Romanticism: A Conflict between Pragmatic Political Ethos and Aesthetics

Abstract

This undertaken project aims at exploring the contrast between Romantics’ political aspirations and their aesthetics. The paper investigates the English Romantics’ rapturous refuge of imaginative experience for the creation of Plato’s inspired ideal world and their flight away from stark reality. The paper unravels the ways in which Romantic poetry, especially, of William Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, bears marks of prevalent socio-politico condition. The study scrutinizes the tug of war between the Romantic aesthetics of “art for art’s sake” with its God-like dreamland of imagination and the Romantics’ pragmatic political ethos which causes the split. Consequently, the gnawing gap is created in the Romantic soul where both the world of reality and the imagination battle to conquer. The paper aims to shed light on such Romantic fissure, it is divided into four portions: the first part deals with the Romantic aesthetics, the second section highlights their political ethos mirroring in the Romantics’ poems, the third portion studies the underlying connection between the Romantic aesthetics and the Romantics’ political aspirations and the fourth part brings out the inherent contradictions between the two.   This is a qualitative study based upon hermeneutic theory of in depth artistic analysis. The paper concludes the two contradictory traits: one, their desire to remain intact with the current political situations that breed political aspiration thus forming a part of this world of reality. And secondly their desire for mystical experiences and flight into the world of imagination, which according to the Romantics is more real than this reality, through their poetry. These two traits become antagonistic because the world of imagination also constructs an ideal world where every individual is happy. In other words it creates a utopia that stands in sharp contrast with the political aspirations because it lacks pragmatism. The paper is contextualized in Romantics’ Poetry for a better comprehension of the schema of art and aesthetics.