Experience and Patriotism

Experience and Patriotism

Over the course of this semester we have studied a variety of the Romantic poets as collectors. This theme of collecting was evident in all of the authors, from Darwin’s collection of plants to Clare’s collection of experience and Wordsworth’s collection of memories. One thing that I think we failed to discuss adequately was the motivations of these poet’s as collectors. Why did all of these artists seemingly need to collect? To be fair, we did discuss motivation for a number of the poets. However, most of the time we were only capable of uncovering merely personal or political motivations, motivations ruled by social class systems (such as Clare’s desire to authentically collect the peasant experience) or personal goals. And although I do agree that some – if not all – of the Romantic poets collected for personal and political reasons, I think the overwhelming plague of artistic collection in the Romantic era speaks to something greater about mankind and the role of art in human existence. Specifically, I think this tendency to collect highlights a spiritual urge that all humans share. 

This spiritual urge is a type of secret patriotism, a metaphysical loyalty to something which is both indistinct and unavoidable. It isn’t patriotism in the traditional sense, but it is something like it. The Romantic poets were not waving the flags of their own countries; they were responding to an instinctual call to some far-off country. They were aware, at least subconsciously, of the distance between themselves and this far-off country. They felt, alongside all mankind, the pain and longing caused by this distance, and, in a desperate attempt to satisfy or satiate this pain, they attempted to collect artifacts which intensified their longing and drew their hearts nearer to that far-off country. Medievalist and theologian C. S. Lewis attempts to define this urge in an essay entitled “The Weight of Glory”:

In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you – the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter.  

Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all that is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

Here Lewis articulates what I think is the common strand among the Romantics: the desire to capture this longing and to satisfy this desire. 

The first poet who caught my attention for doing this was John Clare. His poems focus on events, circumstances, and experiences. His desire to capture his experience felt a lot like Wordsworth’s desire to recapture memories. They both placed overwhelming importance on these elements of their existence. By focusing their art entirely on these elements of their existence, they articulate the significance they ascribe to these elements. For Clare, the raw energy of authentic experience sparked an imaginative rekindling of this longing. Clare’s obsessive return to authentic experience in art is, in many was, similar to our desire to hear our favorite songs loudly, to bask in them and find release in them; it brought him the same type of indescribable joy. 

Works Cited

Clare, John, John Clare, Eric Robinson, and David Powell. Major Works. Oxford: New York, 2004. Print.

Lewis, C. S., and Walter Hooper. Readings for Meditation and Reflection. N.p.: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992. Print.

Wordsworth, William, Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850: Authoritative Texts, Context and Reception, Recent Critical Essays. New York: Norton, 1979. Print.