Big R Romantic Poetry

OR: Not that "roses are red" crap


The picturesque descriptions of nature and the feelings it evokes is a staple of Romantic poetry. I, however, think the most interesting aspect of Romanticism is it's knee-jerk reaction against the rational ideas of the Enlightenment. Although the principals involved with the Rationalist and the Romantic movements were all progressive thinkers who sought to question traditional institutions and values, the Rationalists did so through reason while the Romanticists did so through feeling. Therefore, when reading Romantic poetry I like to pick out the aspects where a Rationalist would take issue and examine those aspects of the poem.

To me, the part of "Floating Island" that epitomizes the Romantic reaction against the Rational is the opening stanza:

"Harmonious Powers with Nature work
On sky, earth, river, lake, and sea:
Sunshine and storm, whirlwind and breeze
All in one duteous task agree."



I love Google Image search ----->



The Rationalist thinkers of the period just before Romanticism (like Jock Locke, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson, etc.) were extremely good at categorizing. The very basis of rational thought is to break something down and analyze its separate parts. Dorothy Wordsworth's poem does the opposite here, calling Nature's powers "harmonious," and calling their work "one duteous task." I like this idea of the multiple aspects of Nature being fundamentally united, but rational thinkers would have likely liked more input on the interactions between the opposing and cooperating forces (if they would have bothered to analyze nature at all). While Wordsworth make it a point to name the different forces of nature, she emphasizes their unity above everything else. This is an important break from Rationalist thought, which would have been more preoccupied with interaction and conflict between forces.

I appreciate the Romanticists because they balance out all the categorizing and breaking down that the Rationalists do. I realize that it is important to break complex ideas and analyze them, but the Romanticists realized that there was a bigger picture that is sometimes just too big (or too small) to dissect. Romanticism focuses on the overall feelings that big, complicated ideas or simple, minute details can evoke in an individual and doesn't one over the other. It's a very intuitive way of looking at the world, and it helps people overcome "paralysis by analysis" that can occur when rationalization overly complicates something. Wordsworth's poem about the "little island" focuses on the effects nature has on the individual without breaking down why the forces do what they do. For instance, in the fifth stanza Wordsworth writes, "And thus through many seasons' space / This little Island may survive" (17-18). Romanticism focuses on the effect of complex and natural forces, rather than the impetus behind the effect.

C.B. Brown's "Dark Side" of Nature

OR: Take that as a Pink Floyd or Star Wars reference, whichever makes me seem less dorky to you

At the beginning of Chapter 20, Edgar Huntly, as a narrative, has come to a lull in the action. The narrator has just finished a flurry of battles with the Natives, and is trekking down a path seeking some semblance of white habitation. If there were any opportunity for C.B. Brown to insert picturesque description, this would be it; the breakneck pace of the previous chapters has slowed and the narrator’s situation is slightly less dire. However, the description of nature we see right off the bat is still lacking in detail, and Edgar Huntly continues to see nature as something to be overcome or passed through:

“I did not allow myself to meditate. The great object of my wishes was a dwelling where food and repose might be procured. […] The path was narrow, and on either side was trackless wilderness. On the right and left were waving lines of mountainous ridges which had no peculiarity enabling me to ascertain whether I had ever before seen them.” (Brown, 195)

This passage shows that nature is a hindrance more than anything. Huntly’s obsession with finding a way through the wilderness, rather than his admiration of the wilderness itself, doesn’t simply reflect his dire situation. In fact, his situation is much better than it was in previous chapters, and if ever there were a time for reflection this would be it. This passage in particular is exemplary of Brown’s ability to make nature a threat. By continuing Edgar Huntly’s frantic search for (white) civilization, Brown never shows the reader another side to nature.

However, in the frame of this narrative, I’m not sure that showing the reader the “Romantic” side of nature would be an effective descriptive device. By neglecting aspects of nature that inspire wonderment and beauty, Brown is heightening the terror and twisted psychology of his work. In order to narrow our focus, as readers, to the narrator’s inner workings, Brown effectively severs nature from its positives. Brown’s caricatures of the Native Americans in the work have the same effect, though to elaborate on how Native Americans are described in the novel would require a much longer and more complex blog post.

So while Brown’s descriptions of nature may have shortcomings, these shortcomings actually help enhance the feeling of frantic psychological terror which permeates the second half of the book. If Brown had given Edgar Huntly the desire to reflect on his natural surroundings and muse about the qualities of rural Pennsylvania’s landscape, we would have ended up with a work that doesn’t evoke the same emotional response Edgar Huntly does now. By manipulating his descriptions of nature so one-sidedly, C.B. Brown is able to more effectively invoke terror in his readers.

Blair Witch Project : Nirvana :: Friday the 13th : Poison

OR: Saw = Nickelback

Terror and horror are both terms that describe emotional responses to a situation, story, or visual. It’s difficult to describe these responses, let alone the difference between the two, but after a lot of deliberating, I think I figured out the best way for me to put it. To me, terror and horror both evoke the same response: my heart beats faster, I hold my breath, and I reveal my annoying habit of rapidly tapping my right foot like a crack addict. Where I distinguish terror from horror in movies and literature is by what my mind tells my eyes to do: in horror, my reaction is to look away or skip the paragraph. In terror, I can’t stop looking or reading.

The film that, at the time, terrified me the most was The Blair Witch Project. Particularly the end (sorry, embedding disabled):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMQQpmm5u3w

Watching it now is still a little crazy, but when I saw it the first time, as a sixteen-year-old, convinced it was real, I was shitting my pants. It was like Freddy and Jason and Chucky and the Ghoulies became Disney movies. This redefined scary. I like to compare Blair Witch to Nirvana where slasher films are like 80’s hair bands. It just made all the older stuff seem silly. And I couldn’t look away the entire time.

Of course, it later came out that everything was staged and the camera people were actors and completely ruined everything. Boo. But I still remember when I first saw it and have to give it props.

In movies like Friday the 13th and Saw, I just turn away from anything stomach turning. I don’t need to look to see what happens when a hatchet meets a face; there is no reason for me to see that. More to the point, I don’t even watch those kinds of movies any more. I have decided that if I want to see blood and guts, I want to root for whatever is doing the killing. I only watch “horror” movies that have a shark, dinosaur, predator, alien, or Rambo doing the dirty work.

The second movie that redefined terror for me was the video inside the movie the ring. I think you all remember this:




Holy jeez, right? I maintain (and have argued) that if you show a long version of this, maybe thirty or forty minutes, THAT would be the scariest film ever made. I love watching this thing. All that other stupid stuff with Naomi Watts and the girl in the well was filler.

And finally, to me the master of terror in literature is not Stephen King, but Cormac McCarthy. Here’s an excerpt from Blood Meridian:

That night they rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses' trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men. All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunder-heads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear. The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches
ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling dream.

By itself, this excerpt walks the fine line between beauty and terror, but in the framework of the novel, it is haunting and absolutely brilliant. Even as people are slaughtered mercilessly throughout the book, I keep turning the pages because of passages like this.

So I guess when I define horror and terror, I say that terror is horror with imagination and intrigue. I’ll write it out as a math equation:

Terror = (Horror+Imagination)(Intrigue)

I don't know why I went with the math equation and the analogies. I guess I've been studying for the GRE's too much lately.