The "Romanticism" that's discussed here on Substack comes in several flavors but seems very much of its time (c. 1970 to the present) and place (North American academia). It often follows Bloom's interests, and includes Keats, Goethe, etc.
How about reading more widely? Novalis's amazing "Allgemeine Brouillon" (will pretty much ruin any simple sense of Romantic philosophy), Adelbert von Chamisso's "Wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl," Friedrich Rückert's "Kindertodtenlieder" (not just Mahler's selections), Schlegel's "Lucinde" (excellent source for the Romantic fragment), Klingemann's weird "The Nightwatches of Bonaventura" (available in a recent translation), Chateaubriand's "Martyrs" (for its religious feeling and archaisms, which tend to be omitted from North American interests in Romanticism), Senancor's "Obermann," and how about Juliusz Słowacki's mock-Byronic epic "Beniowski," just to hear from a less often read part of European romanticism?
A wider, more specific set of references could make it clearer that the "nostalgia" under discussion may be for a period much closer in time and culture—the decades 1980-2000.
Yes. Having been in college in the late 90's, my nostalgia tends towards recent past, the "post-mid-modern" era, something like the Beats to Calvino and Borges.
I guess "romanticism" is valuable as a meme, but it strikes me as a bit pretentious, maybe because I'm not well-read in 18th century literature. I think artists should strive for honesty, transcendence, and universality in whatever ways are available to them.
I think a print comeback is a real possibility. There's been County Highway for a while and The Onion recently announced a print edition. I'd love to see Substack bundle your subscriptions into a monthly magazine. I personally have a hard time reading fiction on a screen.
The ephemeral nature of digital, especially now with instant AI-slop has made longform reading on digital difficult. I find myself looking for books *printed* before 2020 cause at the very least, that slop was at worst written by [a committee of] humans.
"Romantics, if they do have a common politics, tend to be skeptical of big things and prefer small things."
While this is an interesting sketch of the contemporary moment, this really doesn't do justice to the High Romantic project(s)--namely:
- *Why* they were skeptical of "big things"
(is skepticism the right word given their many paeans to big things? I digress)
- The way they saw big things IN small things
- And the way they thought small things could lead to big things.
Yes, the ordinary is one scene of Romantic interest, but that is because the ordinary, in many ways and in many forms, became a scene of revolutionary hope of various kinds.
And to judge by Late Romanticism, which saw revolutions arrive and fail time and time again, their skepticism (such as it was) was quite warranted.
There's more to say on that front, but I realize it's not quite the point of this essay. It is interesting to think of the intitutional adriftness of the Romantics as a reference point for the desire, here, for some kind of less-monetized intellectual and artistic community, a band-of-literary-brothers. I imagine the best people think they can do (certainly I have thought this) is carve out their little space here and hope something about the words they write in that space transcends, which I do agree is a very Romantic sentiment.
A return to the solace of Romanticism and a life of ideas seems appealing now that we're assaulted daily by the ugliness and mendacity in our politics.
The first parts of this are essentially my critique of the whole New Romanticism thing, Matt. My view is that nostalgia can fuel a lot aristocratic self-selection; it gives one a sense of nobility to believe they are looking back to recover some lost, Arcadian essence of life. But that's delusive.
Not sure about the degree of Bloom's direct influence in people's minds now but probably there is a waxing and waning trend of eschewing the canon over "timely" but delimited literatures.
Funny how because it predates Fascism and Marxism (or, to put it in more 20th century terms, Communism), Romanticism led directly to them as it spread into movements for national liberation and self-determination in the latter half of the 19th century, and as utopian projects grew more a part of political action. That seems important.
Also, though I count as something of an elder millenial or a late X I disagree with the idea that "culture war" was in an interregnum. I read plenty of canonical texts in both high school and college courses (despite going to a college that was very self-consciously lefty and theoretical) and starting in high school also realized that Bloom was a buffoon and that the project he was advancing was very much the respectable end of the one that Newt Gingrich was doing. Maybe that just makes me too political and woke or whatever, but I think this is way too broad a generalization.
Also to note that Bloom as a critic and reader could be and was legitimately interesting and thougntful; I took issue and always will with his attempts to insist that because of this he had some special cultural power that required we all bow to his authority as to what and why we should read stuff.
