tag:theconversation.com,2011:/africa/topics/romantics-27077/articlesRomantics – The Conversation2023-01-04T13:27:28Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1961292023-01-04T13:27:28Z2023-01-04T13:27:28ZWilliam Wordsworth and the Romantics anticipated today’s idea of a nature-positive life<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/502403/original/file-20221221-12-9wf35m.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=6%2C6%2C1491%2C1129&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Wiliam Wordsworth lived and wrote in Grasmere, in England's Lake District, from 1799-1808.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Grasmere_from_Stone_Arthur.jpg">Mick Knapton/Wikipedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Musical performances usually happen in concert halls or clubs, but famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma is exploring a new venue: U.S. national parks. In a project called <a href="https://www.yo-yoma.com/news/yo-yo-ma-at-the-grand-canyon-big-time-and-our-common-nature/">Our Common Nature</a>, Ma is performing in settings such as the Great Smoky Mountains and the Grand Canyon. By making music and bringing people together in scenic places, Ma aims to help humans understand where they fit in the natural world.</p>
<p>“What if there’s a way that we can end up thinking and feeling and knowing that we are coming from nature, that we’re a part of nature, instead of just thinking: What can we use it for?” Ma mused in a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/arts/music/yo-yo-ma-our-common-nature.html">recent New York Times article</a>. </p>
<p>There’s a buzzword for this outlook: nature-positive. And it’s cropping up at high-level meetings, including the 2021 <a href="https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/50363/g7-2030-nature-compact-pdf-120kb-4-pages-1.pdf">G-7 summit in Cornwall, England</a> and the COP15 biodiversity conference in Montreal that adopted an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/19/climate/biodiversity-cop15-montreal-30x30.html">ambitious framework for protecting nature</a> in December 2022.</p>
<p>As a group of environmental leaders <a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/what-is-nature-positive-and-why-is-it-the-key-to-our-future/">wrote in 2021</a>: “A nature positive approach enriches biodiversity, stores carbon, purifies water and reduces pandemic risk. In short, a nature positive approach enhances the resilience of our planet and our societies.” </p>
<p>This is a dramatic shift from the mentality that has driven industrialization and global economic growth over the past 250 years. But it’s not new. As a researcher in the humanities and author of “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Wordsworth-Poet-Changed-World/dp/0300169647">Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World</a>,” I see nature positivity as a welcome revival of an outlook that English poet William Wordsworth and other Romantics proposed in the late 1700s.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Cellist Yo-Yo Ma plays ‘In the Gale,’ an original piece for The Birdsong Project, a collaboration to support bird conservation.</span></figcaption>
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<h2>The birth of the sublime</h2>
<p>In the preindustrial era, when life was dominated by hard manual labor, wild nature wasn’t viewed as a terribly attractive place. In the 1720s, writer Daniel Defoe, <a href="https://www.globalgreyebooks.com/tour-through-the-whole-island-of-great-britain-ebook.html">touring across the island of Great Britain</a>, denounced the mountains and lakes of northwest England as “the wildest, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over.” </p>
<p>The mountains were horrible to look at, impossible to pass over and, worst of all, had “no lead mines and veins of rich ore, no Coal Pits,” Defoe wrote. They were “all barren and wild, of no use or advantage either to Man or Beast.” </p>
<p>Attitudes began to change a generation later, with the expansion of a middle class that had the leisure and resources to enjoy a spot of tourism. Early guidebooks gave directions to viewpoints, or “stations,” that opened onto spectacularly beautiful vistas. </p>
<p>Philosophers and poets began to view natural phenomena such as ocean waves, lightning flashes over a mountain or the darkness of old-growth forests with awestruck pleasure rather than fear. They called these sights the “sublime,” a word that we still reach for when contemplating, say, the vastness of the Arctic or the Amazon. As <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/26/obituaries/barry-lopez-dead.html">Barry Lopez</a>, author of “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/103565/arctic-dreams-by-barry-lopez/">Arctic Dreams</a>,” once wrote, the “sublime encounter” with such places offers us a profound “resonance with a system of unmanaged, nonhuman-centered relationships”.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The aurora borealis, or northern lights, have become a modern tourist draw that attracts people to remote northern locations.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Romanticism emerged as the steam engine and the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/technology/spinning-jenny">spinning jenny</a> were driving mass urbanization. As workers flocked from farms to grimy cities in search of manufacturing jobs, a reaction set in: yearning for a return to nature. This became the hallmark of the <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/roma/hd_roma.htm">Romantic movement</a> that flourished across Europe through the mid-1800s. </p>
<h2>‘A sort of national property’</h2>
<p>Many writers, thinkers and artists contributed to this outpouring of nature-positivity. Beethoven’s <a href="https://www.npr.org/2006/06/12/5478661/beethovens-symphony-no-6-in-f-major-op-68">Pastoral Symphony</a> and the <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/joseph-mallord-william-turner-558">paintings of J. M. W. Turner</a> are examples. But in the English-speaking world, none were more influential than <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2020/04/radical-lessons-william-wordsworth-250-years-jonathan-bate-biography-review">Wordsworth</a> (1770-1850).</p>
<p>Born and raised in England’s Lake District, Wordsworth felt alienated from fellow students at Cambridge. As an aspiring journalist in London, he was stunned to discover that many people did not know their next door neighbor’s name. Only when Wordsworth returned to nature – first in the English west country and then when he went home to the Lakes – did he become his true self and write his greatest poetry. </p>
<p>In verse and prose, Wordsworth made a series of revolutionary claims. In the preface to his 1800 collection of poems, “<a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lyrical_Ballads_(1800)/Volume_2">Lyrical Ballads</a>,” he argued that men and women who live indigenously within a natural environment are uniquely in tune with “the essential passions of the heart” because their very humanity is “incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.” </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/502420/original/file-20221221-12-8i9x3g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Portrait of a man with arms folded, standing on a rocky point" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/502420/original/file-20221221-12-8i9x3g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/502420/original/file-20221221-12-8i9x3g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=735&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/502420/original/file-20221221-12-8i9x3g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=735&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/502420/original/file-20221221-12-8i9x3g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=735&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/502420/original/file-20221221-12-8i9x3g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/502420/original/file-20221221-12-8i9x3g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/502420/original/file-20221221-12-8i9x3g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Wordsworth on Helvellyn,’ a mountain in the Lake District (1842), by Benjamin Robert Haydon.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth#/media/File:Wordsworth_on_Helvellyn_by_Benjamin_Robert_Haydon.jpg">Wikipedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In his “<a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/guide-to-the-lakes-9780198848097">Guide to the Lakes</a>,” Wordsworth warned against such innovations as planting non-native conifers that spoiled the beauty and eroded the soil of his native region. Instead, he proposed preserving places of outstanding natural beauty like the Lake District as “a sort of national property.” </p>
<p>This idea later would help to <a href="https://exhibits.lib.byu.edu/wordsworth/">inspire the U.S. national park system</a> and England’s <a href="https://www.hdrawnsley.com/index.php/2-uncategorised/111-no-man-is-an-island">National Trust</a>. Today the concepts of <a href="https://theconversation.com/protecting-30-of-earths-surface-for-nature-means-thinking-about-connections-near-and-far-180296">conservation zones and protected areas</a> are central to the goal of a nature-positive world.</p>
<p>Inspired by Wordsworth’s idea that the health of human society depends on a healthy relationship with the environment, the great Victorian social thinker <a href="https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/arts-blog/john-ruskin-environmental-campaigner">John Ruskin</a> turned economic theory on its head. In polemical pamphlets and public lectures, Ruskin argued that the basis of what was then known as “political economy” should be not labor and capital, production and consumption, but “<a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/environment/energy-government-and-defense-magazines/white-thorn-blossom">Pure Air, Water, and Earth</a>.” </p>
<p>Almost exactly 150 years later, on July 28, 2022, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a <a href="https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/3982508?ln=en">resolution</a> recognizing a universal human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="InstagramEmbed" data-react-props="{"url":"https://www.instagram.com/p/CmTUNuTu27X/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link","accessToken":"127105130696839|b4b75090c9688d81dfd245afe6052f20"}"></div></p>
<h2>Colonial conservation?</h2>
<p>Wordsworth’s influence on the conservation movement wasn’t entirely benign. Late in life, he lamented that his very advocacy of the beauty of the Lake District had brought in a mass tourist industry that had the potential to <a href="https://www.johndobson.info/Tourists/NumberedPages/Page_39.php">destroy the very beauty he sought to preserve</a>. </p>
<p>Furthermore, protecting wild places risks displacing indigenous peoples who have lived in harmony with the land for centuries. Creating conservation zones and protected areas in the rain forests of Central America and the Amazon basin has sometimes <a href="https://www.climatechangenews.com/2016/12/08/conservation-zones-exclude-indigenous-people-drive-deforestation-report/">shut out local tribes</a>. </p>
<p>Organizations such as the <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/sierra-club-apologizes-founder-john-muir-s-racist-views-n1234695">Sierra Club</a> and the <a href="https://theecologist.org/2016/mar/29/century-theft-indians-national-park-service">U.S. National Park Service</a> are now striving to transcend this long history of “<a href="https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/conservation-policy-and-indigenous-peoples">colonial conservation</a>.” The importance of working together with indigenous peoples and learning from their time-honored values and conservation practices received new attention at major conferences on climate change and biodiversity in 2022, although some observers argued that the resulting commitments <a href="https://news.mongabay.com/2022/11/words-that-didnt-make-the-cut-what-happened-to-indigenous-rights-at-cop27/">fell short</a> of <a href="https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/cop15-biodiversity-conference-fails-protect-indigenous-peoples-rights">what was needed</a>.</p>
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<p>In my view, Wordsworth knew that the truly nature-positive are those whose livelihoods and senses of self and community are wholly bound to their native places. As he wrote in “<a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lyrical_Ballads_(1800)/Volume_2/Michael">Michael</a>,” the great pastoral poem at the climax of “Lyrical Ballads”:</p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> And grossly that man errs, who should suppose
That the green valleys, and the streams and rocks,
Were things indifferent to the Shepherd’s thoughts.
... these fields, these hills
Which were his living Being even more
Than his own blood—what could they less? had laid
Strong hold on his affections, were to him
A pleasurable feeling of blind love,
The pleasure which there is in life itself.
