I Come in Self-Annihilation

Tiresome quarrels beckon about what the word “Romanticism” even means, whether Romantics were progressives or reactionaries, whether Romantics ended or extended the Enlightenment, whether “Romantic” names a distinct movement in the arts beginning in Germany in the 1770s and ending in the U.S. in the 1860s or is rather a phase of western (and eventually global) bourgeois civilization we have not yet outgrown. For the sake of argument, then, let us stipulate that the “Romantic” is less a single discernible thing than it is a perennial temperament, one that grows more or less salient in various historical conditions, and let us think through some of this temperament’s pleasures and dangers.