Bloom as a critic of Romanticism (and a few other compatible areas, like Shakespeare and Modernism) could be quite excellent. Bloom as an aspiring canonmaker was just full of absurd, indefensible proclamations like "Emily Dickinson was the second best female poet of the winter of 1860." I too cut my teeth on Romanticism via people who loved Bloom and responded negatively to canon revisionism, and I owe a lot of my understanding of Romanticism to him and his predecessors, who I think are worth revisiting, but even in the stunned aftermath of my exposure to that strain of thinking I mockingly counted up these sentences in the margins of books and made fun of them to friends, lol.
'Interregnum in the culture wars'? The period of 9/11? The period in which we learned the hard way, contra Fukuyama, that history had not ended, with reverberations we see on our streets, to this hour? If we are to find 'historical allies,' and I warmly agree that we need them, let us at least be clear about the history part.
Bravo! Love the essay! My only minor quibble is in calling this an un-Lindy platform. And technically you're correct—there are so many new feature roll outs, it's impossible to call this place old. But at its soul, Substack harkens to the bygone era of blogs. ~20 years is still a blink of an eye, but used in that fashion, it's got some track record.
Then again, Substack ain't gonna survive on the 10% from my paid-subscription-turned-off newsletter, even if coupled by my lingering addiction to Notes....
Romanticism is a default position, it is a parasitic limb to every ideological position because it lacks the form to stand on its own. It’s interesting to bring up Bloom because his aesthetic readings were more to do with a clinging onto a western myth crumbling before his eyes than any real notion of transcendental beauty. To be a capital R Romantic in the year 2025 is to fully submit to the commodity form and locate its beauty in nature rather than look beyond form and find the sublime it conceals.
> Detractors don’t seem to be able to kill it, nor are promoters able to kill it by too much praise.
Get out of town. If you're writing this as yoyr own insight then you're heavily engaging in metamodernism. Everyone said it's a bad idea. I'll read the rest, but it's just narcissism at this point. We all gave up discussing it with yall because yall didn't want to engage with it and we have other things to do.
> much as it can be called that, because it is disembodied, digitized, and mimetic, is nostalgic for the possibility that a network of artists, thinke
Okay, but yall *never* engaged me on this. Yall lied and then it looks like yall are using the language I used. It is just metamodern neonostalgia as is any of the "new x" movements and everyone and the family dog told yall yall weren't real romantics.
Your humble correspondent is sufficiently half-educated that when taking a break from the horrible politics of 2010 to read Richard Holmes's "The Age of Wonder" she could not explain to her husband why he should care about Coleridge or either Shelley. (This was a very, very fruitful book as far as finding husband things that he would actually be interested in. We did biographies of Faraday, Maxwell, Heaviside, Tesla and Edison after which the classical physics of electricity is probably exhausted.) Also more recently I tried to listen to Liszt on Spotify. It did not last 5 minutes. But I can believe that despite Domdaniel's eye-rolling about the idea that Romanticism is all there is of music that Romanticism could mean "what <i>Hiraeth</i> meant to Ceinwen Griffiths". It could mean that there is an infinite horizon for the spirit and that spiritual yearnings have not already been explained in terms of something else.
In terms of normal politics 2010 really was horrible. Ezra Klein at the Washington Post had to write a column telling Obama not to cut Social Security, that was how much it was a realistic possibility. The FDL folks wrote "WHEN Obama does this" and the Democratic party loses all credibility.
"Good Golly, Miss Molly!" This is some serious doo doo. I admit to being so old that when I was in high school in the early 1960s some of us were into Existentialism, which wasn't taught even in our very highly rated private school. So it was a lot of work to figure out who were the existentialists, not to mention making sense of their multiple messages. If only we had waited till college, had some old guy (no female philosophy profs back then) spoon feed it all to us.
But the romantics in literature?
I guess folks had to go through Vietnam and the rise of the Oligarchs to get serious about that. But don't ask a boomer to think about it.
The "Romanticism" that's discussed here on Substack comes in several flavors but seems very much of its time (c. 1970 to the present) and place (North American academia). It often follows Bloom's interests, and includes Keats, Goethe, etc.