</code></pre><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/196129/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jonathan Bate does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The idea that human activity threatens nature, and that it is important to protect wild places, dates back to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.Jonathan Bate, Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities, Arizona State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1755202022-06-19T19:53:09Z2022-06-19T19:53:09ZFrankenstein: how Mary Shelley’s sci-fi classic offers lessons for us today about the dangers of playing God<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452995/original/file-20220318-12943-b0cfo5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster.</span> </figcaption></figure><p><em>In our Guide to the Classics series, experts explain key works of literature.</em></p>
<hr>
<p><a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/frankenstein-9780241425121">Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus</a>, is an 1818 novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Set in the late 18th century, it follows scientist Victor Frankenstein’s creation of life and the terrible events that are precipitated by his abandonment of his creation. It is a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_fiction">Gothic novel</a> in that it combines supernatural elements with horror, death and an exploration of the darker aspects of the psyche. </p>
<p>It also provides a complex critique of Christianity. But most significantly, as one of the first works of science-fiction, it explores the dangers of humans pursuing new technologies and becoming God-like.</p>
<h2>The celebrity story</h2>
<p>Shelley’s Frankenstein is at the heart of what might be the greatest celebrity story of all time. Shelley was born in 1797. Her mother, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Wollstonecraft">Mary Wollstonecraft</a>, author of the landmark A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), was, according to that book’s introduction, “the first major feminist”. </p>
<p>Shelley’s father was <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/godwin/">William Godwin</a>, political philosopher and founder of “philosophical anarchism” – he was anti-government in the moment that the great democracies of France and the United States were being born. When she was 16, Shelley eloped with radical poet <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley">Percy Shelley</a>, whose <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias">Ozymandias</a> (1818) is still regularly quoted (“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”).</p>
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<img alt="A pretty woman sitting between two men, looking anxious." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452987/original/file-20220318-19-lnulc8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452987/original/file-20220318-19-lnulc8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452987/original/file-20220318-19-lnulc8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452987/original/file-20220318-19-lnulc8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452987/original/file-20220318-19-lnulc8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452987/original/file-20220318-19-lnulc8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452987/original/file-20220318-19-lnulc8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Douglas Walton Percy Shelley Elsa Lanchester Mary Shelley and Gavin Gordon Lord Byron in the film The Bride of Frankenstein.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Their relationship seems to epitomise the Romantic era itself. It was crossed with outside love interests, illegitimate children, suicides, debt, wondering and wandering. And it ultimately came to an early end in 1822 when Percy Shelley drowned, his small boat lost in a storm off the Italian coast. The Shelleys also had a close association with the poet <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Byron">Lord Byron</a>, and it is this association that brings us to Frankenstein.</p>
<p>In 1816 the Shelleys visited Switzerland, staying on the shores of Lake Geneva, where they were Byron’s neighbours. As Mary Shelley tells it, they had all been reading ghost stories, including Coleridge’s <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43971/christabel">Christabel</a> (Coleridge had visited her father at the family house when Shelley was young), when Byron suggested that they each write a ghost story. Thus 18-year-old Shelley began to write Frankenstein.</p>
<h2>The myth of the monster</h2>
<p>The popular imagination has taken Frankenstein and run with it. The monster “Frankenstein”, originally “Frankenstein’s monster”, is as integral to Western culture as the characters and tropes from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. </p>
<p>But while reasonable continuity remains between Carroll’s Alice and its subsequent reimaginings, much has been changed and lost in the translation from Shelley’s novel into the many versions that are rooted in the popular imagination.</p>
<iframe width="100%" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TBHIO60whNw" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p>There have been many varied adaptations, from <a href="https://youtu.be/TBHIO60whNw">Edward Scissorhands</a> to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGzc0pIjHqw">The Rocky Horror Picture Show</a> (see <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/feb/11/the-20-best-frankenstein-films-ranked">here</a> for a top 20 list of Frankenstein films). But despite the variety, it’s hard not to think of the “monster” as a zombie-like implacable menace, as we see in the <a href="https://youtu.be/BN8K-4osNb0">trailer to the 1931 movie</a>, or a lumbering fool, as seen in <a href="https://youtu.be/nBV8Cw73zhk">the Herman Munster incarnation</a>. Further, when we add the prefix “franken” it’s usually with disdain; consider “frankenfoods”, which refers to genetically modified foods, or “frankenhouses”, which describes contemporary architectural monstrosities or bad renovations. </p>
<p>However, in Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein’s creation is far from being two-dimensional or contemptible. To use the motto of the Tyrell corporation, which, in the 1982 movie Bladerunner, creates synthetic life, the creature strikes us as being “more human than human”. Indeed, despite their dissimilarities, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoAzpa1x7jU">the replicant Roy Batty in Bladerunner reproduces Frankenstein’s creature’s intense humanity</a>. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452988/original/file-20220318-10625-19lfw2e.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452988/original/file-20220318-10625-19lfw2e.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=244&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452988/original/file-20220318-10625-19lfw2e.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=244&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452988/original/file-20220318-10625-19lfw2e.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=244&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452988/original/file-20220318-10625-19lfw2e.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=307&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452988/original/file-20220318-10625-19lfw2e.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=307&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452988/original/file-20220318-10625-19lfw2e.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=307&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Roy Batty as a replicant in Blade Runner, delivering his famous tears in rain speech.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Some key elements in the plot</h2>
<p>The story of Victor Frankenstein is nested within the story of scientist-explorer Robert Walton. For both men, the quest for knowledge is mingled with fanatical ambition. The novel begins towards the end of the story, with Walton, who is trying to sail to the North Pole, rescuing Frankenstein from <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0c/Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Das_Eismeer_-_Hamburger_Kunsthalle_-_02.jpg/1280px-Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Das_Eismeer_-_Hamburger_Kunsthalle_-_02.jpg">sea ice</a>. Frankenstein is being led northwards by his creation towards a final confrontation. </p>
<p>The central moment in the novel is when Frankenstein brings his creation to life, only to be immediately repulsed by it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Victor Frankenstein, like others in the novel, is appalled by the appearance of his creation. He flees the creature and it vanishes. After a hiatus of two years, the creature begins to murder people close to Frankenstein. And when Frankenstein reneges on his promise to create a female partner for his creature, it murders his closest friend and then, on Frankenstein’s wedding night, his wife.</p>
<h2>More human than human</h2>
<p>The real interest of the novel lies not in the murders or the pursuit, but in the creature’s accounts of what <em>drove</em> him to murder. After the creature murders Frankenstein’s little brother, William, Frankenstein seeks solace in the Alps – in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderer_above_the_Sea_of_Fog#/media/File:Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Wanderer_above_the_sea_of_fog.jpg">sublime nature</a>. There, the creature comes upon Frankenstein and eloquently and poignantly relates his story. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452989/original/file-20220318-36080-1qgz6sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452989/original/file-20220318-36080-1qgz6sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452989/original/file-20220318-36080-1qgz6sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452989/original/file-20220318-36080-1qgz6sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452989/original/file-20220318-36080-1qgz6sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1087&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452989/original/file-20220318-36080-1qgz6sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1087&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452989/original/file-20220318-36080-1qgz6sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1087&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">New York Public Library</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We learn that the creature spent a year secretly living in an outhouse attached to a hut occupied by the recently impoverished De Lacey family. As he became self-aware, the creature reflected that, “To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being.” But when he eventually attempted to reveal himself to the family to gain their companionship, he was brutally driven from them. The creature was filled with rage. He says, “I could … have glutted myself with their shrieks and misery.” More human than human.</p>
<p>After Victor Frankenstein dies aboard Walton’s ship, Walton has a final encounter with the creature, as it looms over Frankenstein’s body. To the corpse, the creature says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Oh Frankenstein! Generous and self-devoted being! What does it avail that I now ask thee to pardon me? I, who irretrievably destroyed thee by destroying all thou lovedst.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The creature goes on to make several grand and tragic pronouncements to Walton. “My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy; and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change, without torture such as you cannot even imagine.” And shortly after, about the murder of Frankenstein’s wife, the creature says: “I knew that I was preparing for myself a deadly torture; but I was the slave, not the master, of an impulse, which I detested, yet could not disobey.”</p>
<p>These remarks encourage us to ponder some of the weightiest questions we can ask about the human condition:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What is it that drives humans to commit horrible acts? Are human hearts, like the creature’s, fashioned for ‘love and sympathy’, and when such things are withheld or taken from us, do we attempt to salve the wound by hurting others? And if so, what is the psychological mechanism that makes this occur?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And what is the relationship between free will and horrible acts? We cannot help but think that the creature remains innocent – that he is the slave, not the master. But then what about the rest of us? </p>
<p>The rule of law generally blames individuals for their crimes – and perhaps this is necessary for a society to function. Yet I suspect the rule of law misses something vital. Epictetus, the stoic philosopher, considered such questions millennia ago. He asked: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>What grounds do we have for being angry with anyone? We use labels like ‘thief’ and ‘robber’… but what do these words mean? They merely signify that people are confused about what is good and what is bad.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Unintended consequences</h2>
<p>Victor Frankenstein creates life only to abandon it. An unsympathetic interpretation of Christianity might see something similar in God’s relationship with humanity. Yet the novel itself does not easily support this reading; like much great art, its strength lies in its ambivalence and complexity. At one point, the creature says to Frankenstein: “Remember, that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.” These and other remarks complicate any simplistic interpretation.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/453199/original/file-20220321-21-1fulrev.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/453199/original/file-20220321-21-1fulrev.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453199/original/file-20220321-21-1fulrev.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453199/original/file-20220321-21-1fulrev.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453199/original/file-20220321-21-1fulrev.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453199/original/file-20220321-21-1fulrev.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453199/original/file-20220321-21-1fulrev.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In fact, the ambivalence of the novel’s religious critique supports its primary concern: the problem of technology allowing humans to become God-like. The subtitle of Frankenstein is “The Modern Prometheus”. In the Greek myth, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus">Prometheus</a> steals fire – a technology – from the gods and gives it to humanity, for which he is punished. In this myth and many other stories, technology and knowledge are double-edged. Adam and Eve eat the apple of knowledge in the Garden of Eden and are ejected from paradise. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, <a href="https://youtu.be/RWCvMwivrDk">humanity is born when the first tool is used</a> – a tool that augments humanity’s ability to be violent.</p>
<p>The novel’s subtitle is referring to Kant’s 1755 essay, “The Modern Prometheus”. In this, Kant observes that: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is such a thing as right taste in natural science, which knows how to distinguish the wild extravagances of unbridled curiosity from cautious judgements of reasonable credibility. From the Prometheus of recent times Mr. Franklin, who wanted to disarm the thunder, down to the man who wants to extinguish the fire in the workshop of Vulcanus, all these endeavors result in the humiliating reminder that Man never can be anything more than a man.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Victor Frankenstein, who suffered from an unbridled curiosity, says something similar: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind … If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>And also: “Learn from me … how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.” </p>
<p>In sum: be careful what knowledge you pursue, and how you pursue it. Beware playing God.</p>
<p>Alas, history reveals the quixotic nature of Shelley and Kant’s warnings. There always seems to be a scientist somewhere whose dubious ambitions are given free rein. And beyond this, there is always the problem of the unintended consequences of our discoveries. Since Shelley’s time, we have created numerous things that we fear or loathe such as the atomic bomb, cigarettes and other drugs, chemicals such as DDT, and so on. And as our powers in the realms of genetics and artificial intelligence grow, we may yet create something that loathes us.</p>
<p>It all reminds me of sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson’s relatively recent (2009) remark <a href="https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780191826719.001.0001/q-oro-ed4-00016553">that</a>, “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/175520/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jamie Q Roberts does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The possibilities of ‘more human than human’ artificial intelligence and the dangers of playing God and are not new – they’re the subjects of one of the world’s first science-fiction novels.Jamie Q Roberts, Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1642022021-08-29T10:55:26Z2021-08-29T10:55:26Z‘Dark Souls’ videogame: Themes of ruin harken to images popularized by European Romantics two centuries ago<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/417296/original/file-20210822-15-aikb0t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=11%2C19%2C1573%2C823&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'Dark Souls' is set in Lordran, a fantasy version of a mythologized medieval Europe.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Bandai Namco)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>September marks the 10th anniversary of “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1780AqAa20">Dark Souls</a>,” one of the most <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/11/22/dark-souls-inspired-the-design-of-sonys-playstation-4/?sh=4cae6a302311">important</a> and <a href="https://www.gamespot.com/articles/the-most-influential-games-of-the-21st-century-dar/1100-6466811/">influential</a> <a href="https://venturebeat.com/2016/05/27/dark-souls-iii-helps-push-digital-game-sales-to-6-2b-in-april/">video games</a> of the last few decades. </p>
<p>The game has generated a large and dedicated <a href="http://gamestudies.org/2004/articles/welsh">online player community</a> and has inspired a new genre of interactive storytelling — the “<a href="https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/Soulslike_video_games">soulslike</a>.” These games are defined by high difficulty, explorative gameplay and a melancholic atmosphere.</p>
<p>As a fan of “Dark Souls,” I am struck by how it takes up similar themes present in the early 19th-century Romanticist texts that I study for my PhD work in early post-apocalyptic literature.</p>
<p>“Dark Souls,” as well as other soulslike games such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3O0FwX5DE8">“Mortal Shell</a>,” “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAO2urG23S4">Hollow Knight</a>,” and “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_054dUJzCE">Salt and Sanctuary</a>” explore apocalyptic themes that were <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691642871/romanticism-and-the-forms-of-ruin">just as popular two centuries ago</a>. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/o1780AqAa20?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘Dark Souls’ official trailer.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Dying embers</h2>
<p>“Dark Souls” takes place in Lordran, a dark-fantasy version of a mythologized medieval Europe. While its grandiose architecture suggests Lordran was once a mighty kingdom, the player’s quest begins at the end of the Age of Fire, when “<a href="https://youtu.be/vpAqgIe05So?t=183">there are only embers, and man sees not light, but only endless nights</a>.” This trope of the dying Earth is demonstrated in the sluggish, exhausted movement of many of the enemies and is reflected in the <a href="https://www.publicmedievalist.com/dark-souls-knight/">fragility of the onscreen character controlled by the player</a>.</p>
