Why I Call Myself A New Romantic Poet

Every revolution in poetry is apt to be, and sometimes to announce itself to be a return to common speech.

—T.S. Eliot

Much has been made of Romanticism on Substack.

Ted Gioia

two years ago was proposing a romantic revival in response to increasingly “algorithmic and mechanistic” ways of thinking that threatened the stagnation of culture. This year

Ross Barkan

, the political columnist and author of Glass Century, declared such a revival was already underway on Substack with the advent of successful, independent novelists and writers. They are the vanguard, he proclaimed, of a larger trend of revolt against the order of things. Against traditional publishing. Against the tyranny of technocrats and their dehumanizing machines. Against all the puerilities of a decadent and decaying society.

Some in the vanguard have already pushed back against Barkan’s proclamation.

Udith Dematagoda

, writing for

The Metropolitan Review

, has cautioned against the dangers of Romanticism and romantic thinking.

Matthew Gasda

, too, has expressed doubts about the desire for a Romantic age, especially one born of discourse alone, only the inauthentic child of thinkpieces. They both worry, as T. S. Eliot’s old man did, that “unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Virtues are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.”

Whether this signals a fatal schism in the movement, or is simply a stage in the dialogic process that will bear fruit, one can only guess. Gasda and Dematagoda’s criticisms come from a believe that Romanticism’s flaws might be obviated. Their pushback is a kind of refinement. Indeed, if there is to be any movement, it must work out what it is, and the degree to which it defines itself will be the degree to which it understands what that is.

Unfortunately for Romanticism, the idea is a complicated and nebulous one. Frank Lucas, in The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (1948), counted 11,396 definitions of Romanticism.¹

I am sympathetic to

Sam Jennings

’ perspective, who intimates in a stirring piece that any genuine romantic movement must be essentially literary. What Jennings means by literary here is very broad, but not unintelligible. It is essentially an imaginative understanding of the world, a faculty of perceiving the forms, patterns, tropes, that are the precondition for comprehension, and hence for right judgement. To know what kind of story one is in, what sorts of characters one might encounter. To be able to ‘read’ a situation. Such an ability is cultivated through literature, and through the arts more broadly.

Jennings, like myself, is a lover of the literary critic Harold Bloom. Bloom championed deep reading and contemplation of the great works of literature. He called the art of reading “an authentic training in the augmentation of consciousness, perhaps the most authentic of healthy modes.” Such a practice, says Jennings, is an antidote to the “catastrophe of language” posed by AI and ChatGPT. It resists, too, the decay of memory typified by the perpetual scroll, and bolsters consciousness against the fragmentation of its attention.

I think this is the right level of analysis for a discussion of Romanticism, for it concerns itself primarily with language and the imagination, the reasons for which, anyway, I consider myself a New Romantic poet.

Romanticism as Revival

In literary criticism there is one interpretation of romanticism that sees it not only as an historical period, say from the late 18th to the mid 19th century (“Romanticism”), but also as an historical process which recurs in all places and periods of a culture (“romanticism”). A romantic movement, then, is merely a change in sensibility from the previous age. It signals a desire to be in opposition to what has come before. The English Romantic movement that began in poetry with the preface to the Lyrical Ballads was a rejection of the poetry that came before. In its second edition it included a title page with the motto:

Quam nihil ad genium, Papiniane, tuum!
(This is not for your taste, follower of Pope!)

So when Wordsworth calls for poetry to be written in “the real language of men,” he is doing so in opposition to the kind of poetry that had reached its apotheosis in the ornateness and decadence of Pope, in poetry that did not talk, or think, as people actually did.

The Modernists of the early 20th century, likewise, were romantic in their aspirations, for what they were rejecting was the Victorian poetry of the preceding era that had reached its apotheosis in Tennyson and Swinburne. So Ezra Pound, writing in 1912 to Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry, says, regarding the poet H.D., “am sending you some modern stuff by an American, I say modern, for it is in the laconic speech of the Imagistes. ... Objective—no slither; direct—no excessive use of adjectives, no metaphors that won’t permit examination. It’s straight talk, straight as the Greek!”

Eliot, too, understood that what he and Pound were up to was no different than what Wordsworth and Coleridge had done.

