Romanticism Had It Wrong
A worldview is very much what it sounds like it would be--a certain way of seeing the world. Worldviews can be grounded in a focus that is artistic, economic, political, and many others, but they are all essentially philosophical. For example, two prevalent worldviews in today's politics are liberal and conservative. Though these terms are not very well defined, they attempt to describe two different ways that people not only think the world should be, but two ways they think it is. There is no easy right or wrong answer because there are different versions of reality. Most major worldviews have also had their share of artistic and literary adherents, and the Romantic worldview of the late eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century was no exception. This worldview was typified by a re-examination of man's place in relationship to nature. Some of the beliefs of the Romantic worldview include the ideas that nature, though chaotic, s also eternal and unstoppable, and that therefore mankind (as a part of nature) is incapable of acting against it, and that misery of most types is attributable to un-natural attempts. I am not a Romantic because it does not take human ingenuity and cognitive capabilities fully into account.
" The boat is constantly being described in terms of natural phenomena--here, a meteor--and is also outlasted by real nature, represented here by the clouds. But in many real ways man has left nature; our use of technology has made it so that natural selection and evolution do not really apply anymore. One of the defining characteristics of the Romantic worldview is that Nature has an infinite quality to it, both in size and time, and that this infinity is the cause of our feelings of awe and mortal fear. The same sentiment echoes in Whittier's snowbound, where "The white drift piled the window-frame," and other images exist of winter taking over man's puny attempts to hold it back. We are even able to travel beyond the boundary of our planet, to seek new environments. This first part is one of Romanticism's most common assertions--it must be accepted as fact before the second part of it can be claimed. This same theme shows up again in "Thanatopsis" by William Cullen Bryant, who describes the burial place of the person the poem is addressed to: "The hills / Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; the vales / Stretching in pensive quietness between. " The poem suggests the futility or unimportance of man in the face of the inexorable drive of nature, especially the lines at the top of the second stanza, "Darkness settles on roofs and walls, / But the sea, the sea in darkness calls," as man's creations (roofs and walls) are mad less important by the "but" of the sea. In Longfellow's "The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls," various images, including that of a traveler, are set against the monotonous repetition of "the tide rises, the tide falls. The view that nature is eternal and somehow insurmountable is built upon in the Romantic worldview to mean that nature encompasses everything, or rather that everything is nature. This means that man, and everything man does, is inherently a part of nature, and that bad things happen when man tries to act against nature. Though out impact might not always be--perhaps seldom is--positive, it does exist, despite what the Romantics believed. Works like Frankenstein suggest this punitive aspect of Romanticism, but other poetical works merely suggest that man and everything man creates is a part of nature. This can also be interpreted as meaning that the definition of "evil" or "bad" is that which attempts to go against nature.
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Cullen Bryant,
Wendell Holmes,
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American Transcendentalist,
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Acceptance Essays