<p>An early example of this dying Earth trope can be seen in the work of <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/lord-byron">Lord Byron</a>, a major figure in British Romanticism. </p>
<p>In his 1816 poem “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43825/darkness-56d222aeeee1b">Darkness</a>,” Byron imagines an Earth beneath an extinguished sun. The last denizens of the planet huddle for warmth around forests and dwellings “burnt for beacons,” and the final two survivors meet in a bitter encounter “beside the dying embers of an altar-place.” This use of fire as refuge prefigures the use of bonfires in “Dark Souls” as rare safe havens within an otherwise menacing world.</p>
<h2>‘The Last Man’</h2>
<p>Byron’s poem was one of many works by British Romantic authors and artists to capitalize on the popularity of French author Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s novel <a href="https://www.hfsbooks.com/books/the-last-man-cousin-de-grainville-clarke-clarke/"><em>Le Dernier Homme</em></a> (<em>The Last Man</em>). </p>
<p>Grainville’s “last man” character witnesses the slow decline and final end of the world. The novel is, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00397709.1963.10732769">as scholars</a> <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/II.1.25">have recognized</a>, a literary expression of the social and ecological anxieties of the time. It also <a href="https://doi.org/10.5621/sciefictstud.41.2.0314">significantly influenced the development</a> of science fiction and dystopian literature.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/cousin_de_grainville_jean-baptiste">Grainville, a priest</a> who was disgraced during the French Revolution, died before his only novel could be published in 1805. When the book was translated to English and published in England in 1806, Grainville was not credited as the author. Despite this, Grainville’s vision of an exhausted Earth that “bore the sad features of decay” influenced British Romantics such as Byron. </p>
<p>Grainville’s novel depicts a central figure that is eerily similar to one in “Dark Souls.” In <em>The Last Man</em>, the Spirit of the Earth is depicted as a humanoid character residing in a cavern among “millions of furnaces,” where he “maintained perpetual fires for the heat that held back the deadly cold.” In “Dark Souls,” Lord Gwyn sits within the Kiln of the First Flame, wherein he desperately tries to keep the world’s embers glowing awhile longer.</p>
<p>In both <em>The Last Man</em> and “Dark Souls,” the world is not a stable certainty but is instead a precarious and fragile thing. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Oil painting of a broody sky, low red sun and a man on the right holding his arms up." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/417662/original/file-20210824-19046-1t2o2o1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/417662/original/file-20210824-19046-1t2o2o1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417662/original/file-20210824-19046-1t2o2o1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417662/original/file-20210824-19046-1t2o2o1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417662/original/file-20210824-19046-1t2o2o1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417662/original/file-20210824-19046-1t2o2o1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417662/original/file-20210824-19046-1t2o2o1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘The Last Man,’ by British painter John Martin, 1849.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-last-man-97626">(Walker Art Gallery)</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Crumbling ruins</h2>
<p>A declining kingdom leaves behind haunted ruins and decaying monuments. Players tread through and among such remains in “Dark Souls.”</p>
<p>The architecture of the game’s setting is inspired by real-world historical styles, including classical Roman and medieval Gothic architecture, and these influences lend to the surroundings a sense of times long past. </p>
<p>An obsession with ruins and ancient structures was prevalent too in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Similar to the ways in which <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/696/696-h/696-h.htm">early gothic British writers</a> gravitated <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/601/601-h/601-h.htm">towards narratives</a> set in <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3268/3268-h/3268-h.htm">spooky medieval castles</a>, an obsession with ruins and ancient structures was prevalent too in the work of the British Romantic writers. </p>
<p>In “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias">Ozymandias</a>,” Percy Shelley writes of a shattered monument in the desert, a “colossal Wreck” around which “the lone and level sands stretch far away.” In “<a href="http://www.john-keats.com/gedichte/the_fall_of_hyperion.htm">The Fall of Hyperion — A Dream</a>,” John Keats describes being transported in a dream to an “eternal domed monument” in which artifacts lie “in a mingled heap confused.” </p>
<p>In Mary Shelley’s dystopian novel <a href="https://broadviewpress.com/product/the-last-man/#tab-description"><em>The Last Man</em></a> (one of the many books, poems, paintings and plays to sport the same name following Grainville’s novel), she portrays the final specimen of humanity wandering alone through the “ruins of Rome.” </p>
<p>Readers of the Romantic period could not get enough of ancient ruins — much like gamers who routinely play “Dark Souls” and other soulslike games.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A knight in armour faces a sun-streaked sky and wall of ruins." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/417663/original/file-20210824-14-19b4rdn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/417663/original/file-20210824-14-19b4rdn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417663/original/file-20210824-14-19b4rdn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417663/original/file-20210824-14-19b4rdn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417663/original/file-20210824-14-19b4rdn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417663/original/file-20210824-14-19b4rdn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417663/original/file-20210824-14-19b4rdn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">We share with the Romantic period a world of uncertainty. Here, a still from ‘Dark Souls.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Bandai Namco/Nintendo)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Uncertain times</h2>
<p>A question remains: Why would such apocalyptic themes prove to be so popular in two very different historical time periods? Put simply, we share with the Romantic period a world of uncertainty. </p>
<p>Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries saw dramatic changes: <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/24780695">the French Revolution</a> upended the political status quo, while <a href="https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2015.0018">new discoveries</a> in geology and paleontology made the notion of species extinction difficult to deny and disturbed the prevailing view of a relatively stable natural world. </p>
<p>We too face destabilizing forces today, from climate change to global pandemics to economic anxiety to rising political polarization. Such instability is certain to inspire images of declining empires and dying worlds.</p>
<p>But ruins and remnants do more than imply the end. They also remind us of that which once lived, just as a tomb is both “<a href="https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-06-18-an-obituary-for-the-architecture-of-dark-souls-eternally-dying-land">a container of the dead, and an affirmation and symbol of life</a>.” Ruins persist and, as Mary Shelley’s last man insists, affirm the “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/18247/pg18247.html">human form divine</a>.”</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-mary-shelleys-the-last-man-is-a-prophecy-of-life-in-a-global-pandemic-136963">Guide to the Classics: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man is a prophecy of life in a global pandemic</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Perhaps this is why a fascination with ancient ruins tends to accompany anxieties of dramatic societal change and ecological precarity.</p>
<p>Regardless, “Dark Souls” stands among the works of Byron, Grainville, Keats and <a href="https://lithub.com/the-treacherous-start-to-mary-and-percy-shelleys-marriage/">the Shelleys</a> as a masterful artistic expression of our fascination with ruin in its dual meaning: both as disastrous end and surviving remnant.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/164202/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Cameron receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. </span></em></p>‘Dark Souls’ draws on the literary theme of the ‘last man’ that emerged from the work of French author Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville and those inspired by him.Michael Cameron, PhD Candidate of English, Dalhousie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1555222021-02-22T15:24:51Z2021-02-22T15:24:51ZJohn Keats: how his poems of death and lost youth are resonating during COVID-19<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385543/original/file-20210222-21-1tg9g8x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C265%2C2400%2C1961&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">John Keats by Joseph Severn (1819).</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw03554/John-Keats?LinkID=mp02480&role=sit&rNo=5">National Portrait Gallery</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In John Keats’ poems, death crops up 100 times more than the future, a word that appears just once in the entirety of his work. This might seem appropriate on the 200th anniversary of the death of Keats, who was popularly viewed as the young Romantic poet “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44479/ode-to-a-nightingale">half in love with easeful death</a>”. </p>
<p>Death certainly touched Keats and his family. At the age of 14, he lost his mother to tuberculosis. In 1818, he nursed his younger brother Tom as he lay dying of the same disease. </p>
<p>After such experiences, when Ludolph, the hero of Keats’ tragedy, Otho the Great, imagines succumbing to “a bitter death, a suffocating death”, Keats knew what he was writing about. And then, aged just 25, on February 23 1821, Keats himself died of tuberculosis in Rome. </p>
<h2>Life sliding by</h2>
<p>His preoccupation with death doesn’t tell the whole story, however. In life, Keats was vivacious, funny, bawdy, pugnacious, poetically experimental, politically active, and above all forward-looking. </p>
<p>He was a young man in a hurry, eager to make a mark on the literary world; even if – as a trained doctor – he was all too conscious of the body’s vulnerability to mortal shocks. These two very different energies coalesce in one of his best loved poems, written in January 1818 when the poet was in the bloom of health:</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385537/original/file-20210222-17-1wamukd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385537/original/file-20210222-17-1wamukd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385537/original/file-20210222-17-1wamukd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385537/original/file-20210222-17-1wamukd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385537/original/file-20210222-17-1wamukd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385537/original/file-20210222-17-1wamukd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385537/original/file-20210222-17-1wamukd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385537/original/file-20210222-17-1wamukd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be is a poem of personal worry, according to biographer <a href="https://yalebooks.co.uk/display.asp?k=9780300197273">Nicholas Roe</a>. In it, Keats is anxious that he won’t have time to achieve poetic fame or fall in “unreflecting love”, and these fears and self-doubts take him to the brink. </p>
<p>But as brinks go, this one doesn’t seem all that bad. The poem is romantic with a small “r” – wide-eyed, dramatic, sentimental – its vision of finality, of nothingness, gorgeous in its desolation, and all-importantly painless. Who can read those final lines without themselves feeling a pull to swooning death, half in love with it, as Keats professed to be?</p>
<p>That’s what I used to think, at any rate. Lately, in the pandemic, I’ve begun to read this poem rather differently. Lensed through long months of lockdown, the sonnet’s existential anxieties seem less abstract, grand and performative, and more, well, human. </p>
<p>It’s a poem that will resonate with the youth who are cooped up indoors, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/feb/20/my-thoughts-became-poisonous-the-toll-of-lockdown-when-you-live-alone">physically isolated</a>, unable to meet and mingle, agonisingly aware of weeks slipping by, opportunities missed, disappointments mounting. This poem has made me almost painfully empathetic towards their plight.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Painting of a young John Keats reading a book." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385541/original/file-20210222-23-19elx6b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385541/original/file-20210222-23-19elx6b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=829&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385541/original/file-20210222-23-19elx6b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=829&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385541/original/file-20210222-23-19elx6b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=829&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385541/original/file-20210222-23-19elx6b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1042&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385541/original/file-20210222-23-19elx6b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1042&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385541/original/file-20210222-23-19elx6b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1042&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">John Keats by Joseph Severn, painted posthumously (1821-1823).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw03558/John-Keats?LinkID=mp02480&role=sit&rNo=7">National Portrait Gallery, London</a></span>
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<p>The sonnet’s fears of a future laid to waste are shared by whole generations whose collective <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/dec/27/covid-poses-greatest-threat-to-mental-health-since-second-world-war">mental health</a> is under siege. In his last surviving <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/35698/35698-h/35698-h.htm">letter</a>, written two years after the sonnet while dying in Rome, Keats records a “feeling of my real life having past”, a conviction that he was “leading a posthumous existence”. How many of us are experiencing similar thoughts at the moment?</p>
<h2>Illness and isolation</h2>
<p>Of all the Romantics, Keats perhaps knew most about mental suffering. He grew up in Moorgate, just across from Bethlem Hospital, which was known to London and the world as Bedlam. Before he turned to poetry, <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/john-keats-poet-physician">Keats trained</a> at Guy’s hospital, London, where he not only witnessed first-hand the horrors of surgery in a pre-anaesthetic age but also tended to patients on what was called the lunatic ward. </p>
<p>It was all too much for him. Traumatised by the misery and pain he felt he could do little to alleviate, in 1816 he threw medicine in for the pen. His experiences at Guy’s, though, and the empathy he developed there, found their way into his writing. For instance, in <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44473/hyperion">Hyperion</a>, his medical knowledge helps him to inhabit the catatonic state of “gray-hair’d Saturn”, who sits in solitude, “deep in the shady sadness of a vale”, despairing after being deposed by the Olympian gods. The vignette is a moving image of isolation and enervation that speaks to us today:</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385540/original/file-20210222-13-7dzl4g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385540/original/file-20210222-13-7dzl4g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385540/original/file-20210222-13-7dzl4g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385540/original/file-20210222-13-7dzl4g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385540/original/file-20210222-13-7dzl4g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385540/original/file-20210222-13-7dzl4g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385540/original/file-20210222-13-7dzl4g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385540/original/file-20210222-13-7dzl4g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44473/hyperion</span></span>
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<p>As for lockdown, Keats was no stranger to its pressures and deprivations. During periods of illness in Hampstead in 1819 – precursor symptoms of tuberculosis – he was reluctant to venture out, isolating himself. In October 1820, he set sail for Italy in the hope warmer climes would save his lungs. On arrival, his ship was put into strict quarantine for ten days. In letters to his friends, Keats described being “in a sort of desperation”, adding, “we cannot be created for this sort of suffering”.</p>
<p>Keats was a poet of his age, his own social, cultural and medical milieu. And yet, on the bicentenary of his death, he’s also – more than ever, perhaps – a poet of ours. A poet of lockdown, frustration, disappointment, fears … and even hope. </p>
<p>Because even in those last, scarcely imaginable weeks in Rome, 200 years ago, holed up in a little apartment at the foot of the Spanish Steps, he never quite gave up on the future, never relinquished his dreams of love and fame.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/155522/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Marggraf-Turley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The doctor-turned-poet died 200 years ago.Richard Marggraf-Turley, Professor of English Literature, Aberystwyth UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1487552020-10-28T16:02:24Z2020-10-28T16:02:24ZHow secular Israeli millennials feel about Palestinians<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/366180/original/file-20201028-13-qab46x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=58%2C166%2C6466%2C4050&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">View of Jaffa from Tel Aviv. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/photos/hnxba71v7T8">Photo by Mor Shani on Unsplash</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A socially elite group, young secular Jewish-Israelis were once the backbone of the peace movement, working against Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza. </p>
<p>But increasing numbers of <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/17/where-millennials-end-and-generation-z-begins/">millennial</a> secular Jewish-Israelis, known as <em>hilonim</em>, have come to see military activity by the Israel Defence Forces in the West Bank and Gaza as acceptable after four Gaza-Israel wars.</p>
<p>My <a href="https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526139993/">new book</a> sheds new light on why their attitudes towards the Palestinian struggle have shifted. </p>
<p>The failure of the Oslo peace process and four wars in Gaza between 2006 and 2014 have made them cynical about peace. Separation barriers dividing Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian populations in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza have made them feel safe. Since 2006, politicians have gradually shifted popular attention from <a href="https://www.inss.org.il/publication/the-politics-of-peace-in-israel-from-2003-to-2013/">occupation to the economy</a>. </p>
<h2>No progress without pragmatism</h2>
