Reading about Allman’s life is like reading about the life of an English Romantic poet. And maybe that’s what he was.1—Rolling Stone, “Correspondence,” August 10, 2017
When one of my undergraduate professors at Rollins College, Dr. Roy Starling, introduced his class to British Romanticism, he did so by describing what it was like for listeners when Bob Dylan plugged in his guitar at the 1965 Newport festival: electrifying, frightening, and transgressive. He didn’t mean to say at the time that Dylan was a Romantic poet, but that Wordsworth was a rock star. He suggested that Wordsworth’s poetry in the 1790s had an effect similar to rock in the 1950s and 1960s and then over and over again in subsequent decades. This comparison undoubtedly came readily to mind because the influence of the English Romantics upon rock, especially since the 1960s, is both pervasive and well known, with William Blake being the most important Romantic poet for the rock and roll generation. Musicians such as Bob Dylan , the Fugs , and the Doors referred to his poetry in the 1960s, Emerson, Lake & Palmer in the 1970s, Daniel Amos in the 1980s, Patti Smith in the 1990s, the Martha Redbone Roots Project in 2012, U2’s Songs of Innocence in 2014, and U2 again in Songs of Experience, released in 2018. Substantial work is devoted simply to cataloging Blake in music.2 This musical interest in Blake is unsurprising, for Blake first sang his poems at informal social gatherings, drawing the attention of musical scholars of his day who notated his original tunes.3 But Wordsworth and Coleridge make their appearances on rock albums as well, Coleridge most famously in Iron Maiden’s 1984 adaptation of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Since Bob Dylan’s reception of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016 seems to have placed beyond question rock’s literary potential, this anthology seeks not only to demonstrate the influence of Romantic literature on rock, which is already the subject of much attention, but to argue that rock itself is a late-twentieth-century expression of Romanticism—an extension, continuation, partner, or doppelgänger of this eighteenth- and nineteenth-century phenomenon.
Theorizing Rock as Romanticism by Historicizing Romanticism
What is Romanticism? And what do I mean by calling rock a modern expression of Romanticism? When Mary Wollstonecraft used the phrase “romantic notions of honour” to describe one of two ways of motivating soldiers (the other being discipline and command) in her 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, few readers would have been confused by her use of the term “romantic” to refer to the values, traditions, or aesthetic of medieval romance . Not long after, Byron would similarly use the word “romantic” to describe erotic relationships, medieval romances, and contemporary works or even scenery that reminded him of a medieval aesthetic . But in his 1820 response to an essay about Manfred that Goethe published earlier that year, Byron registers a use of the term “Romantic” new to him, especially in relationship to English literature: “I perceive that in Germany, as well as in Italy, there is a great struggle about what they call ‘Classical’ and ‘Romantic’,—terms which were not subjects of classification in England, at least when I left it four or five years ago.”4 Byron dislikes this new use of the term “Romantic,” especially when set in opposition to “Classical” authors whom Byron assumes to be Pope and Swift . So while he has no problem with the word “Romantic” being used to describe a medieval aesthetic or a structure of feeling, he objects to its use in a classification system for literature.
Despite Byron’s distaste, the term “Romantic” as part of a classification system of European literature and art continued throughout the nineteenth century though attempts to coherently define the term failed repeatedly. Ongoing concern about the meaning of the term “Romantic” manifested itself during the early twentieth century in an argument between Irving Babbitt and A.O. Lovejoy. This argument was initiated by Lovejoy’s negative review of Babbitt’s Rousseau and Romanticism (1919) published in the May 1920 issue of Modern Language Notes that eventually led to Lovejoy’s now famous PMLA essay “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms” (1924). Lovejoy’s opening remarks observe that his own article is being published one hundred years after “M.M. Dupuis and Cotonet … began an enterprise which was to cause them, as is recorded, ‘twelve years of suffering,’ and to end in disillusionment—the enterprise of discovering what Romanticism is, by collecting definitions and characterizations of it given by eminent authorities.”5 Summarizing uses of the term “Romantic” since then, Lovejoy arrives at the oft-quoted conclusion that the “word ‘romantic’ has come to mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing. It has ceased to perform the function of a verbal sign.”6 As of the time of this writing we are approaching the one-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Lovejoy’s essay, and it remains the most compelling and definitive statement of the problem: what exactly does the word “Romanticism” mean?
His challenge to make the word “Romanticism” a meaningful term in a classification system is twofold: first, to acknowledge the diversity of phenomena that fall under the umbrella of the word “Romanticism,” and next, to make that umbrella a conceptually coherent entity, because once we acknowledge a variety of Romanticisms we imply the existence of a single entity that exists in a plurality of forms. A number of twentieth-century scholars attempted to meet Lovejoy’s challenge, including René Welleck in 1949 and then Morse Peckham in 1951, who argued that Lovejoy met his own challenge in the concluding chapters of The Great Chain of Being (1936). Romanticism is organicism in Peckham’s opinion, a single construct expressed in “positive” and “negative” modes that comfortably house the constellation of attributes typically associated with Romanticism.7 None of these definitions have been convincing enough to stick, however. By 1993, in his introduction to the Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism Stuart Curran would acknowledge Lovejoy’s contributions and then affirm that due to the increasing sophistication of modes of historical and philosophical inquiry, “the problem of contemporary definition has been exacerbated—or perhaps rendered obsolete,” along with the need to identify a single entity behind the plural form “Romanticisms.”8 By that time, however, Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy published “Figures of Romantic Anti-Capitalism” (1984) in New German Critique, which was subsequently republished in G.A. Rosso’s and Daniel P. Watkins’s Spirits of Fire: English Romantic Writers and Contemporary Historical Methods (1990). It appeared in that anthology alongside a number of essays applying Sayre’s and Löwy’s thesis, Michael Ferber’s thorough critique of it, and their response to Ferber . Their work was later revised and expanded to book length in Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity (2001).
Both their essay and book credit Lovejoy for his statement of the problem and then take as their starting point a definition of Romanticism derived from Lukács . Romanticism is “a critique of modernity, that is, of modern capitalist civilization, in the name of v...