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The Romantic Artist

The document discusses the romantic period and the romantic poets. It makes three key points: 1. Contrary to common conceptions, the romantic poets were not detached from politics and social issues of their time, but rather involved in political activities and commentary. 2. During this period, there was significant social, political, and economic upheaval that the romantic writers reflected upon in their work. 3. The romantic period witnessed radical changes in concepts of art, artists, and their relationship with society, including viewing the production of art as a specialized profession and emphasis on the artist as an autonomous genius.

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1K views4 pages

The Romantic Artist

The document discusses the romantic period and the romantic poets. It makes three key points: 1. Contrary to common conceptions, the romantic poets were not detached from politics and social issues of their time, but rather involved in political activities and commentary. 2. During this period, there was significant social, political, and economic upheaval that the romantic writers reflected upon in their work. 3. The romantic period witnessed radical changes in concepts of art, artists, and their relationship with society, including viewing the production of art as a specialized profession and emphasis on the artist as an autonomous genius.

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Selcouth Dreamzz
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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“The Romantic Artist”


(From Culture and Society)
- Raymond Williams

Romantic poets’ were not secluded from the politics of the age. They participated
in political activities. They paid attention to both natural beauty and social affairs.

 The poets from Blake and Wordsworth to Shelley and Keats were interested and involved in
study and criticism of the society of their day.
 The conception of Romantic Artist primarily derived from study of these poets.
 In this conception, the Poet, the Artist, is devoted to natural beauty and personal feeling,
and indifferent to politics and social affairs.
 But this distinction between attention to natural beauty or personal feeling and attention to
government, politics and social affairs was a later development.
 In the beginning of the nineteenth century, both attention to natural beauty and social
affairs were interlocking interests.
 They were seen as different interests only towards the end of the century.
 In the beginning of the century, a conclusion about personal feeling became a conclusion
about society, and an observation of natural beauty carried moral reference to society. It
wasn’t so by the end of the century.

The romantic poets were not devoted to natural beauty and personal feeling
alone. They involved in political activities too.
 Wordsworth wrote political pamphlets, Blake was tried of sedition, Coleridge wrote
political journalism and social philosophy, Shelley distributed pamphlets in the streets,
Southey was a political commentator.
 Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey dealt with Burkean conservatism in their mature age.
 Shelley was revolutionary,
 Byron involved in libertarian opportunism.
 Blake and Keats were passionately committed to the tragedy of their period.
 These activities were not marginal, but related to a large part of the experience from
which poetry itself was made.

The Romantic period was not a peaceful time. There were many social and political
developments. It was period of turmoil. The romantic writers reflect this period through
their writings.
 These two generations of the poets lived through the crucial period in which there was
the rise both of democracy and of industry. Their activities reflected these developments
of their age.
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 They lived in the time of political turmoil and controversy.


 It is possible to extract political commentary from the writings of these poets.
 The romantic period was a time of political, social and economic changes.

The Romantic period also witnessed a radical change in ideas of art, of the artist and of
their place in the society.
 This radical change in the idea of art and artist is the focus of the essay.
 The essayist wishes to adduce this change.
 There are five main points regarding this radical change.

The radical changes in the ideas of art and artist during the romantic period.
 A major change was taking place in the nature of relationship between a writer and his
readers
 A different habitual attitude towards the public
 The production of art began to be seen as one of a number of specialized kinds of production
 Increasing emphasis for the superior reality of art.
 The idea of independent creative writer, the autonomous genius becoming a rule.
 These five changes are very closely interrelated.

A major change was taking place in the nature of relationship between a writer and his
readers, from the third and fourth decades of the 18th century.
 Growing up of a large middle class reading public
 The system of patronage had passed into subscription-publishing
 Writer became a professional man
 This system gave the reader a more relevant freedom than the previous one
 The growth of literary market
 By the beginning of the 19th century the institution was established
The romantic writers’ attitude towards the public

 The writer’s feeling of dissatisfaction with the public became acute and general. Eg. Shelley
calls the public the foolish crowd.
 Keats also despised the public.
 Wordsworth proposed the idea of an Ideal reader, a standard that might be set above the
writer’s actual relations with the society.
 He insisted on an Idea, the embodied spirit of a People’s knowledge.