<p>Over the two years following the 2014 Gaza-Israel war, I conducted 50 in-depth interviews with a diverse sample of self-identified <em>hiloni</em> millennials, plus a larger survey and additional research. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.jpost.com/Jerusalem-Report/Can-Generation-Y-hold-the-fort-453767">Researchers</a> have criticised <em>hiloni</em> millennials for being self-absorbed, not committed to Israel’s future. But I found they had a great sense of responsibility. Many felt a heroic idea of themselves as reasonable, moderate and socially responsible. Across the political spectrum, they thought of themselves as reasonable, as what I call “fulcrum citizens”, balancing out extremists – including violent religious nationalist Palestinians and Jewish-Israelis. One man in his mid 20s, Tamer* told me:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Being moderate allows you to do more for people. Pragmatism is very important in life. Where there is no pragmatism there is no progress.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But the political impact of feeling reasonable has been double-edged. Even those who described themselves as left-wing and ultimately against the occupation, saw continuing occupation of Palestinian territories by Israel “for now” as “reasonable if regrettable”. </p>
<p>Ruth, also in her 20s, the child of Oslo-era activists, told me why fewer of her generation were fighting against the occupation.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’m kind of hopeless actually. I think we’re stuck … We’re really numb … Our life is too good. We have too much to lose. If I want to intern at the UN, you don’t want to get caught at a protest and have a police file. We’re like yeah, (occupation) sucks but (fighting) it is too risky.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This finding is consistent with <a href="https://en.idi.org.il/centers/1159/1520">post-Oslo public opinion polls</a> since 2000. These show that while half of Jewish-Israelis are open to peace with Arab states (such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan), they do not prioritise the protection of Palestinian human rights under international law.</p>
<h2>Neo-Romanticism</h2>
<p>Building on broader <a href="https://en.almogs.org/generation-y-eng">research on this group</a> which looked at the economic, social and political dynamics affecting them, I focused on what it was like to come of age as a secular Jew in Israel after the failure of the Oslo peace accords, against a backdrop of rising ethno-religious nationalism among Jewish-Israelis and Palestinians. </p>
<p>I found that personal life philosophies, close relationships and experiences had shaped the political opinions of those I interviewed in surprising ways. To understand this, we need to think of being a secular Jewish-Israeli in a new way.</p>
<p>I observed what I call a neo-Romantic sensibility among those <em>hilonim</em> I interviewed. <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=5403">Nineteenth-century Romantics in Western Europe</a> tried to find new ways to live a sincere, authentic life in line with their personal intuition and emotional experience. Romantics promoted greater self-expression – but also greater attachment to one’s nation. </p>
<p>They also sought new ways to achieve transcendence beyond, but also within religious tradition, particularly via the arts. <a href="https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/411/romancing-the-haskalah/">Jewish thinkers</a> influenced by Romanticism were excited about how creative individuals could interpret Jewish tradition and develop new ways of being meaningfully Jewish for themselves, beyond rabbinical authority. </p>
<p>While there is no direct historical connection between <em>hiloni</em> millennials and the 19th-century Romantics, I found similar sensibilities among them. Like the Romantics, my interviewees had a commitment to self-expression and emphasised sincerity and personal experience. They were interested in philosophical exploration within and beyond Judaism. They felt a strong sense of attachment to other Jewish-Israelis – particularly family and friends, but also the Jewish ethno-national collective. </p>
<p>These sensibilities were a product of <a href="https://www.almogs.org/generation-y-eng">the political, economic and social context in which they came of age</a> during the 2000s and 2010s, which produced an interplay between individualism and ethno-national solidarity. </p>
<h2>Turning inwards</h2>
<p>Over this period, Jewish-Israeli society has been brought together by multiple factors, including repeated wars with Hamas, a 2006 war with Hezbollah and fears of a nuclear Iran. Since the 1990s, mainstream Israeli politicians have mobilised people around <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/sep/29/israel">ethno-religious symbols</a>, and there is <a href="https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/israel-studies-review/27/1/isr270102.xml">greater positivity</a> towards Jewish tradition within society (<em>ha-datah</em>). </p>
<p>Previous generations felt more attached to wider society and the government. But a number of factors have bred feelings of individualism and reliance on the self, family and friends. These include political corruption, the willingness of successive governments to leave economically vulnerable individuals to the logic of the market and deepening consumerism. </p>
<p><em>Hiloni</em> culture has also evolved. New Age spirituality and Mizrahi (Middle-Eastern Jewish) motifs have become mainstream, echoing 19th-century Romantics’ emphasis on emotion. The internet has facilitated even greater self-experimentation and expression than in previous generations.</p>
<p>As a result, <em>hiloni</em> millennials, like the Romantics, came to rely on their own experiences as a personal moral compass. Personal experience included what happened to them and how they felt about it and also expert opinions they had researched.</p>
<p><em>Hiloni</em> millennials across the political spectrum said they base their politics on a combination of personal experience, rational deliberation and love for others they feel close to. </p>
<p>They came of age physically and emotionally separated from Palestinians, with Israeli politicians loudly asserting that there is “no partner for peace” and promoting Jewish ethno-religious solidarity and <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-44881554">Israel’s identity as a Jewish state</a>. They therefore feel more attached to, and personally responsible for, other Jewish-Israelis than Palestinians, even if they sometimes feel angry at settlers. </p>
<p>I found complicated feelings about Palestinians across the political spectrum: a mixture of understanding, empathy, frustration, despair, friendship, indifference, fear and loathing.</p>
<p>Like 19th-century Romantics, many <em>hiloni</em> millennials have turned inwards – to their own lives or activism around social and economic justice among their own community rather than working to end the occupation.</p>
<p>Young <em>hiloni</em> peace activists in the 1980s and 1990s also saw themselves as reasonable – but they saw working against occupation as the only reasonable option. Times have changed.</p>
<p><em>*Names have been changed to protect the anonymity of interview participants.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/148755/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stacey Gutkowski does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Interviews with young hiloni, secular Israeli-Jews, shows many have complicated feelings about Palestinians.Stacey Gutkowski, Senior Lecturer in Conflict Studies and Co-Director, Centre for the Study of Divided Societies, King's College LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1453312020-09-03T15:50:45Z2020-09-03T15:50:45ZBook shines light on Dennis Brutus, one of South Africa’s most underrated poets<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355798/original/file-20200901-18-1s7reif.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A younger Dennis Brutus, president of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee in Montreal, Canada in 1976.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Neil Leifer /Sports Illustrated via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Fortunately for the rest of us South Africans, the apartheid police state often shot itself in the foot. On the one hand, after a horrifying <a href="https://www.thejournalist.org.za/pioneers/henry-nxumalo/">exposé</a> of jail conditions in <a href="https://theconversation.com/journalism-of-drums-heyday-remains-cause-for-celebration-70-years-later-142668"><em>Drum</em></a> magazine at the end of the 1950s, it passed a total censorship statute on anything that went on inside prisons.</p>
<p>On the other hand, it incarcerated three of South Africa’s best poets – <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/dennis-brutus">Dennis Brutus</a> on Robben Island, <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/breyten-breytenbach">Breyten Breytenbach </a> and <a href="https://www.gov.za/about-government/contact-directory/jeremy-cronin-mr">Jeremy Cronin</a> in Pretoria Central – convicted for anti-apartheid activities. Surprise: after their eventual release, all the jails’ brutality and cruelties came out in graphic print for the world to read.</p>
<p>Tyrone August’s welcome, and overdue, biography – <a href="http://www.bestred.co.za/dennis-brutus-detail.html"><em>Dennis Brutus, The South African Years</em></a> – is based on the author’s doctoral dissertation at the University of the Western Cape.</p>
<p>This book both gives us readers the most thorough biography to date on Brutus, though there is nothing about where and how his seven children completed school and made their lives. The book focuses on how Brutus’ poems were influenced by the poets he read at school and university. Hopefully it will aid his poems becoming more prominent in future anthologies of South African poems, and in school books.</p>
<p>Brutus is one of the most underrated poets of South Africa. Among this reviewer’s treasured books are two collections, inscribed and autographed in his incredibly neat calligraphy.</p>
<p>All told, Brutus published 12 collections, starting in 1963 with <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Sirens-knuckles-boots-Dennis-Brutus/dp/B0006CRN5W"><em>Sirens, Knuckles, Boots</em></a> and culminating in 2005 with <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16155787-leafdrift"><em>Leafdrift</em></a>. In addition, Worcester State University (US) brought out a selected poetry collection <a href="https://libguides.worcester.edu/archives/Dennis-Brutus">in 2004</a> to honour his 80th birthday.</p>
<p>That none of his collections were published in South Africa testifies to apartheid police state censorship: leftists passed from hand to hand copies of his poems. This <em>samizdat</em> circulated in handwritten, typewritten, and later photocopied sheets of paper.</p>
<p>Brutus was born in 1924 in the country today named Zimbabwe; his parents returned to South Africa two years later. He started teaching in 1950 and married in the same year. The government banned him from teaching in 1961 because of his anti-apartheid activities, depriving him of earning a living.</p>
<h2>Jail and exile</h2>
<p>Brutus fled to eSwatini (Swaziland), then a British colony, in 1963. The British colonial authorities refused to grant him a residence permit. He crossed the border to Mozambique. The PIDE secret police in Portuguese colonial Mozambique handed him over to the South African police’s Special Branch that targeted political activists. </p>
<p>He was shot trying to escape, and sentenced to 18 months on <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/robben-island">Robben Island</a>. Repeated beatings, and harrowing assaults, culminated in months of solitary confinement, causing hallucinations and nervous breakdown. He finally left South Africa on a no-return exit permit in 1966 after his release.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/dennis-brutus-south-african-literary-giant-who-was-reluctant-to-tell-his-life-story-141730">Dennis Brutus: South African literary giant who was reluctant to tell his life story</a>
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<p>His first job in exile in the UK was as campaign director of the <a href="http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/gandhi-luthuli-documentation-centre/role-international-defence-and-aid-fund">International Defence and Aid Fund</a>, which raised money to hire lawyers to defend political prisoners and to send subsistence allowances to their next of kin. </p>
<p>In 1971 he emigrated to the US, becoming a professor in the English Department at Northwestern University. In 1975 he co-founded the African Literature Association. From 1986 he became professor of African literature at the University of Pittsburgh. He returned to South Africa in 2005 as an honorary professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Involved in wider causes than just in South Africa, such as the <a href="https://www.pambazuka.org/activism/southern-africa-southern-african-social-forum">Southern African Social Forum</a>, he died of cancer in 2009.</p>
<p>Dennis Brutus’ achievements were two-fold: as a political activist and as poet.</p>
<h2>Political activism</h2>
<p>He joined the Teachers’ League of South Africa in 1950, which was the major affiliate of the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/non-european-unity-movement-neum">Non-European Unity Movement</a>. Mostly comprising <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Coloured">Coloured </a> teachers, it focused on anti-racism and anti-imperialism issues. But he was non-dogmatic, also participating in protests of the Coloured People’s Congress, affiliated to the African National Congress. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/356057/original/file-20200902-20-1ohhsmn.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/356057/original/file-20200902-20-1ohhsmn.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356057/original/file-20200902-20-1ohhsmn.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356057/original/file-20200902-20-1ohhsmn.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356057/original/file-20200902-20-1ohhsmn.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356057/original/file-20200902-20-1ohhsmn.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356057/original/file-20200902-20-1ohhsmn.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>He hid both <a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africas-anc-is-celebrating-the-year-of-or-tambo-who-was-he-85838">Oliver Tambo</a> and <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/content/page/biography">Nelson Mandela</a> (top ANC leaders who had to go underground to avoid detention) in his home when they visited Port Elizabeth. He was also friends and worked with Eddie Daniels and Patrick Duncan of the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/liberal-party-south-africa-lpsa">Liberal Party</a>, a small non-racial political party.</p>
<p>As a sports administrator, he founded the South African Sports Association and later the South African Non-Racial Olympics Committee (<a href="https://africanactivist.msu.edu/organization.php?name=South+African+Non-Racial+Olympic+Committee#:%7E:text=The%20South%20African%20Non%2DRacial,went%20into%20exile%20in%201966.">Sanroc</a>) to lead the campaigns to get whites-only sports codes boycotted by foreign touring teams. Their first victory came in 1956, when the International Table Tennis Federation admitted as member the non-racial <a href="http://scnc.ukzn.ac.za/doc/SPORT/SPORTRAM.htm">South African Table Tennis Board</a> instead of the whites-only SA Table Tennis Union. </p>
<p>Global football followed with the same ban in 1961. <a href="https://www.joc.or.jp/english/historyjapan/tokyo1964.html#:%7E:text=The%20Games%20of%20the%2018th,introduced%20for%20the%20first%20time.">The 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo</a> became the first to exclude whites-only or internally segregated South African sports organisations. Activists from both the Unity Movement and those aligned to the ANC built up this no-racism-in-sport movement.</p>
<p>Throughout the remaining apartheid decades, overseas protesters led demonstrations against whites-only Springbok (South African national) teams.</p>
<h2>Dennis Brutus the poet</h2>
<p>Brutus’ development as a poet was influenced by the English Romantics, including Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats. He also read Yeats, Eliot and Auden. One major challenge for scholars of his oeuvre is that censorship compelled him to publish his prose and poems under a bewildering array of noms-de-plume: Anon., J.B Booth, B.K, le Dab, D.A.B., Julius Friend, John Player, and L.N Terry.</p>
<p>What demonstrated his originality and courage was that virtually no English language poets in South Africa had published poems on politics since <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roy-Campbell">Roy Campbell</a> in the 1920s. <a href="http://www.mwsfoundation.org.za/index.php/featured/304-welcome-to-unique-avcom">Mongane Wally Serote</a>, <a href="http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/national-orders/recipient/mandla-langa-1950">Mandla Langa</a> and <a href="http://www.apc.uct.ac.za/apc/researchers/professor-njabulo-ndebele">Njabulo Ndebele</a> were among the first literary critics to praise Brutus’ poems.</p>
<p>Probably his most widely circulated poem, <em>For a Dead African</em>, delineated the 1950s in its first stanza:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have no heroes and no wars</p>
<p>Only victims of a sickly state</p>
<p>Succumbing to the variegated sores</p>
<p>That flower under lashing rains of hate.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>His second stanza chillingly prophesied the 1960s detentions of anti-apartheid activists:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have no battles and no fights</p>
<p>for history to record with trite remark</p>
<p>only captives killed on eyeless nights</p>
<p>And accidental dyings in the dark.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A topic repeated in his poem <em>In Memoriam</em> to <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/24764301?seq=1">Imam Abdullah Haroun</a>, a clergyman beaten and kicked to death in detention by the Special Branch:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>because he chose not to speak / he died</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Brutus showed his political colours in print in <em>At a Funeral</em> about <a href="https://escholarship.org/content/qt6tc554rb/qt6tc554rb.pdf?t=mniomb">Valencia Majombozi</a>, who died in August 1960, shortly after graduation as a doctor, after much hardship:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Black, green and gold at sunset; pageantry and stubbled graves</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The ANC colours were then illegal. To fly them was punished by up to six months in jail.</p>
<p>Other widely printed lines come from <em>Nightsong City</em>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sleep well my love, sleep well;</p>
<p>The harbour lights glaze over the restless docks,</p>
<p>Police cars cockroach through the tunnel streets;</p>
<p>From the shanties creaking iron-sheet</p>
<p>Violence like a bug-infested rag is tossed</p>
<p>And fear in immanent as sound in the wind-swung bell</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These relevant Brutus poems should be put up on the walls for tourists to view during the Robben Island Museum tours, which are led by former political prisoners as guides. This book should be in every library, and on your bookshelf.</p>
<p><em><a href="http://www.bestred.co.za/dennis-brutus-detail.html">Dennis Brutus: The South African Years</a> is published by Best Red, an imprint of the HSRC Press.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/145331/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Keith Gottschalk is an ANC member, but writes this review in his personal capacities as a historian and a poet.</span></em></p>That none of his collections were published in apartheid South Africa testifies to the police state’s censorship.Keith Gottschalk, Political Scientist, University of the Western CapeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1174542019-06-06T11:56:50Z2019-06-06T11:56:50ZVegans and vegetarians: the history of how plant-based diets grew out of left-wing ideology<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/277639/original/file-20190603-69067-14xeu6g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com">Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The rise of the vegetarian and, more recently, the <a href="https://theconversation.com/should-veganism-receive-the-same-legal-protection-as-a-religion-114243">vegan diet</a> is generally perceived to be a new phenomenon. So, too, is their association with contemporary progressive ideas, politics and lifestyles. But plant-based diets have deep historical roots, and a longstanding connection with the political left.</p>