How about reading more widely? Novalis's amazing "Allgemeine Brouillon" (will pretty much ruin any simple sense of Romantic philosophy), Adelbert von Chamisso's "Wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl," Friedrich Rückert's "Kindertodtenlieder" (not just Mahler's selections), Schlegel's "Lucinde" (excellent source for the Romantic fragment), Klingemann's weird "The Nightwatches of Bonaventura" (available in a recent translation), Chateaubriand's "Martyrs" (for its religious feeling and archaisms, which tend to be omitted from North American interests in Romanticism), Senancor's "Obermann," and how about Juliusz Słowacki's mock-Byronic epic "Beniowski," just to hear from a less often read part of European romanticism?
A wider, more specific set of references could make it clearer that the "nostalgia" under discussion may be for a period much closer in time and culture—the decades 1980-2000.
Yes. Having been in college in the late 90's, my nostalgia tends towards recent past, the "post-mid-modern" era, something like the Beats to Calvino and Borges.
I guess "romanticism" is valuable as a meme, but it strikes me as a bit pretentious, maybe because I'm not well-read in 18th century literature. I think artists should strive for honesty, transcendence, and universality in whatever ways are available to them.
I think a print comeback is a real possibility. There's been County Highway for a while and The Onion recently announced a print edition. I'd love to see Substack bundle your subscriptions into a monthly magazine. I personally have a hard time reading fiction on a screen.
The ephemeral nature of digital, especially now with instant AI-slop has made longform reading on digital difficult. I find myself looking for books *printed* before 2020 cause at the very least, that slop was at worst written by [a committee of] humans.
"Romantics, if they do have a common politics, tend to be skeptical of big things and prefer small things."
While this is an interesting sketch of the contemporary moment, this really doesn't do justice to the High Romantic project(s)--namely:
- *Why* they were skeptical of "big things"
(is skepticism the right word given their many paeans to big things? I digress)
- The way they saw big things IN small things
- And the way they thought small things could lead to big things.
Yes, the ordinary is one scene of Romantic interest, but that is because the ordinary, in many ways and in many forms, became a scene of revolutionary hope of various kinds.
And to judge by Late Romanticism, which saw revolutions arrive and fail time and time again, their skepticism (such as it was) was quite warranted.
There's more to say on that front, but I realize it's not quite the point of this essay. It is interesting to think of the intitutional adriftness of the Romantics as a reference point for the desire, here, for some kind of less-monetized intellectual and artistic community, a band-of-literary-brothers. I imagine the best people think they can do (certainly I have thought this) is carve out their little space here and hope something about the words they write in that space transcends, which I do agree is a very Romantic sentiment.
A return to the solace of Romanticism and a life of ideas seems appealing now that we're assaulted daily by the ugliness and mendacity in our politics.
The first parts of this are essentially my critique of the whole New Romanticism thing, Matt. My view is that nostalgia can fuel a lot aristocratic self-selection; it gives one a sense of nobility to believe they are looking back to recover some lost, Arcadian essence of life. But that's delusive.
Not sure about the degree of Bloom's direct influence in people's minds now but probably there is a waxing and waning trend of eschewing the canon over "timely" but delimited literatures.
Putting everything else aside, I’m not sure being a Romanticist caused Keats early death by TB
Boredom is the problem. Nostalgia is a byproduct of it.
Funny how because it predates Fascism and Marxism (or, to put it in more 20th century terms, Communism), Romanticism led directly to them as it spread into movements for national liberation and self-determination in the latter half of the 19th century, and as utopian projects grew more a part of political action. That seems important.
Also, though I count as something of an elder millenial or a late X I disagree with the idea that "culture war" was in an interregnum. I read plenty of canonical texts in both high school and college courses (despite going to a college that was very self-consciously lefty and theoretical) and starting in high school also realized that Bloom was a buffoon and that the project he was advancing was very much the respectable end of the one that Newt Gingrich was doing. Maybe that just makes me too political and woke or whatever, but I think this is way too broad a generalization.
Also to note that Bloom as a critic and reader could be and was legitimately interesting and thougntful; I took issue and always will with his attempts to insist that because of this he had some special cultural power that required we all bow to his authority as to what and why we should read stuff.
