The Romantic and Symbolist Sublime: A Review Essay

Abstract

The Romantic and Symbolist Sublime: A Review Essay Phillip M. Richards (bio) One rarely thinks of the Romantic and Symbolist convention of the sublime in relation to the formal structures of African American verse. The expansive imagery of infinitude associated with the genre of the sublime is a crucial element throughout American as well as in African American poetry following the first two decades of the twentieth century. If aesthetic appreciation is grounded in the creation of interest by contrasting distinctive elements amidst regularly arranged or conceived patterns, then the sublime becomes an important formal device in black poetry. Such interest emerges inevitably as all-inclusive gestures of transcendence emerge from ordered intellectual and formal patterns. The articulation of this aesthetic phenomenon thus understandably provides a means of assessing the most recent group of contemporary black, female poets. Their achievement in this regard is a mark of their technical development contrasted to that of their immediate predecessors as well as to the central figures in the tradition of African American literature as a whole. Such an assessment has become necessary, largely because of the contemporary absence of a critical perspective that weighs the literary powers of the plethora of black women poets now multiplying from the available opportunities for publication offered by small presses every year. Just as importantly, we are failing to perform the act of critical evaluation by which we winnow out from a growing mass of writing what we wish to transmit from generation to generation in our classrooms, scholarship, literary journalism, and anthologies—which traditionally have figured in the selective assessment of African American literary tradition from generation to generation. These literary historical and evaluative discussions demand a formalist consideration of how the romantic and symbolist sublime has been deployed by the most recent crop of African American women poets to whom I refer above. In examining their use of the dominant conventions of Romanticism and Symbolism we see their connection not only with African American poetic discourse but also Anglo-European literary traditions—a continuity with distant roots in the highly metaphorical languages of early American culture, but also grounded in the literary transcendentalist writers: Emerson, Whitman, and Emily Dickinson—a group which in turn looks back to Romanticism as it developed in English and German poetry. From the second decade of the twentieth century, important black poets such as Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown assimilated black folk tradition into a literary language, which might carry the weight of essentially philosophical themes despite the fact that they often denied their engagement in the abstract reflection that these formulations demanded. At the heart of this philosophical tradition was their representation of the black folk’s angst [End Page 186] before an existential situation characterized by either infinite joy or infinite hope. This reflection upon the meaning of human existence in a rigorously secular culture rejecting the existence of a divine supernatural entity underlies a central project of Romanticism, Post-Romanticism, and Modernism. The search for transcendent meaning in these philosophical cultures has led many thinkers to rearticulate religious discourse in secularized social, psychological, and intellectual terms. These attempts to create ultimate meanings absent the sacred appear vividly in what Thomas Carlyle called “natural supernaturalism” and more recently in Lionel Trilling’s concept of the “secularization of the spirit.” Clearly, some of the most significant black writers have had a particular purchase upon this problem of African American life in modernity. The psychological and social traumas of the formation of the Northern ghetto and the Jim Crow South characteristically faced black writers with the task of shaping the language of black folk into a response to modernity’s crisis of a radically secular absurd and meaningless existence. And these writers did so through the conventions of the sublime in which they portrayed black folk confronting these abysses of meaning with the assertion of an infinitely expansive joy. Or these writers depicted the psychological condition of the folk facing the abyss in another form: the depiction of the feelings generated by a contracted spiritual emptiness. These feelings of despair might also emerge from a confrontation with another infinitude: a total loss often embodied in separation from significant others...