<p>From the time of the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/French-Revolution">1789 French revolution</a>, when radical ideas were sweeping Europe, a political, ethical vegetarianism has grown alongside the British left. Advocated by major figures from the poet Percy Shelley to playwright <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/nov/16/vegetarianism-george-bernard-shaw-1923">George Bernard Shaw</a> – as well as many more in pioneering leftist organisations and communities – contemporary writing demonstrates how a plant-based diet developed as an element of left-wing ideology, activism and identity.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/should-veganism-receive-the-same-legal-protection-as-a-religion-114243">Should veganism receive the same legal protection as a religion?</a>
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<p>During the 1790s, several British radicals adopted vegetarianism as part of their broader attempts to overturn the existing orthodoxy. Influenced by philosopher <a href="https://www.iep.utm.edu/rousseau/">Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s</a> ideals regarding a “natural state” of freedom, peace and equality, people such as the Anglo-Jacobin revolutionary <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=aHBjAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">John Oswald</a>, the radical scholar <a href="https://archive.org/details/anessayonabstin00ritsgoog/page/n5">Joseph Ritson</a>, and the publisher <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6jUCAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">George Nicholson</a> promoted the diet as a central element of their far-reaching arguments for justice and fellowship.</p>
<p>The diet had a significant presence in the Romantic period, especially within the circle of Percy and Mary Shelley. Percy Shelley wrote two essays advocating vegetarianism, one of which – <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38727">A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813)</a> – was appended to his influential revolutionary poem <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Queen-Mab">Queen Mab</a>. </p>
<p>Queen Mab looked forward to a “paradise of peace”, a state of fellowship between all living beings, in which “man has lost / His terrible prerogative” to rob others of life. Depicting a simple, fulfilling existence led in harmony with nature, it illustrated a world “equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless”, devoid of needless conflict and division.</p>
<h2>Ethics and ecology</h2>
<p>Vegetarianism continued its association with the nascent left throughout the early to mid-19th century and became a common feature of socialism by the century’s close. Although largely grounded in ethics, arguments were also developed about its health and ecological benefits. These stressed the environmental burdens of meat production, and sought to counter a growing industrial-capitalist society of damaging over-consumption.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/going-veggie-would-cut-global-food-emissions-by-two-thirds-and-save-millions-of-lives-new-study-56655">Going veggie would cut global food emissions by two thirds and save millions of lives – new study</a>
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<p>Veganism was often acknowledged as the ideal, including by the fin-de-siècle socialist, humanitarian campaigner and pioneering animal rights advocate <a href="http://www.henrysalt.co.uk/life/biography">Henry Salt</a>. Influenced by the ideas of Shelley, as well as the anarcho-communism of Peter Kropotkin and the evolutionary theories of Alfred Russell Wallace – both of whom stressed the importance of cooperation, as opposed to competition, in nature – Salt <a href="http://www.henrysalt.co.uk/studies/reviews/the-creed-of-kinship">outlined</a> a vegetarian-leftist outlook typical of the period.</p>
<p>Arguing that all forms of oppression were interconnected, <a href="http://www.henrysalt.co.uk/studies/essays/humane-influences-of-henry-salt">he advocated</a> “not this or that humane reform, but all of them” simultaneously, for it was not a single specific symptom, but the root “disease” – society’s underlying ethic – that required treatment.</p>
<p>Salt identified this as one of selfish exploitation, and so <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/49336">advocated</a> a consistent principle of humaneness to oppose it, campaigning for the causes of socialism, women’s liberation, pacifism, vegetarianism and animal rights. All were, <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/49336">he asserted</a>, “inseparably connected” and none could “be fully realised alone”. He thus promoted the extension of “compassion, love and justice” to “every living creature”, as part of a comprehensive ethical creed. <a href="http://www.henrysalt.co.uk/life/">He wrote</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I wholly disbelieve in the present established religion; but I have a very firm religious faith of my own – a Creed of Kinship, I call it – a belief that in years yet to come there will be a recognition of the brotherhood between man and man … when there will be no such barbarity as warfare, or the robbery of the poor by the rich, or the ill-usage of the lower animals by mankind.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He was not alone in outlining such a vegetarian–leftist vision. Edward Carpenter, the influential LGBT pioneer, <a href="http://www.friendsofedwardcarpenter.co.uk/biography.htm">shared a similar outlook</a>, and many other significant figures likewise incorporated the diet into their broader politics.</p>
<h2>Violence begets violence</h2>
<p>Throughout this history, vegetarianism has been most associated with more holistic forms of leftist thought – those which look beyond economics to focus on the personal, moral and spiritual aspects of socialism. These “alternative” strands were particularly popular in the 19th century. Typically labelled “libertarian” or “ethical”, they emphasised the interconnection of individual and societal change, anti-authoritarianism and ideas of all-embracing liberation.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/277171/original/file-20190530-69087-rglixx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/277171/original/file-20190530-69087-rglixx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/277171/original/file-20190530-69087-rglixx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=832&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277171/original/file-20190530-69087-rglixx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=832&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277171/original/file-20190530-69087-rglixx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=832&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277171/original/file-20190530-69087-rglixx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1045&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277171/original/file-20190530-69087-rglixx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1045&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277171/original/file-20190530-69087-rglixx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1045&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘The victims of the pot and pan went forth against the tyrant man’. A bull carries the red flag surmounted by an upturned cooking pot in this image by the famous socialist artist, and vegetarian, Walter Crane (1911).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Many adopted the vegetarian diet because they recognised that violence towards other animals, and meat eating in particular, was part and parcel of the violent, exploitative society surrounding them. A society, as described by Salt, characterised by predatory consumption and wherein individuals, particularly the elite, became “almost literally cannibals … devouring the flesh and blood of the non-human animals so closely akin to us, and indirectly cannibals, as living by the sweat and toil of the classes who do the hard work of the world.”</p>
<p>In the view of Salt and others, meat eating habituated predatory behaviours and attitudes, eroded humanity’s benevolent instincts, and undermined the very basis of an ideal peaceful, cooperative society. To oppose meat eating was thus to challenge existing society, and to attempt to change its underlying ethic of exploitation and predation to one of compassion and cooperation.</p>
<p>What was needed was the widespread awakening of a new mindset: a “compassionate consciousness” which combined an instinctive sense of compassion and fellowship with a freethinking rationalist outlook. Through the cultivation of this active ethic of fellowship and love – both the means and ends of social advance – a new sense of universal kinship would naturally develop. To be vegetarian was to attempt to embody and progress a particular vision of the future by enacting it in everyday life.</p>
<h2>A new way of being</h2>
<p>Epitomising universal peace and fellowship, vegetarianism represented a new way of being. For this reason, its practice by key figures in the history of non-violence, from Percy Shelley to <a href="http://www.openculture.com/2016/12/how-leo-tolstoy-became-a-vegetarian-and-jumpstarted-the-vegetarian-humanitarian-movements-in-the-19th-century.html">Leo Tolstoy</a> and <a href="https://ivu.org/index.php/blogs/john-davis/49-gandhi-and-the-launching-of-veganism">Mahatma Gandhi</a>, comes as little surprise.</p>
<p>Equally, meat eating came to embody a counter-form of this ideology, with meat consumption frequently associated with masculine, militaristic and nationalist politics – as exemplified by the 19th-century symbolism surrounding <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/John-Bull-English-symbol">John Bull</a>, the patriotic beef-eating English everyman.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/277647/original/file-20190603-69095-395ll0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/277647/original/file-20190603-69095-395ll0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277647/original/file-20190603-69095-395ll0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277647/original/file-20190603-69095-395ll0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277647/original/file-20190603-69095-395ll0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277647/original/file-20190603-69095-395ll0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277647/original/file-20190603-69095-395ll0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">James Gillray’s John Bull Taking a Luncheon. Bull often epitomised the meat-eating everyman.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gillray_-_John_Bull_taking_a_Luncheon.jpg">James Gillray via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In this light, the diet’s particular adoption by numerous pioneer feminists and suffragettes, especially those who also identified as socialists, such as <a href="https://www.wcml.org.uk/our-collections/activists/charlotte-despard/">Charlotte Despard</a> and <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09612029700200144">Isabella Ford</a> and, in the US, <a href="https://aeon.co/ideas/all-woman-the-utopian-feminism-of-charlotte-perkins-gilman">Charlotte Perkins Gilman</a>, served not only as a rejection of the exploitative violence of an unjust social order, but of patriarchy itself.</p>
<p>Through the 20th century, vegetarianism’s association with the left continued, with numerous prominent Labour MPs, including Fenner Brockway and Tony Benn, practising the diet. And today, to knowingly mention Jeremy Corbyn’s vegetarianism is almost a cliche.</p>
<p>But now it is gaining ground among younger generations, too. <a href="https://theconversation.com/going-veggie-would-cut-global-food-emissions-by-two-thirds-and-save-millions-of-lives-new-study-56655">Against the backdrop of the climate crisis</a>, and with a growing appetite for a new politics of tolerance, compassion and cooperation, which seeks to demolish blinding barriers and divisions, vegetarianism and veganism appear increasingly relevant.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/117454/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sky Duthie is a member of the Labour Party.</span></em></p>It’s not just a modern fad – plant-based diets have a long and colourful political past.Sky Duthie, PhD Candidate in History, University of YorkLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1156142019-04-22T10:46:45Z2019-04-22T10:46:45ZHow ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ inspired the cathedral’s 19th-century revival<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/269831/original/file-20190417-139120-1k4hyut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The gargoyles that sit on Notre Dame today were installed as a nod to the cathedral's past.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Le_Stryge_of_Notre-Dame_de_Paris#/media/File:Chimera_of_Notre-Dame_de_Paris.jpg">Noemiseh91/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>On April 15, people around the world watched in horror as a voracious fire consumed the medieval wooden roof of Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral and felled its spire.</p>
<p>The following day brought some measure of relief: Despite the building’s wrenching losses, its masonry structure <a href="https://www.citylab.com/design/2019/04/notre-dame-cathedral-fire-paris-gothic-architecture-history/587191/">was largely intact</a>, and many of its precious relics had been swiftly and lovingly removed by a human chain of church officials and firefighters. The building had steadfastly endured the destructive flames.</p>
<p>Since then, Notre Dame has been <a href="https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/notre-dame-fire/h_67124f975aef47cd650abb913003b36e">hailed</a> as a stable and enduring symbol of French identity. </p>
<p>But it would be more accurate to say that the cathedral’s importance comes from the very instability of its meaning.</p>
<p>Originally completed in 1345, by the early 19th century Notre Dame stood in a state of dire disrepair. It took an idiosyncratic young architect, moved by Victor Hugo’s “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=NpOjMrpFB-MC&printsec=frontcover&dq=hunchback+of+notre+dame&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiv7fiv7NnhAhWQmOAKHfX8Bn4Q6AEIPDAD#v=onepage&q&f=false">The Hunchback of Notre Dame</a>,” to fashion a new meaning for the building – one that, ironically, looked nostalgically to the past for inspiration.</p>
<h2>‘The book will destroy the edifice’</h2>
<p>In 1831, when Victor Hugo published his famous novel “Notre Dame de Paris” – known in English as “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” – the country was experiencing rapid social, political and industrial change. </p>
<p>The cathedral, meanwhile, had fallen by the wayside. Years of neglect, blinkered renovation efforts and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dechristianization_of_France_during_the_French_Revolution">the anti-Catholic zeal of the French Revolution</a> had left the once-regal building in ruins. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/270031/original/file-20190418-28110-10a882u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/270031/original/file-20190418-28110-10a882u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270031/original/file-20190418-28110-10a882u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270031/original/file-20190418-28110-10a882u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270031/original/file-20190418-28110-10a882u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270031/original/file-20190418-28110-10a882u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270031/original/file-20190418-28110-10a882u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">During the French Revolution, many of the treasures of the cathedral were either destroyed or plundered. Only the great bells avoided being melted down, and the church interior was used as a warehouse for the storage of food.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Notre-Dame,_l%27%C3%89v%C3%AAch%C3%A9_et_le_clo%C3%AEtre,_1830.jpg">Brown University Library</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Set in the 15th century, the novel alluringly evoked a different period in French history. In the novel, Hugo <a href="https://www.bartleby.com/312/0502.html">lamented</a> that the printing press had supplanted architecture as the primary communicator of civilization’s cherished values. In one of the book’s most famous moments, the archdeacon Frollo points sadly to a printed book on his table. </p>
<p>“Alas! This will kill that,” he laments, directing his finger to the cathedral looming magisterially outside his window. He continues, “The book will destroy the edifice.” </p>
<p>Like other Romanticist writers and artists, Hugo imagined the Middle Ages as a simpler time, an era when society was governed by pure faith. He believed that back then, the cathedral was able to inspire the masses and guide them toward a life of devotion and morality. Hugo hoped that his novel might spur the building’s rebirth, allowing it to renew France’s ethical core during the Industrial Revolution.</p>
<p>One architect, attracted to the picturesque history on view in Hugo’s novel, would ultimately heed his call.</p>
<h2>An architect reaches longingly for the past</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Eugene-Emmanuel-Viollet-le-Duc/images-videos">Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc</a> was a teenager when Hugo’s novel was published. The book affirmed Viollet-le-Duc’s suspicion that his own age’s riot of styles and tastes reflected the unwieldy chaos of modern life.</p>
<p>Like Hugo, he sought to capture France’s “authentic” past and, like Hugo, was drawn to the Middle Ages. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/269829/original/file-20190417-139120-16ozmti.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/269829/original/file-20190417-139120-16ozmti.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269829/original/file-20190417-139120-16ozmti.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269829/original/file-20190417-139120-16ozmti.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269829/original/file-20190417-139120-16ozmti.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269829/original/file-20190417-139120-16ozmti.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269829/original/file-20190417-139120-16ozmti.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Eugène Viollet-le-Duc.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eugene_viollet_le_duc.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For this reason, he refused to enroll in the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ecole-des-Beaux-Arts">École des Beaux-Arts</a>, the main training ground for France’s architects, because of the school’s dogmatic focus on classical architecture. He opted instead to learn on the job, working for architects around Paris while studying the city’s medieval architecture in his spare time. </p>
<p>In 1842, the government announced a competition for Notre Dame’s restoration and the 28-year-old Viollet-le-Duc threw his hat into the ring. By then, he had already established his reputation as an expert in the restoration of medieval buildings. </p>
<p>But for him, restoration was about more than touching up an existing form. It meant breathing life into a building by transforming it.</p>
<p><a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=UxpBAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA9&lpg=PA9&dq=%22To+restore+a+building+is+not+to+preserve+it,+to+repair+or+rebuild+it,%22&source=bl&ots=8oZOePoKO1&sig=ACfU3U3M738aqPIsqY9L1iupB2TlRSMlBA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi-hKmVlNjhAhUvnOAKHZlzCcUQ6AEwBnoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false">As he later wrote</a>, “To restore a building is not to preserve it, to repair or rebuild it; it is to reinstate it in a condition of completeness which could never have existed at any given time.” Viollet-le-Duc knew that the very act of restoring old buildings was, itself, a modern notion.</p>
