Romanticism in the Age of World Wars: Introduction to the Forum

Brecht de Groote
Universiteit Gent

Ortwin de Graef
KU Leuven

Perhaps more than any other era in literary historiography, Romanticism

is defined by war; its pivotal dates anchored in key junctures of wars
then raging in the background. The commonly accepted system of dating
Romanticism thus alleges that the period properly started as new modes
of thought and expression took root following the French Revolution of
1789, developed through the ensuing seven Wars of the Coalitions from
1792, and began to peter out when the latter ended in 1815, to conclude
entirely around 1830. The Battle of Waterloo of June 18, 1815, serves
as a convenient turning point, typically taken to signpost the transition
from wartime to peacetime: it defined the nature of modern warfare in
an event of unprecedented and unrepeated proportions, involving some
“200,000 men . . . on a scrap of land barely four kilometers (2.5 miles)
square; never, either before or after, have such a great number of soldiers
been massed on so circumscribed a battlefield” (Barbero 311). A land-
mark moment in the history of modern war, Waterloo can also be read
as signaling the decline of Romanticism. From about 1815, Romantic
thought is seen to divide against itself; into a precursor phase of confi-
dent, self-possessed production, followed by a secondary wind-down pe-
riod marked by hesitant, self-deprecating reproduction (Nemoianu). This
oft-alleged deflation of Romanticism following the conclusion of hostili-
ties in 1815 holds a disquieting implication: war appears to be a neces-
sary condition for Romanticism to inhabit itself fully. As Samuel Taylor
Coleridge pointedly observes in his 1798 poem “Fears in Solitude,” Ro-
mantic poetry originates in war, which exercises the passions and the
imagination as it is brought home through a fast-expanding machinery
of periodical publication. On Coleridge’s reading, Romantic literature
operates an aesthetic ideology which converts violence and conflict into
bracing messages of sympathetic national unity, leaving behind the reali-
ties of war as a destabilizing if largely unobserved remainder:

Partial Answers 20/1: 55–64 © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press

56 Brecht de Groote and Ortwin de Graef

Boys and girls,

And women, that would groan to see a child
Pull off an insect’s leg, all read of war,
The best amusement for our morning-meal!
The poor wretch, who has learnt his only prayers
From curses, who knows scarcely words enough
To ask a blessing from his Heavenly Father,
Becomes a fluent phraseman, absolute
And technical in victories and deceit,
And all our dainty terms for fratricide;
Terms which we trundle smoothly o’er our tongues
Like mere abstractions, empty sounds to which
We join no feeling and attach no form! (Coleridge 6)
The reading of Romanticism through its interaction with war, here briefly
modelled by Coleridge in his “Fears” poem, has become an important
feature of the scholarship on the period. Still, claims like Betty T. Ben-
nett’s contention that war was “the single most important fact of British
life from 1793–1815” (ix) were long refuted or ignored. For much of the
field’s history, and especially in the 1970s and 1980s, the most influen-
tial critical accounts held that Romantic poetics orchestrated an extrica-
tion of writing from its historical and material conditions. As Jerome
McGann notes, a key Romantic ideology, reflexively copied by many a
critic, is that great poems “develop different sorts of artistic means . . .
to occlude and disguise their own involvement in a certain nexus of his-
torical relations,” so that history is present in a sublimated form (12).
Such constructed universality was hailed as a significant literary achieve-
ment, with the added boon of reflecting formalist and deconstructive in-
clinations; in critical terms, it was regarded as a collectivized attempt at
digesting the disappointment of the Revolution. The shift towards New
Historicism in the late 1980s and 1990s had a momentous impact in re-
angling the reading of history as it is enacted or ostensibly suppressed
by texts. The methodological and theoretical groundwork laid by Marjo-
rie Levinson and her co-authors (1989) and further developed by James
Chandler (1998) and others enabled a growing sense that poems such
as “Fears” testify to a deep imbrication in history that shaped even texts
apparently dissociated from their circumstances, and that history particu-
larly asserted itself through references to the wars that form the backdrop
to Romantic writing. Alan Liu’s seminal 1989 analysis of Wordsworth’s
grappling with the figure of Napoleon was a significant event in this re-
gard, spurring crucial work by, among others, Mary Favret (1994), Gil-
 Romanticism in the Age of World Wars 57

