The Portable Romantic Reader

by Howard E. Hugo (Editor)

Book by

Genres: Anthologies

621 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1957

Reviews

[Julio The Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Classicism is health. Romanticism is sickness". Goethe. But, Mein Herr, you were a Romantic yourself once, and SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER is still the Bible of Romanticism for many youths. As this quote suggests, there is no consensus on the definition of Romanticism or who is included in the canon. Yet, the selections in this enchanting anthology suggest we can start with the heroes of the Nineteenth century and move outward. Napoleon was the emperor of Romanticism, and not just in the political sense, and Byron its scribe. In search of a definition and common theme, we do best to contemplate Byron trying to be Napoleon, who is featured in a whole section of praise from the young Beethoven, and damnation, from Mme. De Stael; no morality outside of the will-to-power, or the hero is a monster; hypermasculinity, Byron's "Don Juan" and "Childe Harold" are offered here in extensive selections, while only Mary Shelley counts as a female Romantic; political engagement, Napoleon over Europe, Byron in the House of Lords and on the battlefields of Greece. Death is a constant companion to the Romantic. Shelley, Keats and Byron himself, all magnificent poets and respectively, dead by drowning, consumption and disease, albeit it at war. Hats off to the editor for including the American transcendentalists and nature worshipers, Fenimore Cooper, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, as cross-Atlantic Romantics. Above all, Romanticism is a matter of style. Byron said it best: "The two most important men of the century are Bonaparte and Beau Brummel".

[Mohamad Fattal · Rating 1 out of 5]

hugo collects wordsworth, coleridge, byron, shelley, keats.. binds them in one portable grave.. calls it “romantic”.. i call it the will turned hysterical.. men who looked at a mountain and thought it loved them back.. who heard the wind and believed it was their soul speaking..

what is here: egos dressed as daffodils.. every poet howling “i feel” as if feeling were an argument.. they worship nature because they cannot endure reality.. they chase the sublime because the ordinary exposes them.. sublime is just a word for cowards who refuse to look at the void..

the rot: hugo thinks he’s preserving genius.. he is pickling disease.. these pages are the symptom of the will refusing to admit it is miserable.. so it invents moonlight, ruins, gothic nightmares.. it calls despair “melancholy” and puts a laurel on it.. pathetic..

byron pretends to be lucifer.. he is only a child throwing a tantrum at god.. shelley drowns chasing his own rhetoric.. keats coughs to death while kissing an idea.. wordsworth walks forever and arrives nowhere.. this is not art.. this is the will masturbating in iambic pentameter..

you close the book and you are sicker than before.. because you have been told that suffering is beautiful.. i tell you suffering is only suffering.. the romantics put perfume on the corpse.. i prefer to bury it..

one star.. for paper and glue.. the rest i consign to the fire.. because the only thing portable here is delusion..