<h2>A symbol of stability in uncertain times?</h2>
<p>Thus, Viollet-le-Duc’s winning entry would not simply aim to preserve the cathedral as it then stood. Instead, he sought to revive the building’s mythical past. </p>
<p>During the restoration, Viollet-le-Duc redesigned and rebuilt the medieval spire, which had been removed in the 1780s due to its vulnerability in high winds (an absence that had appalled Hugo). He also sprinkled the building with its now-famous gargoyles in accord with Hugo’s <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=MsEyAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA524&dq=%22grinning+monsters%22+victor+hugo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwimiazy6dfhAhWndt8KHSQEA_gQ6AEILzAB#v=onepage&q=%22grinning%20monsters%22%20victor%20hugo&f=false">atmospheric depiction</a> of a building adorned with “grinning monsters.” </p>
<p>Viollet-le-Duc’s renovated cathedral – the version that we know today – is a product both of the French Middle Ages and of its architectural revival in the 19th century. Like Hugo, Viollet-le-Duc romantically conceived medieval architecture as a stable bulwark against his own uncertain times. He wanted to intensify what he saw as the building’s mystical power – its ability to speak to France’s past at a time when the forces of modernity were threatening to sweep its traces away. </p>
<p>Viollet-le-Duc also ensured his own role in the rehabilitation would forever be preserved: His likeness appears in the face of a copper statue of St. Thomas at the base of the spire. </p>
<p>By good fortune, this statue was <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-paris-notre-dame-renovation-project-20190415-story.html">removed for the renovation</a> just last week and was spared from the conflagration.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/270033/original/file-20190418-28100-xbj9c9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/270033/original/file-20190418-28100-xbj9c9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270033/original/file-20190418-28100-xbj9c9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270033/original/file-20190418-28100-xbj9c9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270033/original/file-20190418-28100-xbj9c9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270033/original/file-20190418-28100-xbj9c9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270033/original/file-20190418-28100-xbj9c9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Viollet-le-Duc’s face appears on a statue of St. Thomas.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Notre-Dame_de_Paris_086.jpg">Harmonia Amanda/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Since the fire, many writers have correctly <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/great-cathedrals-burn-collapse-and-crack-notre-dame-can-survive-this/2019/04/16/b973eab4-5fbb-11e9-9ff2-abc984dc9eec_story.html">pointed out</a> that the catastrophe is also only one episode in a much longer story of architectural survival. </p>
<p>Notre Dame will certainly live on in some new form; France has been offered <a href="https://www.dezeen.com/2019/04/16/apple-notre-dame-cathedral-fire-rebuilding-news/">astronomical donations</a> for the purpose. In fact, a competition to redesign the spire <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global/2019/apr/17/france-announces-architecture-competition-rebuild-notre-dames-spire">has already been announced</a>.</p>
<p>Much like Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration, this newest version of Notre Dame will look to the past – selectively – to ensure the building’s future.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/115614/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julia Walker does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Looking nostalgically to the past, a young architect sought to revive the building as a bulwark to the uncertainty of the Industrial Revolution.Julia Walker, Assistant Professor of Art History, Binghamton University, State University of New YorkLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1023752018-09-14T10:34:44Z2018-09-14T10:34:44ZDelacroix at the Met: A retrospective that evokes today’s turmoil<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/236247/original/file-20180913-177935-lwivej.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Eugène Delacroix's 'Self-Portrait in a Green Vest' (1837).</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/Eug%C3%A8ne_Delacroix_-_Self-Portrait_-_WGA6192.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>I’m an art historian and professor who studies and teaches French Romantic art. So when I was in France this past summer, I made sure to see <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/in-paris-a-major-delacroix-exhibition-that-continues-to-explore-his-genius/2018/04/12/0d754b62-3d6c-11e8-8d53-eba0ed2371cc_story.html?utm_term=.831a1d2be02d">the Louvre’s retrospective exhibition</a> of French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix. </p>
<p>In the galleries, I listened in on the other viewers discussing his paintings. Yes, they talked about their beauty and vibrant colors. But they also spoke of the images they depicted – scenes of tyranny and political upheaval, of resistance, chaos and refugees. They may just as well have been speaking of our present moment. </p>
<p>Now the Delacroix <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2018/delacroix">exhibition</a> is coming to the United States. It opens Sept. 17, at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and will run through Jan. 6, 2019. </p>
<p>The exhibition will have a special resonance for those trying to make sense of the uncertainties and challenges we face today.</p>
<p>If you only know Delacroix from his iconic 1830 work “<a href="https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/july-28-liberty-leading-people">Liberty Leading the People</a>” – in which a symbolic woman representing liberty celebrates the three glorious days of the Revolution of 1830 – you might think he was a political revolutionary. He was not.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235848/original/file-20180911-144455-ktyybr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235848/original/file-20180911-144455-ktyybr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235848/original/file-20180911-144455-ktyybr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235848/original/file-20180911-144455-ktyybr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235848/original/file-20180911-144455-ktyybr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235848/original/file-20180911-144455-ktyybr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235848/original/file-20180911-144455-ktyybr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Eugène Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People’ (1830).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eug%C3%A8ne_Delacroix_-_La_libert%C3%A9_guidant_le_peuple.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>Instead, the artist was a conservative man facing what he called “<a href="http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/14/evenements/delacroix.asp">the century of unbelievable things</a>.” During his lifetime, he experienced war, two revolutions on his doorstep and encounters with Islamic cultures that challenged and entranced him. The exhibition shows us a man trying to comprehend what is happening to his world.</p>
<h2>A star is born</h2>
<p>Born in 1798, <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/titles/14143.html">Delacroix</a> was a privileged child of the Napoleonic age. As a young student, he honed his skills by drawing in schoolbooks and sketchbooks. </p>
<p>But by the time Delacroix was 16 years old, both of his parents had died, and the family’s money dried up. Delacroix, realizing he would have to rely on his painting to make a living, enrolled in the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris while also studying in the studio of <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T035432">Pierre Guerin</a>, where he befriended influential painter <a href="https://www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.1334.html">Theodore Gericault</a>. </p>
<p>He was considered an early leader of the new <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/roma/hd_roma.htm">Romantic style</a>, an approach to painting that expressed passions through dramatic colors and loose, fluid brushstrokes. </p>
<p>While today he’s known as “the great Romantic,” Delacroix rejected that title. Instead, he styled himself as a painter who continued the glorious <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3333655?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">Classic tradition of French art</a>; in his work, he often depicted Classical and historical subjects that were the bedrock of that approach.</p>
<p>He made his debut in the Paris Salon exhibition with the dramatic 1822 work “<a href="https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/barque-dante">Barque of Dante</a>,” an image of Dante and Virgil crossing into Hell that earned him widespread praise. </p>
<p>But Delacroix’s paintings of the <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300045321/french-images-greek-war-independence-1821-1830">Greek War of Independence</a> – an early 1820s conflict between the Greeks and their Ottoman occupiers – catapulted him to fame. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235850/original/file-20180911-144488-brjwo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235850/original/file-20180911-144488-brjwo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235850/original/file-20180911-144488-brjwo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235850/original/file-20180911-144488-brjwo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235850/original/file-20180911-144488-brjwo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235850/original/file-20180911-144488-brjwo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235850/original/file-20180911-144488-brjwo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235850/original/file-20180911-144488-brjwo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In ‘Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi,’ Delacroix uses a pale female figure to symbolize Greece.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greece_on_the_Ruins_of_Missolonghi#/media/File:Eug%C3%A8ne_Ferdinand_Victor_Delacroix_017.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>Delacroix, like many in his circle, supported the Greeks in their struggle against the oppressive Ottoman Empire. While “<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/66/Eug%C3%A8ne_Delacroix_-_Le_Massacre_de_Scio.jpg/300px-Eug%C3%A8ne_Delacroix_-_Le_Massacre_de_Scio.jpg">The Massacre at Chios</a>” (1824), dedicated to the brutal deaths of the Greeks on that island, will remain at the Louvre, the celebrated “Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi” (1826), an image of tragic defeat, travels to the New York exhibition. Delacroix began the painting shortly after the citizens of Missolonghi attempted to liberate their city only to be massacred by the Ottoman Turks in 1825.</p>
<p>In “Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi,” Delacroix embodied Greece as a single allegorical figure. Pale-skinned and clothed in traditional garments of white and blue – with her body lowered on one knee upon the fallen marble blocks – she recalls the Virgin Mary. Shrouded in darkness behind her, there’s a Turk – dark-skinned, turbaned and dressed in menacing hues of red. </p>
<p>At this point in his life, Delacroix had never traveled to the Ottoman Empire or anywhere else in the Islamic world; he only knew of it from the stories, objects and images he encountered in Paris. People in his circle wrote about the Oriental world of the Turks and North Africa as “the other,” at best, and barbaric at worst. In the painter’s hands, the Islamic world is cast as the infidel, while Christian Greece is represented with the imagery of the Virgin. It is a classic clash of West and East, liberty and oppression. </p>
<p>In Europe and America today, these old conflicts are playing out again with similar language and imagery being deployed. This binary relationship runs so deep in Western culture that it seems like a permanent fixture of our politics. </p>
<h2>An artist broadens his horizon</h2>
<p>In Delacroix’s art that simple binary never quite applied. Instead of seeing a border between the two worlds, it was as if he wanted to slip between them time and again. Though he was on the side of the Greeks two centuries ago, he was also fascinated by the glamour and violence he associated with the Islamic world. </p>
<p>In 1832, Delacroix, who seldom traveled, embarked for North Africa as part of a <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1552652?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">diplomatic mission to Algeria and Morocco</a>. The voyage came about purely by chance when the ambassador, Count Charles de Mornay, sought a diverting traveling companion and artist to accompany him on the mission. Delacroix left within a month of receiving the invitation for the voyage. </p>
<p>The lure of the exotic Islamic world that Delacroix only knew through paintings and drawings was too much to resist. It changed the man and his art.</p>
<p>Little prepared him for North Africa and the beauty he found there. To Delacroix, all was soft and liquid in the light. </p>
<p>“I am dizzy,” he wrote his friend <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1552652?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">Pierret</a>. “I am like a man who is dreaming.” </p>
<p>The artist’s small sketchbooks from North Africa, which will be featured in the Met exhibition, offer an intimate glimpse of the scenes and people that captivated him. He would return to these subjects repeatedly throughout his career.</p>
<p>A star of the New York exhibition, “The Women of Algiers in Their Apartment” (1834), brings viewers into Delacroix’s North African world. Years later, the journalist Phillipe Burty reported in his magazine article “Eugene Delacroix a Algers” that Delacroix had received permission to enter the private women’s quarter of an Algerian home with the help of an Algerian acquaintance. Even male family members needed permission to enter the “harem,” so Delacroix’s access would have been an extraordinary event. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235878/original/file-20180911-144461-1oy1zci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235878/original/file-20180911-144461-1oy1zci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235878/original/file-20180911-144461-1oy1zci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235878/original/file-20180911-144461-1oy1zci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235878/original/file-20180911-144461-1oy1zci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235878/original/file-20180911-144461-1oy1zci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235878/original/file-20180911-144461-1oy1zci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235878/original/file-20180911-144461-1oy1zci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Delacroix returned from his trip to North Africa inspired. He would go on to paint ‘The Women of Algiers in Their Apartment’ (1834).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/gandalfsgallery/9892248346">Gandalf's Gallery</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The story may or may not be true, especially since Delacroix painted the piece in his Paris studio. Working from sketches, memory and Parisian models wearing the clothing he brought back from Algeria, Delacroix created what art historian <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/obituaries/linda-nochlin-groundbreaking-feminist-art-historian-is-dead-at-86.html">Linda Nochlin</a> once called an “<a href="http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/rethinking-orientalism-again/">imaginary Orient</a>” – a world that may meld truth with fiction, but reveals much about its author. </p>
<p>Like many of us, Delacroix didn’t spend every moment obsessed with politics and conflict. He lived a rich life, and the exhibition shows the full scope of his work. <a href="http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/autumn12/obrien-reviews-eugene-delacroix-journal-by-hannoosh">His famous journal</a> reveals a man about town, who immersed himself in literature and life. From the 1830s, the Met exhibition brings us paintings as varied as “<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Young_tiger_playing_with_its_mother.jpg">Young Tiger Playing with Its Mother</a>” (1830) and “<a href="https://imgcs.artprintimages.com/img/print/print/eugene-delacroix-medee-furieuse-or-medea-kills-her-children-1838_a-l-2590501-8880731.jpg?w=550&h=550">Medea About to Kill Her Children</a>” (1838). </p>
<p>During the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Revolutions-of-1848">Revolution of 1848</a>, instead of creating a new “Liberty Leading the People,” the moderate Delacroix produced the vibrant “Basket of Flowers” (1848–49). </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/236252/original/file-20180913-177935-1sgy3tu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/236252/original/file-20180913-177935-1sgy3tu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/236252/original/file-20180913-177935-1sgy3tu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/236252/original/file-20180913-177935-1sgy3tu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/236252/original/file-20180913-177935-1sgy3tu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/236252/original/file-20180913-177935-1sgy3tu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/236252/original/file-20180913-177935-1sgy3tu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/236252/original/file-20180913-177935-1sgy3tu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Eugene Delacroix’s ‘Basket of Flowers’ (1848-49).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WLA_metmuseum_Basket_of_Flowers_by_Eugene_Delacroix.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In focusing on natural beauty, it would seem as though the political warfare roiling the streets of Paris was the last thing on Delacroix’s mind.</p>
<p>Delcroix’s most famous paintings, like “Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi” and “Liberty Leading the People,” arose out of the turmoil of the 19th century and evoke the uncertainties of our present day. </p>
<p>But “Basket of Flowers” may also say something important about finding beauty and equilibrium in the midst of chaos.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/102375/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Claire Black McCoy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Through his art and his travels, 19th-century French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix sought to understand the chaos of an era he called ‘the century of unbelievable things.’Claire Black McCoy, Professor of Art History, Columbus State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1002422018-07-25T20:09:00Z2018-07-25T20:09:00ZExplainer: how Romanticism rebelled against cold-hearted rationality<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228754/original/file-20180723-189319-1tbymun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">William Blake, Pity, 1795, Tate.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WilliamBlakePity.jpeg">William Blake/Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Romanticism is often fixed within a period running from the late-18th to early-19th century. But Romanticism as a cultural movement and as a set of ideas influencing visual art, literature, philosophy and politics, bleeds out beyond these designated boundaries. </p>
<p>Indeed, its influence continues in the 21st century. When we think about the qualities of imagination, the natural world or the composition of the self, we usually call upon an idea or two from what has come to be known as Romanticism. </p>
<p>In 21st-century culture, Romantic ideas usually appear when the human and the natural worlds are brought together. For example, the novels of Peter Carey or Tim Winton sometimes set up a type of metaphysical resonance between landscape and the formation (or dissipation) of the self.</p>