lian Russell (1995), Philip Shaw (2002), Simon Bainbridge (2003), and
Jeffrey Cox (2014).
If the early 19th century appears so invested in the meanings of war
as to spark a veritable subfield of Romanticist criticism, much may be
explained not by an effort to sublimate the Revolution, as was influen-
tially argued by such figures as M. H. Abrams (1973), but by an effort to
confront an entirely new model of war and the sociocultural and techno-
logical developments that underlay this new style in warfare. From the
French Revolution forward, war was to transform utterly, mirroring and
reinforcing a much broader cultural dynamic: in facing or evading war,
Romantic writers both touched on an experience that defined their lives
and found a concrete language through which to assess much deeper de-
velopments. No longer waged for territorial gain by a relatively small
number of combatants, at distances that greatly complicated sympathetic
involvement, war now came to signify an ideological titanomachy medi-
ated in the public sphere. Nothing short of the fate of the world was at
stake as Britain faced off against France in varying international coali-
tions: monarchy stood against republicanism, with each side levelling
accusations of tyranny and terror at the other. Wars came to be highly
mediated events in which a constant concern was to accelerate the spread
of news so as to ensure a greater emotional impact. Most importantly,
through its ideologization and mediatization, war came to involve the
whole nation, both as active and as imaginative participants: this totaliza-
tion of war coincided with its internationalization, pitting nations that un-
derstood themselves as nations against one another in conflicts that were
properly understood to be global both in their lists of belligerents and in
their stakes. In short, what is at question in the Romantic-era reinven-
tion of war is not simply the prodigious expansion of militaries, which
necessarily leads to an amplified public involvement, with the British
army for instance expanding from 40,000 in 1793 to 250,000 in 1813
(Bainbridge 2016), but the invention of a new paradigm for social orga-
nization and (inter)national action. Looking back on the Revolutionary
and Napoleonic Wars in 1833, in his On War Carl von Clausewitz noted
that the French innovation of the levée en masse, instituted to further and
defend a revolution in which every citizen was to have a stake, signified a
watershed in global history. “[S]uddenly war again became the business
of the people.” That is, “[t]he people became a participant in war; instead
of governments and armies as heretofore, the full weight of the nation
was thrown into the balance” (592). In this new construction of nation-
hood through war, moreover, literature was to play the part of a catalyst,
58 Brecht de Groote and Ortwin de Graef

mediating the experience of war to the citizenry to ensure an efficient

communication of the ideas and passions that were to undergird the na-
tion state: it is through literature that war properly became confirmative
and constitutive of a newly modelled society.
The true crux of any project on Romanticism and war is not so much
the extraordinary reinvention of wartime but its lasting effects upon the
peacetime that follows. Overhanging invocations of the event at Water-
loo is the question just how much of a break it signified: having reorga-
nized their societies and cultures around a supercharged nexus of war as
the definitive national experience, post-Waterloo states found it difficult
to return to previous models of peace. As a matter of historical fact, the
war had ended; as a matter of cultural fact, its resonances continued un-
abated; or, as von Clausewitz gnomically remarks with respect to the
French invention of a national world war, “[t]he effects of this innovation
did not become fully felt until the end of the revolutionary wars” (592).
It is this fraught relationship between war and peace that most animates
recent scholarship, which acts on Foucault’s 1976 reading of Clausewitz
and Jerome Christensen’s further elaboration of its implications (2000)
to investigate whether and how societies sought to extend and adapt the
structures of a wartime society and culture to conditions of relative peace.
In literary-historical terms, the understanding that the wars that mark
Romanticism have a much longer tail than their officialized terminus ad
quem throws new light on the putative collapse of Romanticism shortly
after Waterloo. A particularized species of Romanticism, based on sym-
pathies and passions that could be sourced to discrete events, may indeed
have withdrawn; what proceeds, however, is a generalized post-Roman-
ticism, which carries the structures of war into peace. Seemingly provoc-
atively anachronistic, the title of the special forum introduced here points
to a fundamental recognition of the nature of modern war and peace:
Romanticism, that is, may be argued to designate an age of universalized
world wars that commenced in 1789 and continues into the present.
If Romanticist criticism once focused on aesthetics, poetics, and sty-
listics, often decoupling each such focus from specific historical con-
cerns, it has increasingly moved to consider the precise ways in which
texts participate in history, bearing or suppressing its traces and perpetu-
ating or resisting its effects. By the same token, if Romantic studies once
focused particularly on the revolutionary decade and the pre-Waterloo
years, a significant portion of the work has now shifted to post-Waterloo
literature and the fraught transition from wartime to peacetime. As is
evident from the contributions to the present forum, Romantic writers
 Romanticism in the Age of World Wars 59

