On American Romanticism 
Notes from Richard
P. Adams, "Permutations of American Romanticism."
A definition of romanticism in terms
of dynamism and organicism has been presented by many critics, beginning
with Morse Peckham's "Toward a Theory of Romanticism" (PMLA 1951).
As described by Adams, Peckham says romanticism was a "shift away
from thinking of the universe as a static mechanism, like a clock,
to thinking of it as a dynamic organism, like a growing tree....For
those who make the shift, the values of static mechanism--reason,
order, permanence, and the like--are replaced by their counterparts
in an organic universe--instinct or intuition, freedom, and change.
Romantic thought is relativistic and pluralistic; it rejects absolute
values, formal classifications, and exclusive judgments; it welcomes
novelty, originality, and variety. It is less interested in distinctions
than in relationships, particularly in the organic relationship which
it posits between man and nature, or the universe, and (less often)
between the individual and society. The great chain of being is replaced
by an indefinitely extended and complicated live network of connecting
filaments, as in the vascular system of a plant or in a mass of animal
nerve tissue, by which every phenomenon is tied by countless direct
and indirect contacts to every other. When a new fact appears, it
is not just another link in the chain or cog in the machine; it is
an evidence of organic growth and development, and its emergence changes
every previously existing aspect of the universe. A new characteristic
is evidence of a totally new an different world.
Therefore a romantic artist will strive,
not to imitate an ideal perfection of form which has always existed,
but to originate a form which has never existed before and which
will uniquely express what he alone feels and knows. To do so, he
will rely more on imagination than on logic, more on symbols than
on signs or allegories, more on unconscious than on conscious powers.
He will believe that he is creating a genuinely new thing and thereby
changing and renewing the whole of his organic universe.
Adams later modifies Peckham's theory
in his article,
I now feel that the fundamental impulse of romanticism was
the shift from staticism to dynamism, and that organicism was mainly
a means of control, a defense against chaos, and a technical resource
for writing, rather than an article of belief; or that, when it was
an article of belief, it led to contradictions an difficulties that
might better have been avoided. ... Contradiction of some kind was practically
guaranteed. Pure dynamism is, in the strictest sense, ineffable; the
concrete feeling of motion, of change, of development cannot be directly
communicated because, in order to be communicated, it must be formulated
into an abstract statement, and all abstract formulas are static. Moreover,
pure metaphysical belief in dynamism is an acutely uncomfortable if
not impossible exercise. It is complete anarchy, which most people,
including writers, find intolerable. In order to make something, as
a writer must do in order to be a writer, one must have not only the
energy of motion but, in addition, some device or formula, some mechanism
or some organism of direction or control. What they discovered...is
that the energy is the primary consideration, and that any kind of control
can be used, so long as it works. That is, it must give some concerted
direction to the energy, without completely stopping it and preferably
without unduly obstructing or inhibiting or distorting its motion....
The trouble with organicism as an article
of belief is that its logical conclusions are static. If the universe
is regarded as a perfect organism, everything must be in its place,
leaving no room for change, growth, or development, any more than
there is in the formistic perfection of renaissance Platonic idealism.
From perfection, whether it is conceived formally or organically,
there is no place to go; perfection is the dead end of change. A writer
who wants primarily to express the energy of motion, but who also
insists on following the logic of organicism to its static conclusions,
will contradict himself; and that is precisely what the writers in
Matthiessen's American renaissance pantheon did: Emerson and Whitman
most frankly and cheerfully, Thoreau less frankly, Hawthorne and Melville
less cheerfully.
Emerson had a strong feeling for the
energy of motion, but he also had a strong belief that the organization
of the universe was ultimately a perfect unity. The feeling and
the belief contradict each other continually in his work. For example,
in Nature (1836), the chapters on "Commodity," "Beauty,"
"Language," and "Discipline" generally deal with the dynamic feeling;
"Idealism," "Spirit," and "Prospects" with the static belief. In
"Self-Reliance" Emerson exhorts us to trust ourselves, even if self-trust
brings us to self-contradiction; but, when he explains "the reason
of self-trust," he asks us to rely not on our individual, changing,
self-contradictory selves after all, but on an "immense intelligence,"
elsewhere called the Over-Soul, in which all contradictions are
resolve and temporal unreliabilities transcended, all individual
souls subsumes. This transcendence appears to be what American transcendentalism
is mainly about. And yet Emerson was not able to give up his sense
of the movement of change, and he most often contradicted himself,
not by developing from one view into another, but by insisting on
both his basic views, the progressive and the ideal, the dynamic
and the static, at the same time, in the same book, the same essay,
and sometimes the same sentence. He was himself keenly aware of
the contradiction, but, perhaps fortunately for the richness of
his work and its appeal to latter-day readers, he was unwilling
to abandon either of his incompatible convictions.