<p>Or, we see a fantasy of our integration with nature (tinged with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “nascent humanity”) in James Cameron’s film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0499549/">Avatar</a>. Even the feedback loop of depression and apocalypse that appears in Lars von Trier’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1527186/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Melancholia</a>, owes something to Romanticism. </p>
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<p>The term “Romanticism” derives from the attraction of some 18th-century German and English thinkers to the culture of the Middle Ages. “Romance” - such as that exhibited in the 13th-century French stories of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancelot-Grail">King Arthur</a>- provided a model of imaginative non-realism, intensity of feeling and decisiveness of action that appealed to young artistic rebels. The Middle Ages also offered an imagined community of integrated harmony that contrasted with the transformations and tumult of late 18th-century Europe. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-the-arthurian-legend-64289">Guide to the classics: the Arthurian legend</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Often, Romanticism is seen as a counterpoint to the Enlightenment. In 1784, Immanuel Kant suggested a slogan for the Enlightenment: “Have courage to use your own understanding!” This prompted the question: what is the nature of that understanding? </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229217/original/file-20180725-194158-1pthlk0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229217/original/file-20180725-194158-1pthlk0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229217/original/file-20180725-194158-1pthlk0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=976&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229217/original/file-20180725-194158-1pthlk0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=976&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229217/original/file-20180725-194158-1pthlk0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=976&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229217/original/file-20180725-194158-1pthlk0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1226&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229217/original/file-20180725-194158-1pthlk0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1226&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229217/original/file-20180725-194158-1pthlk0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1226&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>The modern world can still be understood as swinging between, on one side, the cool work of quantification and observation in scientific rationality and, on the other, a desire for the heat of life lived with intensity, in the experience of emotion or of the ineffable. These latter qualities we find in imaginative and freedom-loving Romanticism, which made a home for itself in English poetry.</p>
<p>Poets such as Charlotte Smith, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Clare presented artistic critiques of what they saw as the exploitative and cold-hearted rationality of their times. These English poets found a refuge for their idea of free and creative humanity in nature and the imagination.</p>
<p>Blake achieved this with his religiously inspired poetic transformations of London. Blake imagines indentured child chimney sweeps set free by angels, even as he sees everywhere the “mind-forg’d manacles” of poverty and exploitation. Blake skewers the wretched present and envisages a transcendent future through poetic imagination. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228755/original/file-20180723-189332-1t05pjr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228755/original/file-20180723-189332-1t05pjr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228755/original/file-20180723-189332-1t05pjr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228755/original/file-20180723-189332-1t05pjr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228755/original/file-20180723-189332-1t05pjr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228755/original/file-20180723-189332-1t05pjr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228755/original/file-20180723-189332-1t05pjr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228755/original/file-20180723-189332-1t05pjr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Beatrice Addressing Dante by William Blake.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beatrice_Addressing_Dante_(by_William_Blake).jpg">William Blake/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<h2>The Romantic sublime</h2>
<p>Where Blake set out an idiosyncratic and radical religious revision, Wordsworth established a poetic interaction between imagination and nature in his landmark 1798 collection with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads. In his poem Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth outlines the idea of the sublime that would come to characterise the Romantic relationship between humanity and nature. </p>
<p>Wordsworth encounters nature but in it hears the “sad music of humanity”: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>And I have felt
<br>
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
<br>
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
<br>
Of something far more deeply interfused,
<br>
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
<br>
And the round ocean and the living air,
<br>
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Romantic sublime here casts nature as a stern teacher ready to impart wisdom if only humanity could be still and listen carefully. Edmund Burke went a little further with his theory of the sublime, in which the teacher is more like a crazed god who might overwhelm and annihilate us. Surviving the encounter, however, we are endowed with wonder and insight. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229218/original/file-20180725-194124-1cvjgn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229218/original/file-20180725-194124-1cvjgn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229218/original/file-20180725-194124-1cvjgn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229218/original/file-20180725-194124-1cvjgn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229218/original/file-20180725-194124-1cvjgn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229218/original/file-20180725-194124-1cvjgn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229218/original/file-20180725-194124-1cvjgn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229218/original/file-20180725-194124-1cvjgn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The Romantic sublime in Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey casts nature as as a stern teacher ready to impart wisdom if only humanity could be still and listen carefully.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">shutterstock</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Wordsworth explained this control of the sublime experience in his poetic method. In his 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads he describes the process of recreating the experience of nature and transforming it into poetry:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Wordsworth argues that it takes a special kind of “mind” to recall the intensity of emotion that accompanies an encounter with a mountain or the roiling sea. As Shelley would reiterate later, the Romantic poet is cast as an almost priestly figure, mediating between humanity and nature through “his” capacious imagination.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229219/original/file-20180725-194131-e66nik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229219/original/file-20180725-194131-e66nik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229219/original/file-20180725-194131-e66nik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=735&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229219/original/file-20180725-194131-e66nik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=735&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229219/original/file-20180725-194131-e66nik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=735&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229219/original/file-20180725-194131-e66nik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229219/original/file-20180725-194131-e66nik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229219/original/file-20180725-194131-e66nik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An 1842 portrait of Wordsworth by Benjamin Robert Haydon.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But, of course, these “unacknowledged legislators” of human nature were not all men and not all so ready to present their special sensibilities. Charlotte Smith was an early Romantic poet who influenced Wordsworth. Smith’s melancholy nature poems present a less heroic vision of poetic imagination and the self. Her sonnet, To Night, includes a literary device that subsequent Romantic writers tended to neglect: irony. </p>
<p>Wordsworth and Shelley claim to access the transcendental voice of nature without conceding that they may, in fact, merely be hearing their own echo. Smith, on the other hand, acknowledges the vanity of communing with “the deaf cold elements”. It doesn’t stop her from anthropomorphising nature in its “sullen surges” and “viewless wind”. But she, at least, recognises the game she is playing.</p>
<p>Smith knows the human world is cruel and that nature can provide consolation, even when we admit it is actually indifferent to our suffering. In a way that Kant might not have anticipated, Smith presents a Romantic kind of enlightenment - a courage to use one’s own understanding of sorrow. </p>
<p>She addresses “Night” with some of the saddest and bravest lines in English poetry:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I still enjoy thee — cheerless as thou art;
<br>
For in thy quiet gloom the exhausted heart
<br>
Is calm, tho’ wretched; hopeless, yet resign’d.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This Romantic voice takes responsibility for itself by artfully imagining nature as a cool but consoling companion, rather than a distant sage or annihilating god. It is a knowing projection of our capacity for calm, set against a frantic and unjust world.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/100242/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Ryan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Romantics - including poets William Blake and William Wordsworth - lived in the 18th century, but their passionate ideas about imagination and nature are still influential today.Matthew Ryan, Lecturer in Literature, Australian Catholic UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/843192017-09-28T10:53:06Z2017-09-28T10:53:06ZDavid Bowie, a latter-day Romantic, was a modern-day Lord Byron<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187829/original/file-20170927-24154-1ydjitw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jean-Luc via Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Before he <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-38533901">died in January 2016</a>, David Bowie was universally regarded as one of the seminal rock stars of the modern age. He sold <a href="http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/2017/08/david-bowie-has-been-streamed-more-that.html">millions of records</a>, won <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2017/02/12/david-bowie-grammy-awards-blackstar/97827398/">countless awards</a>, and influenced numberless followers. </p>
<p>Almost without fail, <a href="https://theconversation.com/david-bowie-innovator-extraordinaire-52998">tributes after his death</a> lauded Bowie as a pioneer, particularly when it came to questioning ideas about gender and identity. But although Bowie’s willingness to challenge norms and boldness in doing so are undeniable, his position as a pioneer is more questionable. </p>
<p>Bowie is, in fact, directly linked to the Romantics, the writers and intellectuals who challenged similar norms some 200 years ago. And this link reveals not only the weight of Bowie’s work, but also the continuing influence of Romantic thought today. </p>
<p>My favourite version of David Bowie is the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/gallery/2016/aug/25/david-bowie-tour-thin-white-duke-photos">Thin White Duke</a> of 1975 and 1976. As skinny as a thread and with a laser-cut profile, the Duke wore his snowy shirt and black waistcoat with an icy hauteur that inspired both my fascination and my envy. </p>
<p>But it wasn’t until recently that I realised that the Thin White Duke has roots that go deeper than David Bowie’s <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/bowies-last-single-said-to-be-a-tribute-to-kabbalah/">fascination with cocaine and kabbalah</a> (his 1976 album Station to Station makes direct use of kabbalistic words and concepts). He is also a direct descendant of English Romanticism’s most alluring poet, <a href="https://theconversation.com/love-letters-from-joyces-dirty-missive-to-keatss-paeans-37500">Lord Byron</a>. </p>
<p>Like Byron, Bowie lived and worked in a time of enormous social and intellectual upheaval. And also like Byron, he embraced that upheaval eagerly, becoming its best-known symbol. </p>
<p>Byron travelled to then-mysterious lands in the early 1800s, bringing back stories of exotic scenes and events. He wove this strangeness into tales whose fictional heroes – boldly and successfully defying moral and social expectations, embracing personal morality and liberty – seemed based on himself. Childe Harold, The Giaour, The Corsair were all poems whose eponymous heroes were taken as versions of Byron himself.</p>
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<p>Bowie picked up on precisely these elements of Byronism when he adopted the persona of <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/ziggy-stardust-how-bowie-created-the-alter-ego-that-changed-rock-20160616">Ziggy Stardust</a>, alien liberator and 1970s counterculture personified, but who shared the physical characteristics of David Bowie.</p>
<p>Bowie’s connection to Byron runs deeper still. Both explored the question of identity in their works, while in their real lives suggesting that identity might be nothing more than a surface. They happily created themselves as brands, delighting in making fans puzzle over what was real and what was not, who was singing or speaking. </p>
<p>For this, both men earned accusations that their work was shallow. In fact, such frankness confronts the very deepest questions about how to define identity. Do people have a single “self”? What even is self, really? What if identity is really just a series of masks, donned at the appropriate moments?</p>
<p>The more I considered Bowie, the more I realised that he wasn’t linked just to Byron. Bowie is a prime example of how all of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/Romanticism">Romanticism</a> continues to influence our culture. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187003/original/file-20170921-8199-1j24xzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187003/original/file-20170921-8199-1j24xzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=786&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187003/original/file-20170921-8199-1j24xzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=786&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187003/original/file-20170921-8199-1j24xzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=786&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187003/original/file-20170921-8199-1j24xzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=988&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187003/original/file-20170921-8199-1j24xzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=988&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187003/original/file-20170921-8199-1j24xzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=988&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Byron - lord of the romance.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/lord-byron-1800s-252139615?src=_xA6yoE78G8wBIjoW4JexA-1-4">Shutterstock</a></span>
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<p>Bowie’s cross-dressing and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2006/jan/22/popandrock.davidbowie">his announcement</a> that he was “gay, and I always have been” were brave statements in England in the early 1970s. (The parents of Bowie’s guitarist Mick Ronson were publicly harassed simply because of their son’s association.) </p>
<p>But 150 years earlier, John Keats confused the gender boundaries of his time, and had his work dismissed with contempt and his career destroyed because <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1C0HDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=keats+and+effeminate&source=bl&ots=N2GD7sTBpP&sig=sg9rPYotsv9wOG71mH-SyouKaA4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiQ_-De-rXWAhVFKMAKHYUBBj4Q6AEIPTAH#v=onepage&q=keats%20and%20effeminate&f=false">critics thought</a> his poetry was effeminate. Bowie tapped into the same fear that Keats embodied, and his gender questioning links to concerns that lurk in the corners of many Romantic books and poems.</p>
<h2>Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes</h2>
<p>What’s more, while Bowie can be seen as rock ’n’ roll’s master of apocalypse and dystopia (his <a href="http://www.davidbowie.com/album/diamond-dogs-0">Diamond Dogs</a> album opens with an image of a world full of “fleas the size of rats sucking on rats the size of cats” and doesn’t get much more positive from there), that vision can trace its roots back to <a href="http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/blke/hd_blke.htm">William Blake’s highly symbolic</a> and post-apocalyptic poetic visions, detailed in works such as Jerusalem and The Four Zoas.</p>
<p>In fact, a great deal of Bowie’s work links back to the genre of so-called “<a href="https://www.routledge.com/Sublime-Conclusions-Last-Man-Narratives-from-Apocalypse-to-Death-of-God/Weninger/p/book/9781910887219">last-man narratives</a>”, which envisioned the end of the world through the eyes of a last survivor and were very popular in the Romantic period. The songs “Space Oddity” and “Ashes to Ashes”, for instance, are the spiritual children of <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/ksr.1989.4.1.1">Mary Shelley’s The Last Man</a> and <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/alastor-by-p-b-shelley">Percy Shelley’s Alastor</a>. These connections to Romanticism show that Bowie’s work can’t be dismissed as “just” pop music. </p>
<p>Furthermore, Bowie’s work shows that Romanticism still has an influence on the contemporary world. The Romantic Era, that grand and distant epoch, is not remote history, but a continuing influence on how we understand our own world. Bowie demonstrates that in some cases we are still Romantics, wrestling with the same questions that writers and thinkers grappled with more than a century ago: Who am I? How many “selves” do I have? Am I sure if I’m a boy or a girl? What will become of my world, of <em>the</em> world? </p>
<p>In an intellectual game of Chinese Whispers, these same Romantic questions and concerns appear in Bowie’s songs, and sometimes in our own minds, just in different words. In this way, it turns out, the Thin White Duke’s slender thread ties the present to the past, knots Bowie to Romanticism, and shows that Romanticism is knitted into our contemporary selves.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/84319/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Emily Bernhard Jackson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The singer had Romantic notions in common with the poet – as well as with William Blake, Mary Shelley, and John Keats.Emily Bernhard Jackson, Lecturer in English, University of ExeterLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/649842016-09-12T15:13:36Z2016-09-12T15:13:36ZWhy a volcano, Frankenstein, and the summer of 1816 are relevant to the Anthropocene<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137363/original/image-20160912-3793-1gc5v36.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Creative Travel Projects / Shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The idea that we are now living in the <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/anthropocene-2770">Anthropocene</a> – a new geological epoch characterised by humanity’s influence on the planet – has gained wide currency in recent years. And now a group of experts tasked by the International Commission on Stratigraphy to assess whether human activities are leaving a strong trace in the rock record have advised that the Holocene – the epoch that has defined the last 10,000 years – should indeed be declared over.</p>
