“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite”
The Marriage between Heaven and Hell, William Blake, 1793
In 1792, William
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge came out with their Lyrical Ballads. To many, this particular moment in time marks the
beginning of Romanticism, a movement which opposed the rationalism that had
been central in the Age of Reason decades earlier. Plays made way for a focus
on poetry and prose, in which themes like youthful innocence, a connection to
nature, and the confrontational breaking of taboos started to play major roles.
Institutions like the church, the government, and even the education system
were consistently besieged with heavy critiques, showing the irrationality
within the rationality their so-called systems claimed to have. The Romantics
attempted to once again enchant the world, to restore its magic, to bring back
the supernatural, and to purposefully not answer all the questions life puts
forward, but instead display the enjoyment of clueless wonder, in a language anyone
could understand. Approximately 150 years later, a new sense of rebellion came
along, partially voiced by artists once again embracing the mysteries of life. In
a world just struck by war, seeing the rise of feminist marches, civil rights
movements and the developing voice of younger generations, the Hippie movement
and Rock ‘n Roll soon took over. Paving the way for the mainstream were people
like the beat poets, who, during the 50s, started to write about junkies, the
lower class, and homosexuals, thereby actively breaking with conventions.
Additionally, the language used became more free verse, more direct, and simply
more accessible, therefore strongly opposing the rational, almost pretentiously
complex texts modernism had put out the years before WO II. Unsurprisingly, the
beat poets themselves felt aligned with the romantics of two centuries earlier.
Allen Ginsberg even named William Blake as one of his biggest inspirations. In
other forms of post-modernist writing, an enchantment of the world once again
arose through the humorous existentialism of, for instance, Samuel Beckett and
the irrationally mythicized mundane of the Magical Realists. What more do these
similarities tell us about that period, and in what ways has it influenced our
own?
Continue reading “Sex, Drugs & Romanticism”
