The Completion of Romanticism in Modernism

(Lecture Notes)


Rajiv C Krishnan


The founding moment of Modernism, represented by the early polemical writings of TE Hulme, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, was presided over by a strong and openly declared antipathy towards Romanticism.

The ascesis of Imagism was meant as a counterforce to the profligacy of Romantic poetic practice, just as the dictional overhaul carried out by Romanticism was meant to overcome the rigidities of Neoclassical poetry.

And it was the fatigue of the lyric forms and modes patronized by Romanticism that made the Modernist experimentation with form both necessary and inevitable.

Thus it would appear that Modernism’s practices of discontinuity, juxtaposition and fragmentation are also reverberated in its relationship with Romanticism.

But, strenuous as the Modernist claim of autonomy and of divergence from Romanticism may be, the moment one tries to unpack the differences between these rival poetic ideologies, the more the continuities between the two seem to be. Keats is the representative of the sort of Romanticism that makes Modernism clearly post-Romantic. It is in the nature of a rhetorics of hatred and difference that the inability to acknowledge affiliations and guilt takes the form of vehement and irrational fear and suspicion



One of the problems that Modernism inherited from the Romantics was the experience of alienation—between man and nature, self and objects. Poem after poem bemoans this separation:

Ode on Intimations of Immortality
The Daffodils
Ode to a Nightingale
Skylark
West Wind

The paradigmatic moment is expressed as the vertigo of identification.

The typical routine of the Romantic lyric then becomes the attempt to suture the gap between subject and object, man and nature, sensation and thought, thought and imagination, things and signs. The task of representation thus submits that which is already bridge—referentiality—to the scrutiny of purposes that cross the boundaries of mere reference. Words in the Romantic poem thus contract the obligation to refer, not just to objects, but also to that excess that is represented by meanings and significances—an excess that describes the human self in all its creativity and power.
This appears to me to be one of the reasons why it becomes necessary for Romanticism to recruit the concept of the agential imagination.

The frequency with which objects appear in Romantic lyrics as proxy for the imagination—Shelley’s West Wind, Keats’ Nightingale, Wordsworth’s Skylark—shows the essential Romantic paradox of representation, which is that of representing that which exceeds the grasp of representation. And it is precisely because the Romantic object gets occulted behind the imagination—which is what names the human self—that Keats’ Nightingale is not a particular nightingale, but all nightingales. The Romantic fondness for prosopopoeia and the pathetic fallacy then reflects less a love of objects for their own sakes than the anxiety to reinstate the autonomy of the human self. This is also why the sensible moment of Romantic metaphor and narrative has to be interrupted in the interests of semantic and narrative closure. Our own embarrassment at what we call ‘Romantic description’ points to our own habits of expectation.

Keats’ ‘negative capability’ represents a Romantic ideal that is more an idea than an actual experience. And this is the very point at which Modernism, with its quest for impersonality, rejoins Romanticism.

But before I go on to take up a discussion of Modernism, let me make a few more points about Romantic representation.

It was the notion of the imagination that enabled the Romantic poets to present the self as more than just a bundle of perception, as a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. By extension, they also had to resist the idea of the poem as a residue of perceptions and as a degraded form of truth.

But the reappearance of the external world in thought and expression, and the echo of sensations in words always had to be at the expense of the imagination.

And this brings me to the one great distinction that separates Romanticism from Modernism: Modernism distrusts tropes (but Stevens…):

The Red Wheelbarrow

The Modernists interrogate the notion of art as an ontologically inferior copy of reality, and seek to grant the work of art an autonomy and uniqueness that make it an autotelic object that adds to the existing stock of objects in the world.

Anecdote of a Jar

It is the practice of impersonality that can lead to the practice of presenting and representing objects in all their unique particularity and being. Objects thus seem to appear in Modernist poetry purified of extralinguistic motives, and in a representation that captures the unique, unrepeatable valency of particulars. Modernism would thus seem to demand as many voices as there are subjects and objects. Hence its sponsorship of ventriloquism, as in

TS Eliot’s The Wasteland (“He Do the Police in
Different Voices”)
James Joyce’s Ulysses
Ezra Pound’s The Cantos
William Carlos Williams’s Paterson

If this is the basic movement of Modernism, it is clearly at odds with Romantic practice. For objects here seem important for themselves, and the self seems erased out of existence by the autonomy that it grants objects.

But what is it then that prevents Imagism from being a mere taxonomy of objects, or Modernism from succumbing to the temptation of regarding the poem as a mere residue of perception?

My answer is that just as the Romantics did, the Modernists also deposit meanings and significances to objects (or collections of objects)—they only adopt a reverse epistemology whereby objects in poems naturally and contextually create meanings in the minds of readers without the support of tropes and logical structures.

Thus Modernism differs from Romanticism in terms of the trust that it invests in the ability of objects to recall sense. Its protocols of presentation thus functions within the perimeter of what has been called an anti-Platonic epistemology. It can thus pretend to function from an Archimedean point that can have privileged access to the life and being of objects, emotions and beings.

Taking Williams’s Wheelbarrow poem as our point of departure, it is fair to say that Modernism is afraid of a failure of reference (as the first two lines of the poem clearly suggest) within a purely anti-Platonist presentational mode. This fear lifts only when we come to the work of the Postmodern poets, who abdicate choice and celebrate the aleatory and the contingent. Modernism can therefore escape Romantic symbolism only by virtue of a prior belief in the essential continuity of and between phenomena. In decreasing its distance from empirically authentic discourse, it was only extending a practice begun by the Romantics.

The ekphrastic fear—which is the fear of literality—that seems to dilute Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is already there in Stevens’s Jar poem and in Williams’ Wheelbarrow poem. The pathos of dumbness that Williams exploits in his poem is in effect the same pathos that governs the unheard melodies and unknown motives in Keats’s Grecian Urn poem.

In conclusion, I wish to say that despite the many differences between Modernism and Romanticism, there are important continuities of interests and hopes—continuities that speak of the completion of Romanticism in Modernism.