{"id":672,"date":"2006-10-04T19:17:58","date_gmt":"2006-10-05T00:17:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/?p=672"},"modified":"2020-01-03T12:09:40","modified_gmt":"2020-01-03T17:09:40","slug":"the-portable-romantic-poets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/the-portable-romantic-poets\/","title":{"rendered":"The Portable Romantic Poets"},"content":{"rendered":"

Happened on a copy of this Viking Portable Library book<\/a> at Talking Leaves Books<\/a> in Buffalo yesterday (drove my guest to Niagara Falls and then tried to hit the Albright-Knox<\/a> on the way back but it’s closed Mondays and Tuesdays, booooo A.K.).<\/p>\n

The collection is edited by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson and their introduction alone made the purchase worthwhile for me. They argue that the romantic poets marked the redefinition of mankind’s conception of self as self-consciousness:<\/p>\n

Like God and unlike the rest of nature, man can say “I”: his ego stands over against his self, which to the ego is a part of nature. In this self he can see possibilities; he can imagine it and all things as being other than they are; he runs ahead of himself; he foresees his own death.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This romantic self is driven primarily to experience; that is its highest end. For instance, unlike Marlowe’s Faust who wanted to “do great deeds and win glory,” Goethe’s Faust wants to “know what it feels like to be a seducer and a benefactor.” Further,<\/p>\n

. . . if the enemies of reason are passion and stupidity, which cause disorder, the enemies of consciousness are abstract intellectualizing and conventional codes of morality, which neglect and suppress the capacity of the consciousness to experience. Reason has to distinguish between true and false; the will, between right and wrong: consciousness can make no such distinction; it can only ask “What is there?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Therefore the redemption of the Ancient Mariner is “no act of penance” and “is not even directly concerned with his sinful act” but is “the acceptance of the water snakes by his consciousness which previously wished to reject them.”<\/p>\n

The collection itself begins with Blake’s Song (Memory, hither come)<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Memory, hither come
\nAnd tune your merry notes;
\nAnd while upon the wind
\nYour music floats,
\nI’ll pore upon the stream,
\nWhere sighing lovers dream,
\nAnd fish for fancies as they pass
\nWithin the watery glass.<\/p>\n

I’ll drink of the clear stream,
\nAnd hear the linnet’s song,
\nAnd there I’ll lie and dream
\nThe day along;
\nAnd when night comes I’ll go
\nTo places fit for woe,
\nWalking along the darkened valley,
\nWith silent melancholy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and ends with Poe, From childhood’s hour<\/em>:<\/p>\n

From childhood’s hour I have not been
\nAs others were; I have not seen
\nAs others saw; I could not bring
\nMy passions from a common spring.
\nFrom the same source I have not taken
\nMy sorrow; I could not awaken
\nMy heart to joy at the same tone;
\nAnd all I loved, I loved alone.
\nThen — in my childhood, in the dawn
\nOf a most stormy life — was drawn
\nFrom every depth of good and ill
\nThe mystery which binds me still:
\nFrom the torrent or the fountain,
\nFrom the red cliff or the mountain,
\nFrom the sun that round me rolled
\nIn its autumn tint of gold,
\nFrom the lightning in the sky
\nAs it passed my flying by,
\nFrom the thunder and the storm,
\nAnd the cloud that took the form
\n(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
\nOf a demon in my view.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The book was first published in 1950 too, btw . . . in print 56 years later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Happened on a copy of this Viking Portable Library book at Talking Leaves Books in Buffalo yesterday (drove my guest to Niagara Falls and then tried to hit the Albright-Knox on the way back but it’s closed Mondays and Tuesdays, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,9],"tags":[737,803,1521,1522],"class_list":["post-672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-books","tag-book-review","tag-poetry","tag-romanticism","tag-the-portable-romantic-poets"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6105,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672\/revisions\/6105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}