The new concept of the production of art as one of a number of specialized kinds of
production.

 The novel became a commodity.


 Literature became a trade.
 Culture became the normal antithesis to the market.
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 The emphasis on the market and the idea of specialist production.


 In reaction to this, there grew up also an emphasis on the special nature of art activity as a
means to imaginative truth.
 An emphasis on the artist as a special kind of person.

Romanticism as a general European movement


 Romanticism is a general European movement
 The influence of Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller.
 The idea of the artist as a special kind of person.
 The emphasis on the superior reality of art
 Condemned the industrial processes
 Burke condemned the new society in terms of his experience of the earlier society.

The sense of the word ‘imitation’ during the romantic period

The word imitation acquired a derogatory meaning in the romantic theory. Imitation was understood to
mean imitation of work already done. It wasn’t understood as the imitation of the universal reality.

Romanticism and classicism


 The tendency of Romanticism is towards a vehement rejection of dogmas of method in
art. Like the classicist theory, the romantic theory claims that the artist’s business is to
read the open secret of the universe.

 Both romanticism and classicism are idealist theories of art; they are really opposed not
so much by each other as by naturalism.

The Romantic writers’ defense of the tendencies of the market


 While in one sense the market was specializing the artist, artists themselves were
seeking to generalize their skills into the common property of the imaginative truth.
 The poets defended the idea of art as commodity. They were convinced that the
principles on which the new society was being organized was actively hostile to the
necessary principles of art.
 Wordsworth’s Preface of 1800 to the Lyrical Ballads illustrates this view.
 The concept of taste in Wordsworth’s preface is inadequate. It implies one kind of
relationship between writer and reader.
 When art is a commodity, taste is adequate, but when it is something more, a more
active relationship is essential.

The idea of poet in romantic theory


 In romantic theory, the poet, the artist in general, is an upholder and preserver,
carrying everywhere with him relationship and love.
 Artists came to see themselves as agents of the revolution for life, in their capacity
as bearers of the creative imagination.
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 Here is an association between the general perfection of humanity and with


the practice and study of the arts.

The emphasis on humanity in romantic theory


 In Romantic theory, there was an emphasis on humanity
 The emphasis on a general common humanity was evidently necessary in a period in
which a new kind of society was coming to think of man as merely a specialized
instrument of production.
 Emphasis on the creative imagination may be seen as an alternative construction of
human motive and energy, in contrast to the assumptions of the political economy.
 The positive consequence of the idea of art as a superior reality was that it offered
an immediate basis for an important criticism of industrialization.
 The negative consequence was that it tended to isolate art, to specialize the imaginative
faulty to one kind of activity.

The specialization of art and artist in the romantic theroy


 The word art became specialized during the eighteenth century. Initially it meant skill.
The emphasis on skill was gradually replaced by an emphasis on sensibility.
 There were also parallel changes in words such as creative, original, genius.
 Aesthetics, itself a new word, was contribution of the specialization.
Coleridge and Keats have contributed to the romantic theory literary theory
 Keats coined the term negative capability concerning the artist’s personality- when a
man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable
reaching after fact and reason.
 But Keats’s emphasis is on the poetic process rather than on the poetic personality
 In Romantic theory, the consideration of the poetic process became entangled
with more general questions of the artist and society.

The central argument of the essay


 In romantic period, there were deep insights, and great works of art.
 But in the continuous pressure of living, the free play of genius found it difficult to
associate with the free play of market.
 This difficulty was not resolved, but cushioned by an idealization.
 The poets were see as separate from other men. They were classified as an
idealized general person, Poet or Artist.
 The romantic period didn’t resolve the difficulty arose out of the conflict between
artist and the political changes. Instead, it idealized the romantic artist as distinct and
separate from the common man in order to cover up this difficulty.

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