In Whitman's work we see essentially
the same contradiction. Whitman puts a heavier and more consistent
emphasis on the dynamism of change, but he also clings to a belief
in an ultimate organic perfection of the universe, as a necessary
conclusion of change, if not as a present reality....The poet himself,
and each individual person and thing, as Whitman implies in all
his work and most clearly says in "Passage to India," loses individual
identity in death or dissolution, and in so doing "melts in fondness"
into God the ultimate unity....
Thoreau ran into the contradiction
by emphasizing the dynamism of his experience at Walden, his feeling
for the novelty of each day and season, with images of morning and
spring, at the same time that he celebrated the absolute unity of
"the laws of Nature" which he inferred from the regularity of the
pond as measured in the dead season of winter.
For Hawthorne and Melville, who were
less transcendentalist, and sometimes anti-transcendentalist, organicism
was a matter less of belief, perhaps, than of feeling; at any rate,
they seem to have been less inclined to carry it to static conclusions.
Doubting the ultimately perfect organization of the universe, they
tended less to easy optimism and more to a concern with human maladjustments
and conflicts. Writers of fiction, rather than of poems and poetic
essays, they worked in an inherently more dynamic medium, concerned
with temporal events, change, and vicissitude. They used the organic
metaphor as a means of control, a way of giving some coherence to
what might otherwise have been mere noise and confusion; but they
did not let it dominate their thinking or their art to the degree
that their more transcendentalist contemporaries did.
In Walden, "for convenience,"
Thoreau said, he put "the experience of two years into one," making
the book to that degree fictional. He symbolized the growth of his
protagonist by describing it in terms of one complete cycle of seasons,
beginning and ending with spring, the season of rebirth. The pattern
is simple (although it admits an infinite amount of embroidery),
the protagonist is successful, the tone is optimistic, and the implication
is that the world is a very well organized enterprise, in which
there is no need for any sane, energetic man to be uncomfortable.
Hawthorne used a similar organic pattern
in "Young Goodman Brown," but for Brown the result is more complex.
He goes through the motions of the pattern without experiencing
the growth; he "dies" out of childhood, but he is not "reborn" into
maturity, as the pattern implies he ought to be. The esthetic effect
is generated by a powerful tension between the implication of organic
development and the fact of Brown's failure to develop, which remains
unresolved in a conclusion filled with rich and fascinating ambiguities.
The feeling of dynamic life that it conveys is not as inspiring
as the feeling conveyed by Walden, which, considered as a
long lyric poem in prose, in indisputably one of the world's great
books; but the impact of "Young Goodman Brown" is considerably more
concrete and, I suspect, for many readers more compelling....
These works all celebrate the force
of change in the world, of motion, of dynamic life, while at the
same time they all use the organic metaphor to provide coherence
and structural order, either because the authors believed that the
universe was really organic, or because they needed the metaphor
as a technical control, or both....
Emily Dickinson is in many ways more
consistently dynamic than any of the writers in the American renaissance
group. Her best effects very often represent moments of intensely
melt motion or change; sudden (or suddenly realized) disappearances,
losses, or escapes; sharp transitions from one stage to another
in a day, a season, or a life; and celebrations of the sheer power
of wild weather or wild (though usually repressed) emotion. Her
best techniques are compression and contrast, both of which tend
to emphasize the energy of change by bottling or blocking it, or
suddenly releasing it, or catching the flick of it, so to speak,
from the corner of an eye. Her typical poem is a clever little net
in which to snare a moment of reality, and her reality is change,
which can never be caught for more than a moment. Her speakers live
in a quicksilver world, where everything is touch and go, and usually
more go than touch. Her work is often lacking organization, finish,
and control. It makes up for such deficiencies by its vigor and
by the brilliance with which it often succeeds in showing us the
very leap and dart of change. .... Emily Dickinson's poems have
a remarkably modern feel to them....she does not seem to be trying
to organize or control the anarchy of change in any systematic way,
but rather to confront it with various kinds of momentary stops
and quirks that enable us to glimpse it, or just fail to glimpse
it, as if in a stroboscopic flash, in mid-career. The trick, when
it succeeds, has a strong appeal to modern sensibilities, which
relish motion for its own sake, and the more sparks flying the better.
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