A Call for Neo Romanticism
(Before it is too late.)
I have always been, at heart, a neo-Romantic, probably from childhood, even though I didn’t know it. Over time, British Romanticism became my specialty in grad school.
This week, as I was teaching a class of high school juniors and introducing the British Romantic period to them, it occurred to me how Romantic I actually am. More than that, I realized that we are currently living in time that parallels theirs; a time that begs for a new Romantic view in much the same way as it happened in the early 1800s in Britain. The need for Romanticism is arguably as strong as it was back then — or maybe stronger.
Much of the Romantic impulse was born of drastic changes in the paradigms of existence. Clocks were, because of railroads and factory schedules, starting to rule people’s days. Before this, sure, there were some clocks in town squares, but it didn’t matter much if the clock in Bath was five minutes faster than the one in London. When trains started to run, however, this all changed. Schedules needed to be met.
For the first time, also, people were working in factories, sometimes 12-14 hours per day, six days per week. It was no longer about waking when the sun rose to sow the seeds or bring in the crops and then falling asleep after dark. One now needed a watch or one would be late, get fired, and starve.
William Blake, in particular, with a hatred for factories so deep that lead him to famously call them the “Satanic mills,” particularly rebelled against this changing world in his work. Humans, he thought, should not be spending the majority of their lives doing repetative tasks for pennies. This was not what we were put on Earth for. Only we, as individuals, had the right to choose our purpose.
Following in his footsteps, Coleridge and Wordsworth said: cities are not heatlhy places for humans to dwell. We belong in Nature; we learn from it; we heal in its arms.
Other literary themes followed along in their poetry: freedom; the dignity of the common person; the search for self, etc. But it can be argued that all of this was triggered by the ugliness of the Industrial Age — both figuratively and literally, as the factory soot blackened white stone of the cities — and a kind of imprisonment of the soul created by the conditions of the era.
Now, in 2025, I find myself feeling much as Blake did. But it is not Satanic mills that disgust me in their enslavement of my fellow humans – it’s technology. Social media has changed the whole paradigm of existence. It beats us senseless with a never-ending flow of information, misinformation, distraction and manipulation.
Our daily world is becoming less tangible. We use devices that we touch but cannot really feel — pushing virtual bottons on our phones that don’t move but pretend to. We touch glass and a product arrives on our doorstep. We interact with digital versions of each other; we even have “friends” we have never been in a room with. Digital human connection flourishes, but we rarely feel the warmth of each other’s handshakes and too infrequently hear the sound of each other’s voices.
As the factories, and the shift in the nature of human commerce, had affected the world of William Blake, so the Internet and the smart phone has affected ours.
For me, the need to escape all of the artificiality is as strong as Coleridge’s need to take his newborn son out of the city. He tells his son, in “Frost at Midnight:”
...I was reared In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim, And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars. But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds, Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy God Utters, who from eternity doth teach Himself in all, and all things in himself. Great universal Teacher! he shall mould Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.
Coleridge’s son would escape the dark, dirty city that his father spent so much time trapped in during boarding school. Coleridge would do what he could to bring his son into the reality of Nature and, so, of sanity.
I want myself and my loved ones to escape, too. But we need to run from the “virtual” toward the real and tangible one – away from the complete absurdity of computers who write things for us; away from lighted screen and back to books of paper, leather and stiches; away from text chats and toward conversation in the company of friends; away from the virtual and back into what is actual: flesh and soil and wood and air. We may not need to climb the mountains of the Alps as Wordsworth did, but we certainly need to spend more time, barefooted, in our yards; less time on our phones and more touching trees and rocks and ice-cold streams.
We need Nature, again, the way the fields need water.
The world of electronic media is cloistering us from the human and the tangible and replacing flesh with pixels and, in doing so, is strangling empathy and immediacy.
So, we have this need for a new Romantic era. One in which we take back the idea that we deserve live unfettered by the constraints of a world we did not ask for.
The Romantics may have saved the collective sanity of Western culture by introducing the idea that Nature can heal us. Before they wrote for posterity, the idea of an escape from the everyday was not a common concept. If you have ever sighed on a beach or marveled at a sunset, you owe tht feeling — or, at least, the expression of that feeling — to them. Now, we need to take their wisdom and their rebellious idea that we deserve our freedom, both mentally and physically, and figure out, as I am trying to do, how to wriggle out of the spider web of virtual life. I’m not just talking about comfort and lifestyle…
…our mental health as a species may well depend on it.