The Confessions, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rated • 0 reviews • books, romanticism • adelaide.edu.au
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b-bear/romanticism
Last seen: 5 months ago
b-bear is a 29 year old guy from Mountain Air, VIC, Australia
Drink your Bliss; for every Thing that Lives is Holy.
~William Blake
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Mon auberge était à la Grande Ourse.
My inn was under the sign of the Great Bear. ~Rimbaud
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Kubla Khan
Rated • 7 reviews • hedonism, poetry, love, romanticism • virginia.edu
A damsel, my lover, in a vision I saw: she was Coleridge's Abyssinian maid, and on her dulcimer she played, singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me her symphony and song, to such a deep delight 'twould win me, that with music loud and long, I would build that dome in the air, that sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, and all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, her floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, and close your eyes with holy dread, for he on honey-dew hath fed, and they together hath drunk the milk of Paradise.
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Poetical remains: poets graves ... - Google Books
Rated • 0 reviews • poetry, books, bizarre oddities, romanticism • google.com.au
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Nerval: A Man and His Lobster (Harpers Magazine)
Rated • 3 reviews • animals, history, romanticism, poetry • harpers.org
All Things Feel.
-Pythagoras
So you alone are blessed, you free-thinking man,
In a world where life sprouts in everything?
You seize the liberty to dispose of the forces you hold,
But in all your plans a sense of the universe is lacking.
Honor in each creature the spirit which moves it:
Each flower is a soul moved by Nature's face;
In each metal resides some of love's mystery;
"All things feel!" And all you are is powerful.
Beware, even the blind walls may spy on you:
Even matter is vested with the power of voice...
Do not make it serve an impious purpose.
Often in the most obscure beings resides yet the hidden God;
And like the infant's eye covered by its lid,
The pure spirit forces its kernel though the husk of stones.
Gérard de Nerval, Vers dorés (1845)
In their reclamation of nature, the Romantic generation championed the rights of animals not to suffer abuse and deprivation. During a revolutionary age in Europe, a period which began in the middle of the eighteenth century and was soon to be rocketed aside by the industrial storm of the nineteenth century, the anti-vivisection campaign proved as attractive as the anti-slavery campaign, and both campaigns shared many of the same arguments.
Romantic poets are only the most celebrated cases of animal lovers during this period of abolitionists. Byron had a bear, among a horde of other animals. Rossetti had a wombat. And Nerval, unique among the Romantic generation, adored lobsters. At a time when taxonomy was working at some pace to ensure that lobsters were placed at the bottom of the anthropocentric scheme of life, Nerval championed the capacities and lives of these crustaceans.
The poet loved lobsters for their ability to feel, for their tranquility and seriousness, and for what he ironically called their secret knowledge of the seas. This was not the attitude of a taxonomist slavishly following the Linnaeus system. When the poet was spotted walking his pet lobster in the Palais-Royal in Paris, he defended his lobster as he would any animal. Behaving like a latter day Paul and Linda McCartney, Nerval had rescued his lobster from the nets of a coastal town and in fleeing the town authorities had brought his pet, Thibault, to Paris.
Nerval based his actions on a Pythagorean principle that modern societies still today refuse to follow. Even philosophers, who should no better, ignore this principle in their addiction to the ideas of Plato and Aristotle.
I imagine Nerval whistling out this principle and this poem as he walked his beloved crustacean Thibault along the Palais-Royal.
This stumble crawled my way thanks to a man of feeling.
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C.Fernandez: Romanticism of Charlotte Turner Smith
Rated • 0 reviews • literature, romanticism, poetry, books • emory.edu
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http://libr.unl.edu:2000/ctsmithsite/index.html
Rated • 1 review • literature, romanticism, poetry, books, relationships • unl.edu
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http://www.english.uga.edu/nhilton/Blake/blaketxt1/descri...
Rated • 0 reviews • literature, romanticism, poetry, writing, blake • uga.edu
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Thomas de Quincey’s walking stick - Dove Cottage, The...
Rated • 1 review • fine arts, romanticism, de quincey • wordsworth.org.uk
The history of Thomas de Quincey's walking stick. LOL.
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PhiloBiblos: Mr. Wordsworth ... in the Kitchen ... with...
Rated • 0 reviews • books, romanticism, wordsworth, de quincey • blogspot.com
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Literary Review - Patricia Fara on The Age of Wonder by...
Rated • 1 review • history, literature, romanticism, poetry, science • literaryreview.co.uk
Romantic writers were fully aware of recent scientific discoveries. As a twenty-year-old medical student, John Keats spent a drink-fuelled night enthusing over a newly purchased verse translation of Homer's Iliad. Early the next morning, he took less than four hours to set down his own famous poem, in which he compared his feelings with those of 'some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken'.
~Patricia Fara
The thesis of this book, Richard Holmes' The Age of Wonder, is a historical one that applies to any discovery of the world - and it matters not whether this discovery (of an object or an idea or a feeling or an event or a reality) be poetic or scientific.
For there is something in these cases of discovery that may be said to resist all attempts at strict epistemological delimitation, all willed or unconscious attempts to exclude the wonder of the thing. This something is, for want of a better word or cultural location, `Romanticism'. It is, more precisely, the Romantic paradigm of an experience that no philosophy, before or after Kant, has been able to completely exclude (for some even more pedantic reflections on this, and oblique ones as far as my comments go, see Walter Benjamin's The Task for the Coming Philosophy, c. 1918. I wouldn't wish a read of this text on my worst enemies, however, although it is blissfully short.).
Now, the heart of the problem is, frankly, mushrooms. And the question I ask myself is: Why am I yet to discover a great Romantic poetry about mushrooms? This to me is a damning criticism of Romanticism in the nineteenth-century. What are the consequences for a cultural movement if it possesses no poetry of fungi? One of the worst results, I argue, is that such a movement is then caught deleteriously in a metaphysics of consciousness that only indefinitely prolongs the problems of Kantianism.
The major problem of this poetic limitation is the anthropos that, centuries before other philosophies posed a critique, could have made way in Romanticism for a mycopos -- for if Romanticism had admitted that man is merely fungi, some of the worst forms of twentieth-century fascism may have been rendered culturally unthinkable in the very best sense of the word: as in out-thought. Wordsworth's household gods, harboured by man in a domestic sense, may have made way for mushrooms bearing the rhizomatic realities of a world beyond sovereign power. Yet, from Wordsworth's poems of individuation to Shelley's Triumph of the Will, one reads the anthropotropic turning away from fungi or parasitic vegetation and back into the arms of Man.
It is anthropotropism that constitutes the return to an order of metaphysics, a return held in Romanticism in abeyance, in the fragmentary triumph of 'man' which no cultural movement, from Romanticism to postmodernism, has been able to surpass. But today I declare that `Man' is a peculiar figure that must make way for mushrooms. And, perhaps, metaphysics must make way for mycophysics!
Apropos of the Fungi: these comic and tragic reflections on living beyond fascism, with mushrooms, beyond the catastrophes of biopolitical science and culture, come on the margins of The Mycolatry Institute.
