Humanities Crash Course Week 35: Romanticism

Grappling with poetry infused with powerful mythological imagery.

Week 35 of the humanities crash course had me dipping into the main Romanticist poets: Byron, Shelley, Blake, etc. I’ve never liked verse, and these works didn’t bring me around — but there were some standouts. I also watched a classic film that doesn’t relate much to any of them.

Readings

Gioia recommended reading poems by Keats, Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Novalis, and Hölderlin. Rather than try to hunt them down online, I bought an ebook of The Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry, an anthology that groups poems by categories:

1. Romantic Hallmarks

2. Narratives of Love

3. Romantic Solitude, Suffering and Endurance

4. Ennobling Interchange: Man and Nature

5. Romantic Odes

6. Romantic Lyric and Song

7. The Romantic Sonnet

8. The Gothic and Surreal

9. Romantic Comedy and Satire

10. Protest and Politics

11. Poets in Relationship

12. On Poets and Poetry

A wide range — and a big book! I didn’t attempt a comprehensive read-through, going instead for a few well-known poems and some that caught my eye. Here’s what I read:

• Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• To Autumn by John Keats

• To a Skylark by Percy Bysshe Shelley

• I Remember, I Remember by Thomas Hood

• The Ruined Cottage by William Wordsworth

• Love by Coleridge

• The Eve of St. Agnes by Keats

• Juan and Haidee by Lord Byron

• The Storm-Beat Maid by Joanna Baillie

• The Female Exile by Charlotte Smith

• Visions of the Daughters of Albion by William Blake

• Excerpts from Songs of Innocence by Blake

• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge

My favorites were Juan and Haidee and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The former is part of a longer poem, Don Juan. I’d previously read the latter, given it’s the inspiration for Iron Maiden’s song of the same name.

A sailor tells his story to a hesitant wedding guest: while on a voyage, he recklessly kills an albatross. A curse descends on the ship: the wind stills and everything stops. Eventually, everyone onboard except him dies of thirst.

His path to redemption begins after he blesses a group of beautiful water snakes. The albatross — which was hung around his neck as a sign of guilt — drops into the water. The curse lifts, but he remains condemned to wander and retell the tale.

While I’m not into poetry, this poem felt like high mythology. The image of the shipmates hanging the albatross’ corpse on the mariner’s neck is a great metaphor for guilt. It’s become a common phrase for a guilty conscience or a deserved curse.

Audiovisual

Music: Beethoven’s 6th symphony (“Pastoral”) plus Chopin’s Nocturnes and Preludes. The pastoral symphony is meant as a “programmatic” work illustrating a sojourn in the countryside — a very “Romantic” theme.

These are extremely popular works; I’d heard them many times before. I considered FANTASIA as this week’s movie pick given it illustrates the Beethoven symphony, but I’ve also seen it several times and wanted to stake out new ground.

Arts: Paintings by Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), who Wikipedia says was “generally considered the most important German artist of his generation.” I’d seen Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (in a book cover?) but was otherwise unaware of his work.

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) by Caspar David Friedrich via Wikimedia

His work echoes the Romanticist ethos, with its emphasis on nature and spirituality. But his influence waned toward the end of his life. His paintings of small solitary human figures against vast landscapes reminded me of Chinese landscape paintings.

Cinema: Sydney Lumet’s NETWORK (1976).

I usually only call out the director, but this film’s writer — Paddy Chayefsky — also deserves a mention. The movie is an astringent satire of the TV medium and the main ills affecting the U.S. in the mid-1970s. Much of it is in the script.

Peter Finch plays Howard Beale, a news anchor for a fictitious TV network that’s trailing in the ratings. The network fires Beale and he announces the firing on-air, adding that he will commit suicide during his final broadcast.

At first, network executives panic — but soon they spot an opportunity. Beale’s antics increased ratings; powerplays among execs elevate him to a prominent position before eventually terminating him.

The gist: commercially produced television is a moral black hole. Company leadership will do anything for ratings, the consequences be damned. Why hasn’t this been remade with social media execs? Engagement, baby!

This wasn’t the only movie I saw this week. Herzog was still on my mind, so I watched several interviews on YouTube. I also checked out Les Blank’s BURDEN OF DREAMS (1982), his documentary about the making of FITZCARRALDO. Astonishing stuff.

Reflections

As I said above, I’m not big into verse — I much prefer prose. (And non-fiction, especially.) That said, an education isn’t always about digging into the things you already like — stretching is part of the point of doing something like this crash course.

Poetry is a more effective medium for mythologizing. The story of the ancient mariner wouldn’t be as effective if told in prose. For me, the language in these works evoked imagery and emotions that would be hard to convey otherwise.

The problem is that I find them hard to follow. I tend to read relatively fast, often scanning texts as I go. Verse requires a slower pace and more methodical reading than I’m used to. As a result, I often get the images but miss the broader arc of the story.

Of all the poems I read this week, I found the Don Juan excerpt and The Rime relatively easy to follow. But I was surprised at how difficult I found other works — even some that I was familiar with. (E.g., Kubla Khan, which inspired another favorite rock song: Rush’s Xanadu.)

These songs speak of Romanticism’s enduring influence; the poems they’re based on clearly tap into deep mythological themes.

Notes on Note-taking

As I’ve done in previous weeks, I asked ChatGPT for help — in this case, after reading, since I wanted to try to make sense of the poems myself. Here’s ChatGPT’s summary of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner tells the story of a sailor who, after recklessly killing an albatross, brings a curse upon himself and his shipmates. The crew suffers under supernatural torments until all die but him, leaving him to wander alone. His redemption begins when he blesses the beauty of sea creatures, which lifts the curse, though he remains condemned to wander the world retelling his tale as a warning.

It’s a story of guilt, punishment, and partial redemption — with strong themes of reverence for nature, the spiritual consequences of human actions, and the power of storytelling.

Would you like me to also give you a high-level outline of the poem’s seven parts, so you can track how the narrative unfolds?

While I’d gotten the gist, ChatGPT gave me better words to express my thoughts. (E.g., describing the killing of the albatross as “reckless.”) I’m always wary of adopting what I get from LLMs verbatim, but in this case that seemed like the perfect word.

Note the question at the end. The LLM providers are obviously playing the engagement game as well. I wonder if one day there will be a movie like NETWORK about the OpenAIs of the world?

On another note, I remain awed at the ability to access all these works — movies, symphonies, poems, paintings — on an iPad. It’s never been easier to undertake a humanities crash course like this one. We live in amazing times!

Up Next

We’re heading into works with obvious contemporary political relevance. Gioia recommends The Declaration of Independence, The U.S. Constitution, Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. I’ve read the first two before, but not the others.

Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. See you next week!

This post first appeared on my blog.