PJ Media

This is a very interesting and suggestive post. As an admirer of Romantic poetry and music; however, I must note that the left you describe has absorbed only SOME Romantic notions and really not it’s most valuable ones. I really can’t imagine Wordsworth supporting suicide bombings. The Romantics valued, according to Wordsworth, emotion “recollected in tranquility.” The Romantics never valued the kind of shallow emotions of the far left, but the thought and a deeper understanding that enabled man to hear “the still sad music of humanity”. Emotion led to a deeper compassion for humanity, but one based on reflection and judegement. While the Romantics reacted to some enlightenment ideas, they were also deeply rooted in the enlightenment. Unlike the Islamist lovers of today, they valued women’s rights and ideas we would associate with the sane left that is rapidly disappearing and not the far left. The British Romantics, while initially admiring of the French Revolution, were later horrified by it, especially Wordsworth and Coleride. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the monster who ravished Europe was born in Ingolstadt, the location her mother (Mary Wolstoncraft) had identified as the birth place of the French revolution. The Romantics, at least the British ones, were deeper and much more morally astute than today’s left.