Romanticism Archives - Bob on Books

Cover image of "The Last Romantic" by Jeffrey W. Barbeau

The Last Romantic (Hansen Lectureship Series), Jeffrey W. Barbeau with contributions from Sarah Borden, Matthew Lundin, and Keith L. Johnson. IVP Academic (ISBN: 9781514010518) 2025.

Summary: The influence of Romanticism on C.S. Lewis in terms of imagination, subjectivity, memory and identity, and the sacraments.

As a young Christian, the logical arguments of Mere Christianity were helpful in confirming me in my own Christian conviction. They also served as a source of “reasons to believe” that i could share with my friends. So I went on to read other works by Lewis including the Chronicles of Narnia and the Space Trilogy. These works captured my imagination and evoked both fear and love for the Lion who was on the move. Then I read Surprised by Joy, and how joy served as a signpost for Lewis in his journey to faith.

Jeffrey W. Barbeau helps me understand the subjective experience and Christian imagination I found in Lewis and its connection to the objective, logical arguments Lewis made for the Christian faith. What Barbeau develops in this book, a transcript of three Hansen Lectures, is the influence of nineteenth century Romantics on the thought of C.S. Lewis. He begins, though, with a debate during 1967 at his own institution, Wheaton College. Was Lewis’s thought infused with “the Romantic heresy”? The principles were Clyde Kilby, who obtained Lewis’s papers for Wheaton and introduced many in this country to Lewis, and Morris Inch, who took Lewis’s subjectivity to task.

Studying the marginalia in Lewis’s books, Barbeau traces interaction with Schleiermacher, Hegel, Marx, and Kant. He also shows the profound influence of Wordsworth, and especially Coleridge upon Lewis. While Lewis recognized that subjectivity could mislead, it could also evoke and mirror objective reality and point toward it. He shows how often in Lewis’s work, he begins with the personal to point toward the general, objective truth.

In the second lecture, Barbeau turns to what he calls “the anxiety of memory.” He observes that Lewis, in Surprised by Joy and A Grief Observed, draws on nineteenth century spiritual biography. He parallel’s Lewis to Sarah Eliza Congdon or Elmira, New York and the Journal she kept of her spiritual journey. Lewis didn’t know of Congdon but possessed a copy of John Wesley’s Journal. Again, for Lewis, Wordsworth and Coleridge released him from concerns about the “suffocatingly subjective” character of his own experience. Rather, Coleridge’s ability to connect spiritual intuition with objective theological truth was critical in the lead-up to Lewis’s conversion.

Finally, the third lecture focuses on how Romanticism influenced Lewis use of symbol. He unpacks Lewis’s view of nature, imagination, and of experiences of God. Barbeau shows how Lewis differed with figures like Nietzsche and Emerson, distinguishing nature’s power from nature worship. It is actually in the commonplaces of food and drink, and with our neighbors that we may most deeply encounter God, as in the bread and cup of the sacrament.

A distinctive contribution of Barbeau’s scholarship is his study not only of Lewis’s works but of his library. Lewis’s marginalia points to what he was thinking as he read philosophy, theology, and the works of the Romantics. Not only that, Barbeau retrieves Romanticism from the dustbin of evangelical thought as he elucidates the influence of figures like Coleridge on Lewis. It turns out the personal, the subjective, and the imagination may well point us to objective truth. Both cannot help but be inextricably involved in the Christian journey.

____________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Heinrich Heine (Everyman’s Poetry #28), Heinrich Heine (Translated and edited by T. J. Reed and David Cram: London: Everyman/J. M. Dent, 1997.

Summary: A collection of translated poems of Heinrich Heine.

Heinrich Heine composed poetry during the height of the romantic period. Some of his early lyric poetry was set to music by Schubert and Schumann. His later poetry reflects a certain cynicism toward romanticism. For example, the opening poem in this collection, Prologue, begins with him “walking into a fairy wood” and concludes with a statue of The Sphinx coming ravenously to life: “her kisses drove me wild/Her claws dug in again.”

A favored theme is one of beautiful, romantic beginnings with sad or grievous endings, typified in the poem “Sweet-bitter,” beginning with loving embraces under the lindens (lindens are everywhere in Heine) only to end with “the coldest curtsey” and frosty goodbyes. There are poems that draw on mythology, such as The Lorelei, of a beautiful blonde siren atop a rocky outcropping, who distracts shipman who crash upon the rocks. He also has a poem on the Tannhauser legend.

Some of his poetry is political. Heine supported revolutionary movements and fled Germany to Paris in 1831, resenting the censorship of his works. By 1835, his work was banned in Germany. His Germany: A Winter’s Tale is a barbed commentary on its pretensions. In No Need to Worry he observes:

We call them 'fathers', it's 'fatherland'.
Which makes it easy to understand
Why it all belongs to them, and we
Have sausage and sauerkraut for tea.

In October 1849 marks the failed revolutions of 1848. He laments:

This time the Austrian Ox has made
An ally even of the Bear.
Take comfort, Magyar, though you fall --
We have a far worse badge of shame to wear.

During the last eight years of his life, Heine was paralyzed and confined to bed. His poems are increasingly dominated by reflections on his own mortality. Double Vision is an encounter with an doppelganger, one healthy, one sickly that ends with the healthy one pummeling the sick one only to find he was pummeling himself. You may recognize Morphine and its concluding, Job-like lines:

To sleep is good, and death is better, but
Far better still never to have been born.

Heine captures the reality of life as bittersweet. Our loftiest aims will often end disappointed. Life is a tragicomedy for Heine and many of his poems are satires on the romantics with a grotesque or bitter twist. This translation seems to capture the almost “tongue-in-cheek” ironic character of Heine’s poetry. It is accessible, easy to read, even as one ponders the ironic twists. This work, if you can find it, is a wonderful introduction to this unusual poet.