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Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe

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Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe | Public Interface | Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe | Patriotic poetry and verse : Introductory survey essay

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Texts and stories Literature (poetry/verse) Europe (general) 1813 – Körner, Theodor: (Männer und Buben) 1805 – Scott, Walter (Sir): Breathes there the man Theodor Körner Byron, George Gordon (Lord) [Athens (GR) 1896] What is the German’s Fatherland? (Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?) 1813 Leerssen, Joep

The instrumentalization of poetry as a vehicle for the expression and propagation of national ideals intensifies sharply after 1800 – Walter Scott’s “Breathes there the man” becoming, as a result, a household text in the course of the century. Some causes for this are the development of simpler, more demotic verse-forms such as the Lied or the ballad; the Romantic idea that poetry was the finest expression of the nation’s character in the nation’s language; the equally Romantic idea that of all literary genres, lyrical poetry was the most emotional, inspired form of expression, capable of intuiting and expressing great, inspiring truths in immediately effective form; the new, Romantic self-image of the poet as a mantic, uniquely insightful personality; and the exemplary role pattern of individual poets whose “Romantic” character had special allure and charisma.

The rise (or rather: rediscovery and renaissance) of the ballad as a serious literary form dates back to the mid-18th century and is linked to antiquarian editions such as Percy’s Reliques of ancient poetry. The early Romantics use this antiquated and naive poetic form, outside the scope of approved classicist genres, in fresh verse – a habit introduced by the sentimentalist Sturm und Drang generation of Romantic poets in Germany, and in tandem with collections of folk ballads such as Herder’s Stimmen der Völker in Liedern. Goethe’s Heidenröslein (c.1770) is an example: based on a 17th-century prototype, it was turned by Goethe into a personal, lyrical reflection on the painful perplexities of love, then included by Herder as an oral folk ballad in his Volkslieder volume of 1779, and published by Goethe under his own name in 1789. It was set to music by Schubert in 1815, indicating a constant ambivalence between collective performativity and high-art canonicity.

Strengthened by Wordsworth’s insistence that poetry (especially the “Lyrical Ballads” which he and Coleridge launched in 1799-1800 as the premier genre of the new Romantic school of poetry) should employ “language really used by men” in order to express the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling”, the use of homely, vernacular diction and of the simple ballad-form gained literary respectability as an authentic, sincere literary form close to the collectivity of the people-at-large – the nation. In the years between 1800 and 1815 we accordingly see a great increase in ballad production that draws on national feeling.

National feeling recommended itself as a poetic subject since “love of the fatherland”, amor patriae, is a long-standing affect in European history, and its expression in poetic form antedates the onset of Romantic Nationalism; witness some of the speeches in Shakespeare’s Henry V, or Alain Chartier’s Quadrilogue invectif. The invocation of amor patriae as a lofty, virtuous emotion increased steeply in the second half of the 18th century, under the combined influence of the climate of Sentimentalism and Enlightenment Patriotism. It addressed a high-minded, even sublime virtue which was considered trans-partisan and almost as apolitical as other (less sublime) virtues such as marital fidelity or filial piety.

The climate of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars gave a fresh political edge to the poetic invocation of Patriotism. Love of the fatherland, from being a general civic virtue, now became the stalwart defence of one’s own nation against foreign oppressors; the poem England and Spain, or: Valour and patriotism (1808) by the young poet Felicia Hemans (1791–1835) is a case in point, celebrating the anti-Napoleonic allies and the campaign in which her brother was serving. At the same time, the Romantic climate also meant that poets began to thematize the vernacular diversity of Europe’s cultural geography; “national” in this sense could refer to the local colour specific to different countries, each as such appealing to poetic taste. Again, the work of Felicia Hemans, dating largely from the period 1810-35, is a good example. While some of it is English-patriotic, sometimes in militaristic and sometimes in sentimental terms, her work is equally preoccupied with evocations of the culture of her adopted fatherland of Wales, Walter-Scott-inspired scenes from Scottish history, Philhellenic celebrations of Greece, and with appreciative solidarity-poems about the admirable medieval and modern champions defending the national liberties of Switzerland, Spain, or Italy. If a common denominator is to be found here, it lies in the continuing application of Herderian thought (the celebration of national diversity) in the climate of the anti-Napoleonic wars and the post-Napoleonic Restoration, linking poetic feeling to the couleur locale of scenery and historical memories, and with the implication that proper Patriotism entails (against the Metternich system) the right to national self-determination.