Wordsworth’s poems had met with no worse reception than verse of such novelty is accustomed to receive. I myself can remember a time when some question of ‘poetic diction’ was in the air; when Ezra Pound issued his statement that ‘poetry ought to be as well written as prose’; and when he and I and our colleagues were mentioned by a writer in The Morning Post as ‘literary bolsheviks’ and by Mr Arthur Waugh (with a point which has always escaped me) as ‘drunken helots’. But I think that we believed that we were affirming forgotten standards, rather than setting up new idols. Wordsworth, when he said that his purpose was ‘to imitate, and as far as possible to adopt, the very language of men’, was only saying in other words what Dryden had said, and fighting the battle which Dryden had fought²

Eliot was a champion of Dryden at a time when Dryden had fallen out of favor. To the extent that we appreciate Dryden today, we have Eliot to thank. His view of Dryden, like Wordsworth, was that of someone responsible for revitalizing poetry by introducing into it a new idiom, a new way of speaking that was different than what had come before. This idiom was grounded in the everyday language of men, in the way they actually thought and spoke. This might be hard to imagine, given that Dryden’s writing seems to us so artificial, but one only has to have in mind the poetry of the seventeenth century that preceded him to see how this might have been the case. Wordsworth and Coleridge, too, can seem just as artificial if one does not consider the style of Pope or Gray or Milton. The same accusations of artifice have been made against the modernists, and they will be made again against this era’s poetry when it passes away. What seems vitally new inevitably falls out of fashion and looks as if it never was. A new style that once engendered creative possibilities eventually exhausts itself and hinders that same creative energy.

So what we see when we look at the poetic tradition from a great distance are a succession of movements whereby the language of poetry, the prevailing idiom or way of speaking, is continually refreshed by the introduction of a new idiom. The old one grows stale and degraded by overuse and misuse and must be renewed. And it is that romantic spirit that wants to shake off the old and renew itself.

Reform Not Revolt

But this process of renewal is not itself new. In poetry that renewal is less a revolt than a reform of language. This is what Eliot rightly points to when he says that “every revolution in poetry is apt to be, and sometimes to announce itself to be a return to common speech.”³

In so far as I consider myself a New Romantic poet, I am closer to the ideas of Wordsworth and Coleridge than Shelley. I’m interested in poetic language and its “return to common speech.” I’m less interested in what Shelley was trying to do later with poetry when he declared that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” To the extent that I sympathize with the sentiment (many poets do, almost patriotically) it is certainly not in the way Shelley meant it. Nor do I believe, as Shelley claimed, that poetry is “the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.”⁴ Magniloquent as he is, Shelley was often wrong, and his poetic project was much different than that of Wordsworth and Coleridge.⁵ Shelley was a radical revolutionary, a capital “R” Romantic. Wordsworth and Coleridge were mainly reformers, lower case romantics who wanted to shed the old ways that had grown stale and renew poetry by way of the common language.

I’m interested in such a renewal. What does it mean to “adopt the everyday language of men” in poetry? It means a great deal more than simply using more current words. A language is not just its words, but an entire way, a manner, of saying and thinking. When the reading public dismisses poetry as too obscure, or elusive, or shallow, or sentimental, or inconsequential, they are not speaking only of the words poets use. They are referring to the manner in which they speak. When Sam Jennings says, correctly, that “our poetry is totally bereft of history, cadence, or rhetorical power” he is referring to an absence of just such a manner of speaking.

To the extent that this blog is interested in poetics, it is to imagine a new way of speaking in poetry. One that it once possessed, but no longer does. It is interested in affirming certain forgotten standards. In this way I consider myself a New Romantic.⁶

Turner, “The Fighting Téméraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up” (1839)

1. per the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics

2. “The Use of Poetry & The Use of Criticism”. The Collected Prose of T.S. Eliot, Volume 2. Faber & Faber. p 718-9.

3. “On Poetry and Poets”. The Collected Prose of T.S. Eliot, Volume 4. Faber & Faber. p 147.

4. From “A Defence of Poetry” (1821).

5. I understand that the ‘project’ was mainly Coleridge’s, but Wordsworth, despite his insistence that he only wrote the preface on Coleridge’s behalf, still clearly had one in mind, and wrote a supplement to the preface elaborating it.

6. For an introduction on poetic diction, and the difference between the poetic and the prosaic, see a previous post. I also mentioned the imagination as another reason for calling myself a New Romantic. I’ve written about that previously as well, and will continue to. What the imagination is, and its role in poetic production, was a topic of great interest to Coleridge, and to poetic criticism in general going back to Sidney’s Defence of Poesie. That we have mostly relegated our thinking about it to the realm of science is yet another sign that not all is well with poetry.