supply ample materials to conduct such studies, but before briefly in-
troducing these contributions it is worth recalling the prescient work of
James Montgomery, since his diagnosis of the spirit of the age accords
remarkably well with current criticism on Romanticism as it interacts
with war.
Now rarely read or studied, Montgomery (1771–1854) was a best-
selling hymnal poet and a reputable critic: in pursuing the latter occupa-
tion, he produced an assessment of the current state of Romanticism in a
lecture to the Royal Institution in 1837. Throughout his address, Mont-
gomery recurrently notes that Waterloo marked the end of Romanticism
(Ramsey 2017), even if he and his fellow writers were late to wake to
their own demise, as it took “till 1825” for “the tremendous visitation”
of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars to register fully (1837: 2). It
is with the benefit of a long digestion, then, that Waterloo emerges as a
point that marks the collapse of a shape of thought, whose most evident
outward sign is the implosion of the literary genre that most represents
Romanticism. The poets, Montgomery records, “have been one and all
of them, either wrecked on the rocks, foundered in the deeps, stranded
upon the shoals, or cast away on a lee-shore” (115). Poetry after the Ro-
mantic fashion can no longer be produced; indeed, the period is winding
down so precipitously that its poets have either died timely deaths or
fallen silent. As such, “Southey and Wordsworth, Coleridge, Campbell
and Moore, Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron; . . . minstrels of every de-
gree from these masters of the lyre down to Robert Bloomfield and John
Clare — of these we are compelled to say, that they are all now moulting
or dead” (3). Montgomery, then, subscribes to the broad historiographic
construction which Romanticist criticism employs to the present day,
recognizing the weight of 1815.
In nominating Waterloo as the precise juncture at which Romanti-
cism began to deflate, Montgomery seeks to assert the importance of war
in the construction of Romanticism. He highlights the strength of their
interaction by inverting the conventional directionality: the continued
failure of writers to produce a Romantic poem, he muses, may be a good
thing, in that it indicates a continuation of peace. Should poetry return
in, say, a hundred years’ time, it would spell the advent of another world
war, envisioned here in imagery eerily anticipating the trenchscapes of
the Great War:
It is difficult to imagine what will be the result of the present progress
of society, should peace be perpetuated to the end of the century; and, at
60 Brecht de Groote and Ortwin de Graef

whatever hazard of unpoetical changes which it threatens to produce, I

fervently pray that it may be so perpetuated; for if so, war may be antici-
pated as virtually extinguished forever among civilized nations, since such
mechanical and chemical means of annoyance and destruction . . . will by
that time have been brought to perfection, that it would be as great mad-
ness for two armies to meet, in the year 1915, on the field of Waterloo, to
decide again the fate of Europe, as it would be to set their battle-array on
opposite sides of the crater of Mount Etna, during an eruption, and rush to
the charge across the abyss that burns between. (115)
On one level, the death of poetry may be a good thing, in that it betokens
the end of war. In offering this remarkable reading, Montgomery acts
on a theory of wartime society which reposes on the interaction of peri-
odicals, poetry, and passions: “from 1795 to 1825, all the passions and
energies of the human mind” were “being kept in continual excitement”
through “the daily newspapers”; as a result, “the public mind, under such
extraordinary excitement . . . was prepared to be wrought upon” by “the
fascinations of poetry.” On a deeper level, however, a complication per-
turbs any straightforward schematization of the connections between war
and writing. Crucially, the “transition from war to peace, in 1815” was
not quite a “returning from romance to reality — from a state of passion-
ate and visionary existence to everyday life and common-place cares”
(2), in that the current peacetime in no wise resembles its previous ver-
sion. Wartime was global and total; peacetime, it appears, is to be shaped
by it, though through different cultural means, since “[t]he age of poetry
is gone; that of economists and calculators has succeeded” (1). After all,
“[t]he transition from such a war to such a peace left peace no alternative
but to revolutionize the state of society, in its turn, by arts and sciences,
as its predecessor had done by arms and violence” (115). Montgomery
does not pursue this perceptive suggestion, other than to imply that the
collapse of Romanticism may be a much more involved affair than it ap-
pears; not so much a death of poetry as the sublimation of the aesthetic
ideology which it organized into every aspect of post-war culture; a Ro-
manticism that continues throughout the age of world wars.

The five articles that compose the present forum stage a series of read-
ings at the intersection of Romanticism and war, demonstrating the pro-
ductivity of articulating the oft-assumed yet rarely asserted persistence
of Romanticism; the idea, that is, of a post-Romantic period which we
continue to inhabit. Each of the five authors initially presented their re-
marks at the Romanticism in the Age of World Wars conference, orga-
 Romanticism in the Age of World Wars 61

