Page 115 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

114 How to write critical essays
What a seventeenth-century love-poet thought reasonable as
a definition of a human relationship might strike an eighteenth-
century essayist as insane in its perversely impassioned
hyperbole. Moreover intelligently deviant texts may challenge
even those definitions of acceptably rational behaviour which
their own contemporary societies favour. A list of authors who
have been diagnosed as dotty by contemporary reviewers might
constitute, in the mind of a radical critic, a roll of honour.
Madness is arguably one of those redefined topics whose
growing prominence in writings of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries constitutes a phenomenon called
Romanticism. This involves another set of terms that you must
use with care. Much Romantic poetry is explicitly opposed to
those values which ‘romantic’ in ordinary modern usage evokes.
Shelley’s ‘Epipsychidion’, for instance, describes the convention
of monogamous marriage in terms which Barbara Cartland’s
readers could hardly approve:

I never was attached to that great sect
Whose doctrine is that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion, though it is in the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go. (ll. 150–60)
When E.M.Forster quoted from these lines in the title of The
Longest Journey, he was announcing a novel whose view of
human relationships could be described as ‘soberly unromantic’.
Yet the lines do adopt a convention-defying stance which some
literary historians would call characteristically Romantic. Get
such discriminations clear and be sure which kind of
romanticism you wish to suggest before using the term. When
you do use it, design a context which will allow your reader to
know precisely what you mean.
Even if you determinedly use ‘Romantic’ in the literary, as
opposed to popular, sense, there are still distinctions to be
drawn. Do you wish to make a reference to English or, more