Bloom as a critic of Romanticism (and a few other compatible areas, like Shakespeare and Modernism) could be quite excellent. Bloom as an aspiring canonmaker was just full of absurd, indefensible proclamations like "Emily Dickinson was the second best female poet of the winter of 1860." I too cut my teeth on Romanticism via people who loved Bloom and responded negatively to canon revisionism, and I owe a lot of my understanding of Romanticism to him and his predecessors, who I think are worth revisiting, but even in the stunned aftermath of my exposure to that strain of thinking I mockingly counted up these sentences in the margins of books and made fun of them to friends, lol.
'Interregnum in the culture wars'? The period of 9/11? The period in which we learned the hard way, contra Fukuyama, that history had not ended, with reverberations we see on our streets, to this hour? If we are to find 'historical allies,' and I warmly agree that we need them, let us at least be clear about the history part.
“Romantic’ and ‘nostalgic’ can never be untwined.
Bravo! Love the essay! My only minor quibble is in calling this an un-Lindy platform. And technically you're correct—there are so many new feature roll outs, it's impossible to call this place old. But at its soul, Substack harkens to the bygone era of blogs. ~20 years is still a blink of an eye, but used in that fashion, it's got some track record.
Then again, Substack ain't gonna survive on the 10% from my paid-subscription-turned-off newsletter, even if coupled by my lingering addiction to Notes....
Romanticism is a default position, it is a parasitic limb to every ideological position because it lacks the form to stand on its own. It’s interesting to bring up Bloom because his aesthetic readings were more to do with a clinging onto a western myth crumbling before his eyes than any real notion of transcendental beauty. To be a capital R Romantic in the year 2025 is to fully submit to the commodity form and locate its beauty in nature rather than look beyond form and find the sublime it conceals.
New short story about predictions https://nimnim1.substack.com/p/poly-hell
> Detractors don’t seem to be able to kill it, nor are promoters able to kill it by too much praise.
Get out of town. If you're writing this as yoyr own insight then you're heavily engaging in metamodernism. Everyone said it's a bad idea. I'll read the rest, but it's just narcissism at this point. We all gave up discussing it with yall because yall didn't want to engage with it and we have other things to do.
> much as it can be called that, because it is disembodied, digitized, and mimetic, is nostalgic for the possibility that a network of artists, thinke
Okay, but yall *never* engaged me on this. Yall lied and then it looks like yall are using the language I used. It is just metamodern neonostalgia as is any of the "new x" movements and everyone and the family dog told yall yall weren't real romantics.
I'll take this as a tip of the hat.
I still respect your work gasda.
Your humble correspondent is sufficiently half-educated that when taking a break from the horrible politics of 2010 to read Richard Holmes's "The Age of Wonder" she could not explain to her husband why he should care about Coleridge or either Shelley. (This was a very, very fruitful book as far as finding husband things that he would actually be interested in. We did biographies of Faraday, Maxwell, Heaviside, Tesla and Edison after which the classical physics of electricity is probably exhausted.) Also more recently I tried to listen to Liszt on Spotify. It did not last 5 minutes. But I can believe that despite Domdaniel's eye-rolling about the idea that Romanticism is all there is of music that Romanticism could mean "what <i>Hiraeth</i> meant to Ceinwen Griffiths". It could mean that there is an infinite horizon for the spirit and that spiritual yearnings have not already been explained in terms of something else.
In terms of normal politics 2010 really was horrible. Ezra Klein at the Washington Post had to write a column telling Obama not to cut Social Security, that was how much it was a realistic possibility. The FDL folks wrote "WHEN Obama does this" and the Democratic party loses all credibility.
R.D. Samuel, The Cat's Elbow SS:
"Good Golly, Miss Molly!" This is some serious doo doo. I admit to being so old that when I was in high school in the early 1960s some of us were into Existentialism, which wasn't taught even in our very highly rated private school. So it was a lot of work to figure out who were the existentialists, not to mention making sense of their multiple messages. If only we had waited till college, had some old guy (no female philosophy profs back then) spoon feed it all to us.
But the romantics in literature?
I guess folks had to go through Vietnam and the rise of the Oligarchs to get serious about that. But don't ask a boomer to think about it.