nized at the University of Leuven in November 2018, and worked these

into a sustained argument. Even more strikingly than in their conference
papers, in examining the fraught relationship between war and Romanti-
cism, the contributors uncover a wealth of reciprocally illuminating links
between past and present, between Romanticism then and Romanticism
now. The contributions show the continued importance of scholarship
that is historically informed while not historically overdetermined; much
broader in its compass of temporal and critical references than is typi-
cally attempted, yet not willfully anachronistic.
The articles are presented in a roughly chronological and thematic
sequence, each time bouncing Romanticism off its post-Romantic after-
lives and vice versa. Taken together, they weave a compelling intertex-
ture. Neil Ramsey opens the series by reading a novel by Scott (1816) via
Foucault (the 1970s); Anders Engberg-Pedersen examines an 1832 novel
by Balzac about 1817 France through Clausewitz (1832) and, again,
Foucault; Jan Mieszkowski tracks the permutations of revolution as an
organizing term in key texts by Burke (1790), Shelley (1819–1820),
and Arendt (1963); Laura Cernat re-interprets Woolf (1938) through
Coleridge (1808); and Frederik Van Dam explores Auden’s engagement
with the legacy of Romanticism (1938) in a critique of the abuses of
Romantic aesthetics.
In “The Liberal Paradigm of Security in Sir Walter Scott’s The Anti-
quary,” Ramsey offers a reading of Walter Scott’s historical novel in re-
lation to the thesis propounded by Foucault through Clausewitz that, just
as wartime is a continuation of peacetime politics by other means, mod-
ern peace likewise extends the structures of war. Ramsey demonstrates
that even if the arc of British history constructed through the three Wa-
verley novels may document the pacification of the British Isles through
the institution of a security apparatus that should safeguard Britain from
revolutionary France, it also contains a more unsettling theme. Britain’s
ostensible security is belied by a refraction of war into peace: the novel
reveals that a domestic invasion has been silently successful even as the
threat of revolution has been studiously avoided. Britain, that is, has been
invaded by its own military and the structures of thought which it em-
bodies.
Foucault looms large in any historicizing debate on the connections
between war and peace: Engberg-Pedersen’s “Is Society at War? Le Col-
onel Foucault” also takes up the question of a militarized civil order.
It shows how Balzac’s Le Colonel Chabert (1832), where the imagina-
tion of 1817 France is compressed in the astonishing return of its titular
62 Brecht de Groote and Ortwin de Graef

character from the Napoleonic battlefield to civic society, invites a close

investigation of Foucault’s thesis that war affects liberal and capitalist
structures of peace. Engberg-Pedersen asks whether warfare and wartime
really do offer sufficiently dependable schemas for understanding social
relations. The article critiques Foucault through Balzac, juxtaposing a
historical-philosophical analysis with the novel’s account of the inter-
action of social, legal, and military spheres, pointing to a considerable
instability in the notion of a warlike society.
The third article in the collection moves from the silent revolution
conducted as civil society is placed on a warlike footing, if only in the
philosophical discourse designed to comprehend it, to consider the mean-
ings of revolution as an organizing term. In “Shelley’s Wars, Burke’s
Revolutions,” Mieszkowski continues the study of the militarization of
civil experience by tracing how the Romantics understood the relation-
ship between war and revolution. The essay elucidates this aspect within
Romanticism and its legacy by examining the recalcitrance of “revolu-
tion” as an organizing term in Burke, Shelley, and such thinkers as Ar-
endt. In a series of close readings of the disorganization that ensues when
the idea of revolution enters an argument, the article suggests that the
word “revolution” enacts its meaning: writers cannot control its circula-
tion, ensure its legibility, or cordon off its perpetual expansion.
The final contributions focus on the links between Romanticism and
modernism, fully bringing the World Wars to the fore. Cernat’s “Equal
Outsiders: Woolf and Coleridge Thinking Community, Romance, and
Education in the Face of War” examines key works across Woolf’s oeu-
vre in light of their arresting and hitherto understudied references to
Coleridge. Pursuing an archaeology of Romantic concepts and phrases
across Woolf’s and Coleridge’s corpora, Cernat traces the threads that tie
Woolf’s attitudes towards war to her critical response to Romantic politi-
cal thought, especially as she endeavored to recover the societal ideals of
Romanticism for the feminist cause.
Van Dam provides the forum’s closing contribution. “From Error to
Terror: The Romantic Inheritance in W. H. Auden’s ‘In Time of War’” ex-
amines Auden’s famously challenging sonnet sequence. Van Dam dem-
onstrates how Auden’s involute style both reflects new experiences of
wartime and offers a stage for a detailed engagement with the inheritance
of Romantic aesthetics. “In Time of War” is shown to pursue a critique of
the deformation of Romantic aesthetics into global fascism, arguing that
much of the poem’s difficulty lies in its subversion of a warped Romantic
aesthetic ideology by arrestingly offering an exemplarity that rebuffs ide-
 Romanticism in the Age of World Wars 63

alization. This final article, then, once again takes up the links between
war and peace, demonstrating that Auden challenges readers to rethink
Romanticism in the age of world wars.

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