The taste for national diversity and authenticity fed the success of Robert Burns in Scotland and inspired the Irish melodies of Thomas Moore. In Germany, poets like Arndt used the form of the Lied for anti-French propagandistic purposes, militaristic rather than lyrical. In all cases, the popular power of the  new genre was materially aided by the fact that many of them were set to music and became favourites in the repertoire  of domestic or convivial performance. Alongside sentimental balladry (Schubert’s Heidenröslein, Moore’s “Last rose of summer”) we also notice the rise of the political song, its great inspiring power demonstrated as early as 1792 by the prototypical Marseillaise. Its German counterpart is Arndt’s Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?. The posthumous poems by the 1813 war volunteer Theodor Körner, fallen in the Battle of Leipzig (himself subject of fan-poems by Felicia Hemans and many other later poets), became a model for nationalists inside and outside Germany, and, repeatedly set to music, were enshrined into the core songbook repertoire of student fraternities and choral societies. How familiar this corpus was can be seen from the climactic closing line of Goebbels’s proclamation of total war at the Berlin Sports Palace in 1943 (Nun Volk steh’ auf, und Sturm brich los! – “Arise, then, people, and break loose, O storm!”): it was a direct invocation of Körner’s “Männer und Buben”, much as soundbytes like “happy few” and “band of brothers” testify to the continuing resonance of Shakespeare’s Henry V. No less inspiring across Europe were the songs of Pierre Béranger, which in the Restoration climate of the decades after Waterloo kept a more populist nationalism alive in France. Most of Europe’s national anthems derive from ballads written by the successors of Arndt and Béranger in the various national movements of Europe – be it by state-endorsed establishment poets like Tollens in Holland or Oehlenschläger in Denmark; by persecuted or insurrectionary activists like the Hungarian Petőfi, the Pole Mickiewicz, the Bulgarian Hristo Botev, or the Ukrainian Ševčenko; or by an in-between category (e.g. Felicia Hemans in England, Thomas Davis in Ireland, Prešeren in Slovenian, Mácha, Kollár and Štúr in the Czech and Slovak lands, Almeida Garrett in Portugal, Verdaguer in Catalonia, Gezelle in Flanders, Wergeland in Norway, Runeberg in Finland, Lydia Koidula in Estonia). The topics of their verse could range from the overtly nationalistic, with a deliberate propagandistic intent, to more lyrical effusions, whose main nationalistic effect lay in their demonstration that the vernacular language could be used for serious, ambitious literary purposes; the Galician verse of Rosalía de Castro being a case in point.

Poets themselves adopted a Romantic self-image and became Romantic-Nationalist role models. Körner as a soldier-poet was celebrated as a martyr to the national cause both inside and outside Germany, but his type of role-model is in fact one of several templates. Three other “poetic stances” besides the soldier-hero-martyr poet (Petöfi, Botev) can be encountered, and may be linked to the role models of Byron, Wordsworth, and Scott respectively.

Byronism was one of the most pervasive and enduring repercussions of the Romantic movement for European (and indeed global) culture. It was inspired less by Byron’s actual poetry (which is often glibly satirical and if anything classicist in its orientation) than by his heroes and indeed his own self-dramatization. The Byronic hero (and Byron himself in his Byronic pose) is a solitary, morose, brooding character, virile but misanthropic, whose capacity of tender feeling has been scarred by bitter experiences. Haughtily averse to social niceties, he leads a wandering existence and stands apart from the crowd because his ideals are too lofty, his passions too intense, and his manners to rough-hewn to fit into modern conventions. Heroes like Manfred and Childe Harold are of this type, and Byron’s own restless, scandal-ridden wanderings were seen as expressions of this passionate, intriguing (“Romantic”) character. What appealed especially was that in his anti-bourgeois non-conformism, Byron felt more sympathy for the outlaws and warlords of harsher, non-civic societies, to an honour-and-shame ethos which was disappearing in the modernization process. Thus, Byronism glorified the lawless peripheries of Europe, from the Balkans to the Andalusia of Mérimée’s Carmen, and his poetry became the great beacon for a solidarity between the ethos of the cynically Romantic rebel-poet (emulated by the likes of Puškin, Heine, and Prešeren) and the emerging national cultures in Europe’s late-imperial borderlands with their klephts and hajduks. This function was hugely strengthened, of course, by Byron’s active Philhellenism and his death in Greece (1824) as a supporter of the anti-Ottoman insurrection there.

The Wordsworthian stance, itself reminiscent of the Goethe of the Heidenröslein, is that of the inspirational retreat into the idyll of the countryside and proximity to nature and to the artlessness of voice of the peasantry. This idyllic lyricism gives a voice to the rural peasantry and creates a conduit from spontaneous folk art into high literature. In national movements whose language was just emerging from the stigmatized register of mere peasant speech into the ambitions of a literate, public-sphere status, such poetry could be a nationalist inspiration (e.g. the Galician verse of Rosalía de Castro, or, in the Catalan language area, some verse by Verdaguer and Teodor Llorente).

One lyrical trope that is common to a number of Romantic poets from subaltern cultural communities is that of the lost beloved being transcended, not only into an inspiring muse-figure, but also into a personification of the yearned-for nation: thus with Baratažvili’s conflation of Princess Dadiani and his subjected Georgian homeland, in Jan Kollár’s Slavy Dcera, Brizeux’s Breton Marie, and (through the Kathleen Ní Houlihan trope) Yeats’s idolatry of the unattainable Maud Gonne.

Walter Scott brought the role model of the wandering minstrel voicing cultural memories into circulation, especially through his widely popular “Lay of the last minstrel”. It appeared in 1805, just when the cult of Ossian as a “bard” had died out, and provided an alternative Romantic model in its stead. It presents an emotional, incident-rich (“Romantic”) tale of olden days; the frame-setting, however, is that of an Ossianic  poet who has outlived the glories of his former days, but who can awaken old tales through his rapt inspiration and take his audience into the fictional world of long-vanished deeds and passions.  This, too, was a role-model, and the verse of Oehlenschäger or Tegnér, or the cult of “troubadours” and “bards” singing of the nation’s glorious, colourful past, cannot be understood without Scott’s post-Ossianic prototype. It also explains why the historical-narrative poem maintains great popularity alongside the new genre of the historical novel.

Thus the register of the Romantic poet is situated between the soldier and the outlaw (Körner and Byron), between the aristocratic past and the contemporary peasant (Scott and Wordsworth). In all cases, the poet enjoys a privileged status as the voice of his nation (or of his nation’s aspirations), and as having, through the power of his inspiration, an intuitive understanding of the transcendent principles informing contemporary affairs.

Word Count: 1954
1.1.2.6/a https://doi.org/10.5117/9789462981188/ngYF6o46kZvU5JlRRZHU6Fxi https://e-rn.ie/survey-15