The Promised Land Project: English Romanticism and the Rise of Individual Conciousness

Turning Vision into Action....at least hypothetically

Strike up the music of the band
We're blazing a trail for the promised land
Heaven on earth is within you.

Through the writing of stories, poetry, essays, and a novel, I’ve creatively contended with the consumer culture and the problem of the ideal in the modern era. This preoccupation in time would lead to a vision of cultural transformation and where I believe our democratic society needs to go to truly progress beyond the modern era. Conceding my limited credibility, this blog provides a synthesis of recognized visionaries, poets, and writers with the objective of making a credible argument. Ultimately, it is a certain feeling the project strives to inspire and sustain on a certain level, making more vital use of poetry and the arts; consequently whether one agrees or not is less important than whether one senses it and feels it over time.

Saturday, May 22, 2010

English Romanticism and the Rise of Individual Conciousness

As we continue to explore the foundations of modern poetry, we move into the realm of English Romanticism. Perhaps no poet personifies this movement more than the poet William Wordsworth. As Stephen Gill writes in his introduction to Wordsworth’s The Prelude:

The poem is a landmark in European literature because it records the coming into being of an individual consciousness at exactly the moment when European society was being tortured into extreme self-consciousness through the convulsion of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic war that followed.

The rise of individual consciousness in Europe would shape the modern mindset and appear prominently in Whitman's vision of American democracy as reflected in "Song of Myself."