<p>To say that we are living in the Anthropocene does not mean that our impacts now define the earth system, or that we have control over it. Rather, it means that our activities play an increasingly important role within a complex set of interactions with a wide range of other forces, objects, and agencies.</p>
<p>For <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Ecocriticism_on_the_Edge.html?id=IvOmCQAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y/">some commentators</a>, the Anthropocene marks a breach from the past that requires new ways of thinking. And yet, for at least two centuries, nature writers have been addressing the complexity of humanity’s entanglements with the natural world.</p>
<p>One plausible start date for the Anthropocene is during the Romantic period (1780-1830), which saw the beginning of the world’s industrialisation and of the increasing atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. Coincidentally or not, the same period also saw a remarkable flowering of literature concerned with the relationship between human beings and nature.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137365/original/image-20160912-3768-d3pg96.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137365/original/image-20160912-3768-d3pg96.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137365/original/image-20160912-3768-d3pg96.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137365/original/image-20160912-3768-d3pg96.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137365/original/image-20160912-3768-d3pg96.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=492&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137365/original/image-20160912-3768-d3pg96.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=492&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137365/original/image-20160912-3768-d3pg96.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=492&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Smoking towers soon became a common sight in the British landscape.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:StRolloxChemical_1831.jpg#/media/File:StRolloxChemical_1831.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>Authors such as Gilbert White, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Charlotte Smith, and John Clare wrote about their local flora, fauna, and natural phenomena with unprecedented depth and richness, thereby inventing the modern genre of nature writing.</p>
<p>Their works also bear the imprint of global environmental forces. The final pages of White’s <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1408">The Natural History of Selborne</a> (1789), for example, describe “the horrible phaenomena” of the summer of 1783, including a “peculiar haze, or smokey fog” that appeared across Europe and created a “superstitious kind of dread”. And the poet William Cowper wrote of the same summer that: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>the props<br>
And pillars of our planet seem to fail,<br>
And nature with a dim and sickly eye<br>
To wait the close of all. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The principal cause of the unusual conditions of 1783 was the eruption of the Laki volcano in Iceland. A generation later, the much larger eruption of the Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora in 1815 was to have a defining impact: both on the climate, and on Romantic literature.</p>
<h2>The year without a summer</h2>
<p>The following year, 1816, was exceptionally cold and wet and came to be known as the “year without a summer”. What Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “this end of the World Weather” led to incidences of famine, political unrest, and disease across the globe.</p>
<p>The summer of 1816 is also known as one of the most productive periods in the history of English literature. This is not least because it saw the conception of Mary Shelley’s <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/84">Frankenstein</a>, as well as major works by her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and their friend Lord Byron. All were composed during the time that the three spent together near Geneva.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137367/original/image-20160912-3807-1c72ea4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137367/original/image-20160912-3807-1c72ea4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137367/original/image-20160912-3807-1c72ea4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=785&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137367/original/image-20160912-3807-1c72ea4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=785&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137367/original/image-20160912-3807-1c72ea4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=785&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137367/original/image-20160912-3807-1c72ea4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=986&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137367/original/image-20160912-3807-1c72ea4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=986&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137367/original/image-20160912-3807-1c72ea4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=986&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Lord Byron.</span>
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<p>A mixture of terrible weather, the sublime Alpine landscapes that they visited, and their interest in science led them to think hard about the vulnerability of human communities living with uncontrollable natural forces. They even considered the possibility of human extinction.</p>
<p>A key concern for Byron and the Shelleys was global cooling. Responding to contemporary geological theories (and no doubt the unnaturally cold temperature), Percy Shelley argued that the glaciers around Mont Blanc were continually “augmenting”. In a letter to his friend Thomas Love Peacock, he raised the possibility that “this globe which we inhabit will at some future period be changed into a mass of frost by the encroachments of the polar ice”. And his poem “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/45130">Mont Blanc</a>” describes glaciers that “creep | Like snakes that watch their prey”; a “flood of ruin” that threatens human existence.</p>
<p>Byron goes further in his poem “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/43825">Darkness</a>”, imagining the dimming of the entire universe: “The icy earth | Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.” In a chillingly apocalyptic vision, the growing cold and darkness leads to resource wars, ecosystem collapse, famine, and eventually the destruction of all life on Earth, leaving it “a lump of death”.</p>
<p>The extinction of the human species is also addressed in Frankenstein and here again it is linked to global cooling. Victor eventually destroys his work on the Creature’s companion due to his fear that the two might procreate and supplant humanity. Significantly, the Creature is much better adapted to cold conditions than his creator. Frankenstein raises the spectre of a post-human future in which a stronger species develops that is able to flourish on an icy globe.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137369/original/image-20160912-3777-fik88t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137369/original/image-20160912-3777-fik88t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137369/original/image-20160912-3777-fik88t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137369/original/image-20160912-3777-fik88t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137369/original/image-20160912-3777-fik88t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137369/original/image-20160912-3777-fik88t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137369/original/image-20160912-3777-fik88t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Frankenstein%27s_monster_(Boris_Karloff).jpg#/media/File:Frankenstein%27s_monster_(Boris_Karloff).jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Cold futures</h2>
<p>The anxieties of Romantic writers might seem rather different to ours. Despite their interest in climate – including the possibility that human activity could “improve” it – they were not concerned by the possibility of a human-made global climate crisis. But given that <a href="https://theconversation.com/blocking-out-the-sun-wont-fix-climate-change-but-it-could-buy-us-time-50818">some scientists are proposing</a> to counteract the effects of climate change by mimicking the effects of a large volcanic eruption, their writing seems particularly pertinent to the Anthropocene.</p>
<p>Their works do not offer simplistic solutions. Frankenstein is not a warning against technological experimentation. Nor is it an endorsement of the idea that we should “<a href="http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/past-issues/issue-2/love-your-monsters">love our monsters</a>” and therefore embrace <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/geoengineering-1515">geoengineering</a>.</p>
<p>The most interesting Romantic literature is not so much concerned with what we “do” to nature or vice versa, but with the entanglement of human and nonhuman agents. Thus the protagonist of Byron’s drama <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/18/6/11.html">Manfred</a> refuses to bow down to the personified elemental forces that surround him and yet relies on their power. And “Mont Blanc” raises the possibility that reality is defined by the human imagination at the same time as presenting our vulnerability to environmental change. </p>
<p>A key legacy of Romanticism has been a form of nature writing that depicts the solitary individual’s transcendent experience of the sublime landscape. Perhaps unfairly, such writing has sometimes been criticised for its self-absorption and blindness to larger contexts.</p>
<p>But a richer understanding of Romantic literature might inform a nature writing fit for our current situation: messy, urgent, aware that “nature” does not exist separately from politics and economics, and reflective of the complex human-nonhuman assemblages that characterise the Anthropocene.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/64984/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Higgins receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the research on which this article is based. </span></em></p>A volcanic eruption in 1815 triggered a year without a summer – prompting a flowering of nature writing that is all too relevant today.David Higgins, Associate Professor in English Literature, University of LeedsLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/559082016-04-28T09:33:56Z2016-04-28T09:33:56ZWhy give to charity? A Romantic view of helping the needy<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/117715/original/image-20160406-29002-g8oe4a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'The only free man in the universe', according to Charles Lamb.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/erix/5209047066/in/photolist-aWSbWr-FBeWSZ-pG6Vtq-bR7r7R-8i55gJ-8WiJdj-9EYFQw-5qqmg7-9wDm4b-9TzG1F-8onxLo-9KoQSw-4LF7sn-aMUgH-kYnjAn-4fW7Na-APBYHW-7Xeaet-4PmKHD-pBJr9b-jD6dxU-ftCzH-wyJy77-8onyBS-LFe3-g6R5D-eDfp9-bM6wjV-dPMKSb-a4QaiE-sWNz-8onz4u-765nbd-7jFL3A-4FYSux-ofj5-7WTzfa-6bPKZ3-3YexRZ-3sQdF7-3P9dX-Z8Aa-6iZJbX-4mjmTp-4iKxCW-4NVurD-j5qt9s-exc97-7qiPFh-9WRTHh">Erich Ferdinand</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>“Is it possible I could have steeled my purse against him?” the Romantic essayist Charles Lamb asked in 1822, writing about a man who sat each day by the road begging alms. “Give, and ask no questions.” Today, charities must answer plenty of questions before they can persuade an often wary public to untie their purse strings. </p>
<p>The charity sector as a whole is facing <a href="http://www.thirdsector.co.uk/editorial-why-listen-true-fair-foundation/communications/article/1386331">a wave of scrutiny</a>. A glance at some recent scandals suggests that the root of <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/the-problem-with-big-charity">this discontent</a> lies in a perception that the direct connection between the individual giver and the recipient has broken down; that the charity is not acting as we would if we were delivering the aid ourselves. On an almost daily basis, we read complaints that charities are <a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/2012/02/big-charity/">too large</a>, or spend too much on back-office costs, or use <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/09/charities-risk-goodwill-aggressive-fundraising-tactics-olive-cooke">aggressive fundraising techniques</a>, or have become distracted by political campaigning. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/117460/original/image-20160405-13526-hjloyi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/117460/original/image-20160405-13526-hjloyi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/117460/original/image-20160405-13526-hjloyi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/117460/original/image-20160405-13526-hjloyi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/117460/original/image-20160405-13526-hjloyi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/117460/original/image-20160405-13526-hjloyi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/117460/original/image-20160405-13526-hjloyi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Give, and ask no questions.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/enki22/8124223076/in/photolist-dnULtE-6C6JDz-xGxHod-7Np96H-9gUSsA-cxDXN1-6SK8TG-it8cd2-ckf1ZG-5VExff-tu3B2-j9ND4Z-cxDX7f-725SJg-ajBJaQ-5puZZy-fD5Nok-it8cXt-77JGn8-qboE6D-7zAVw7-41KSPz-bVtE-bLXbhr-4xLGFZ-6nWp7e-8BoSCZ-6t146s-8ABq5T-6PVKR-725SPT-7W8rFm-arUNnF-6g9xMm-6iWY9y-bxj9Gf-6PVK7-h7bcpT-8YbzeH-8zSPMy-njU25-azY4nY-8k9XFc-2h3L3g-7ThrLv-dKnqm5-4C3QbQ-6eYpDh-5xWCXP-6cc8SU">enki22/flikr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The government’s commitment to spend <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/mar/09/uk-passes-bill-law-aid-target-percentage-income">0.7% of GDP on international aid</a> rankles with many because taxpayers have no direct control over how the money is spent, or whether it should be spent at all. And <a href="https://theconversation.com/accounting-for-kids-company-why-charities-books-must-add-up-54140">the collapse of Kids Company</a> in 2015 sparked <a href="http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cmselect/cmpubadm/433/433.pdf">further questions and concerns</a> about how charities operate.</p>
<p>And yet the idea that charitable giving is something we weigh up in our own minds is a relatively recent invention. Traditionally, the church taught that it was good to give to charity for the benefit of one’s soul, no questions asked. It was only after the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, when traditional sources of authority began to fall away, that individuals had to make up their own minds about when to give to charity and why. The Romantic movement, which reflected a new focus on emotion and individualism, has a lot to teach us about the questions we tend to ask today when giving to charity and the reasons why we give to charity at all.</p>
<h2>Seeing and giving</h2>
<p>William Wordsworth, contemplating the ruins of Tintern Abbey (once a centre of monastic almsgiving) <a href="http://www.rc.umd.edu/sites/default/RCOldSite/www/rchs/reader/tabbey.html">wrote</a> that the “little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love” that make up the “best portion of a good man’s life” could be found in the natural world, now that religion could no longer provide all the answers. For him, nature could inspire moral goodness just as Tintern Abbey’s monks drew inspiration from daily prayer.</p>
<p>In another poem, <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww139.html">The Old Cumberland Beggar</a>, Wordsworth wrote that seeing the objects of charity kindles benevolence in us and throughout the whole community. The visible presence of poverty reminds us of the good we have done and what we have yet to do. </p>
<p>But what if our minds are in no fit state to reshape society in our own image, asked John Polidori <a href="http://study.com/academy/lesson/john-polidoris-the-vampyre-summary-analysis-quiz.html">in his lurid tale</a> The Vampyre? His bloodsucking villain Lord Ruthven (modelled on Byron) lavishes “rich charity” on the “profligate” and the “vicious” man in order “to sink him still deeper in his iniquity”, while the virtuous man who has suffered innocently is turned away “with hardly suppressed sneers”. Polidori’s nightmare philanthropist spends money on the worst possible causes, reminding us how individual caprices can skew charitable priorities.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/117468/original/image-20160405-13542-skmc1x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/117468/original/image-20160405-13542-skmc1x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=854&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/117468/original/image-20160405-13542-skmc1x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=854&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/117468/original/image-20160405-13542-skmc1x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=854&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/117468/original/image-20160405-13542-skmc1x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1074&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/117468/original/image-20160405-13542-skmc1x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1074&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/117468/original/image-20160405-13542-skmc1x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1074&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Charles Lamb.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/Charles_Lamb.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>Lamb’s essay, <a href="https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/lamb/charles/elia/book1.23.html">A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis</a>, tried to banish such egotism. He argued that begging was “the oldest and honourablest form of pauperis” and taught us not to value our own dignity too highly. The “all-sweeping besom [broom] of societarian reformation” is what happens when we think we know best, tidying away the emblems of poverty that act as “the standing morals, emblems, dial-mottos, the spital sermons, the books for children, the salutary checks and pauses to the high and rushing tide of greasy citizenry”. </p>
<p>For Lamb, the beggar was a defiant figure – “the only free man in the universe” – and it is better to be deceived by fraudsters than not to give to charity at all.</p>
<p>Romantic literature teaches us that many concerns about charities today, such as how effectively money is spent, are perpetual ones which, extreme cases aside, we should learn to accept. It reveals to us how important our feelings have become when we decide how to give to charity. But as Lamb wrote, we are not always in the best position to judge what needs to be done. If we had time to do everything ourselves there would be no need for charities at all. Sometimes it is better to step back, accept that running a charity isn’t easy and let good charities get on with the work on our behalf.</p>
<p>It also reminds us that charitable organisations are filling in for individual acts of charity that we cannot perform ourselves. By pointing out the power and pitfalls of imagination, the Romantics help us to navigate the complexities of the charitable encounter and to know when to step back and let a responsive and realistic charity sector carry out its work.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/55908/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrew Rudd does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Better to be deceived in your motivation than not to give to charity at all, or so the 18th-century Romantics would have it.Andrew Rudd, Lecturer in English, University of ExeterLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.