with the stars consists of quick glances rather than scientific observations and recordings.  By escaping charted, analyzed data through casual looks at a vague, apparently endless blanket of darkness spotted with dots of light, Whitman has celebrated the ineffability and transcendence of immediate sensation. 

            Poe poses a question in “Romance,” asking whether his youth has been wasted on dreams and fantasies.  The poem concerns itself solely with the passions that have accompanied each of the three life stages.  He ignores physical details, offering as his most vivid physical descriptions, items like a “wild wood” and “some shadowy lake.” 

            These two pre-modern poems seek a transcendence of physicality through a perfecting of ideas about the physical world.  Both comment on physical phenomena—Poe writing on the changes of age and Whitman writing on celestial science—but both reject mere physical details and embrace a mystical or emotional experience or understanding.

            Modern poets have borrowed from as well as negated components of Romanticism.  In many ways the Modern and Post-modern have reversed the spiritualizing work of Romantic writers by prioritizing the physical rather than emotional details of experience.  Through a celebration of specific sensations Modern poets have redefined the transcendental project.  Post-Romantic writers may have rejected the personification of nature or the exaggeration of experience to infinite significance, but they have continued the Romantic tradition by imbuing finite physical reality with transcendental power.       

            James Wright's (late Modern) poems “A Blessing” and “Northern Pike” describe events as a series of vivid concrete details.  The experiences themselves seem almost insignificant in light of the sweeping emotional incidents in the Whitman and Poe poems.  Wright builds significance from the precision of his physical details taking the reader to a threshold of philosophical insight.  The passion which spoke so clearly in “Romance” and “When I heard the Learn'd Astronomer” peeks subtly through the sensuality of everyday life in Wright's poems. 

            In “A Blessing” Wright begins without fanfare, “just off the highway to Rochester Minnesota.”  He tells the story in sharp and simple details, only lightly tinting these with emotional significance.  Unlike Poe's unbounded passions in “Romance,” the emotions of “A Blessing” have limits.  The horses, “can hardly contain their happiness,” at the arrival of the two men.  The adverb “hardly” presses the emotional response toward the limit without quite letting it go beyond.  Even the hint of transcendence at the end of the poem is tempered by the fact that the poet leaves us, and himself, at the knowledge of rather than the actual attainment of that “break[ing] / into blossom”.

            “Northern Pike” begins with an almost Poe-ish morbidity.  “Every body / I know and care for,” he writes,  “And every body / Else is going / To die in a loneliness / I can't imagine and a pain / I don't know.”  Unlike Poe, Wright cushions the blow of such painful knowledge with a simple and vivid description of fishing.  He moves in a direction opposite Whitman in “When I heard the Learn'd Astronomer” by outlining in raw detail the process of “untangl[ing] the net [and] slit[ting] the body of this fish . . . from the hinge of the tail / to a place beneath the chin”.  The poem goes beyond that even to a list of seemingly unrelated physical details from the “ripples below [the muskrats'] tails,” to “the “wrist of [his] cousin”.  The poem is a story of survival with psychological implications in the statement “we had / to go on living.”  But the movement from a cynical knowledge of death to a decision to “go on living” ends with the ultimately concrete sentence “we ate the fish”.         

            In these two poems by Wright we can see enacted the Modern distaste for grand mystical extremes and the celebration of pure physical details.  What ties these two poems to the Romanticism in “Romance” and “When I heard the Learn'd Astronomer” is a sort of reaching out toward something untouchable. 

            Poe is looking for a way to transcend the painful realities of aging, and what he finds is a philosophical solution in which the passions of his life out-value the physical deterioration of his body and mind.  By canceling his regrets at youthful dreaming, the greybeard disempowers the physical ravages of time. 

            Similarly Whitman rejects the precise empiricism of the astronomer, escaping to the “mystical moist night-air.”  Like Poe's, Whitman's poem does not offer precise descriptions of its physical subject matter.  The important truth to the poet is that he can feel the majesty of the stars with silent observation.  He looks without a telescope and without measuring what he sees, and rather than telling us what they look like he tells us simply that he sees them.  He allows the mystical implications of stars and night sky to work within our own minds, suggesting an idea of universal transcendence and sublime experience that should not (and cannot) be named. 

            Modern writers have consistently mistrusted the vague emotional and spiritual sublime experience.  They have rejected the imprecision of emotional signification.  Wright, for instance, offers emotions only in the form of implications and denials.  His nearly transcendent ending in “A Blessing” comes to us in the form of a concretized metaphor.  He describes “break[ing] into blossom” without ever clarifying what emotion the metaphoric blooming refers to.  His brooding beginning in “Northern Pike” is soon canceled by an onslaught of living, physical details.

            With the birth of Modern poetics the Romantic tendency to draw sweeping mystical significance from an emotional glorification of experience was replaced by a fascination with physical detail.  Rather than writing on  the sublime, as Sharon Lockett described it, an “experience . . .  that cannot be replicated or sought within the normalcy of everyday life,” Modern writers have tried to connect everyday life with that sublime significance.     

            The Romantics seemed to be reacting to a trend toward comodification of humanity and nature, and perhaps were reacting to this capitalist devaluing of a great spiritual past by moving from physicality to spirituality, from simple to grandiose. 

            Eventually the Romantic grandiosity proved over-indulgent, and Modernists tried to temper these excesses with a simple immediacy.  What they retained of the Romantic was a search for sublime experience, which they re-designed as a transcendent celebration of physical details.  They did not personify nature, nor did they exaggerate emotions to infinite importance.  Instead, by rejecting  exaggerated emotions and spiritual nature, they validated the concrete, allowing a new path toward a sublime understanding of life.