Why I Love the Romantics (or, Why I Hate the Romantics)

Be through my lips to unawakened Earth

The trumpet of prophecy! O wind,
If Winter comes, can spring be far behind?

And it's now, fair reader, that I venture into waters heretofore uncharted. I admit I may lose you with this next sentence alone, but it's true: I've been snookered by the beauty of "Ode to the West Wind," by Percy Bysshe Shelley's terza rima, by his five sonnet ode to the Zephyrian gusts, and by his burning desire to, well, get blown.

You blacked out until blown, right? I can't say I blame you.

Before this week, I preferred not to tango with Romantic poetry. I happily ignored all things Wordsworth and Coleridge and Blake as soon as I, then a senior in high school, closed the massive anthology and opened Huxley's Brave New World. It's fitting, really. That "brave new world" I sought wasn't to be found in gushing naivete of a Romantic mysticism; the world I wanted was hurdling through the future, spinning off into distopian catastrophes, and stoking the fires of prophetic failures in a false social "order."

But today, I capped off a week of Romantic poems with my seniors through an examination of Shelley's ode. After four days, I finally got them to focus on how the aforementioned poets regarded nature and their relationships with it. I washed the poetic intricacies with suds of superficiality. I accepted the dumbed-down responses. I broke them of the wont to label these poets hippies, escapists, or just plain loony. They finally recognized my urgings, eventually reciting for me--in sloppy handwriting all--how speakers "want to be in harmony with nature," how the rationalism sent them "on journeys to make nature mysterious again," and how social order in the cities "made monsters of good people."

Then, I casually sent them back into the ugly world they inhabit, oblivious to an existence without artificial sounds, artificial light, and empty hands. Before one group of students left, I reflected on an assignment I used to mandate. For homework, I told them, I used to ask my students to seek out a location in a natural setting. There could be no traffic, I recalled, no music, and no cell phones. When students arrived, I just asked that they sit for 30 minutes. After that time passed, I only requested they write about their reaction to the previous chunk of time. I didn't assign this today, mind you, just invoked it as a hollow threat.

The gasps were overwhelming. The horror of disconnection, even for thirty minutes, seemed unfathomable to many of them. It forced me to wonder, If being a Romantic is no longer attainable for anyone who claims to have a soul, is merely understanding the Romantics, the circumstances that drove them to create, and the awareness of their appeal, also impossible?

When I got in my car and left, I received a partial answer:

"The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind./ The answer is blowing in the wind."