John Astley, local author and facilitator of Exmouth community education column, writes for the Journal.

Many of us will be celebrating or regretting longingly, the feast day of St.Valentine today. The modern sensibility is to express our love for some person to enhance the romantic feelings we have, and even share, or at least hope to share. It is supposed to be romantically chivalrous, but I do not offer any further comment on that!

Lurking in the background of this social and cultural event is the Romantic Movement which, stemming from the late Eighteenth Century and at its peak in the mid to late Nineteenth, encapsulates many of our ideas and feelings about Romance and the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. Through all the arts, Romanticism has seeped into our lives and cultures with its emphasis on emotion and individualism, often characterising us ‘lone rangers’ fighting against the odds, ‘storm and stress’ to insist and act out being our true self!

But, and it is a big but, The Romantic Movement especially through poetry, literature, art and music, was also a critical response to the very being of the Industrial Revolution, its impact on the lives of all, for good and for ill; those ‘dark satanic mills’ of Blake’s poem ‘Jerusalem’, and Parry’s later music.

So, as a 3rd. Century Italian priest, what has St.V got to do with all this? Well, the story is that he married many people, often at short notice to keep the men from war service. Eventually he upset the church hierarchy and the Emperor, who had his head chopped off. Also according to the myths he did some occasional healing of people, which eventually usually goes down well with the church. There is also a story that Geoffrey Chaucer, England’s great Medieval chronicler, made most of this up in a late 14th. century poem?

What is clear of course is that along with many other myth based events in our calendar, the commercialisation of these culturally embedded festivals is enormous; there is no human activity that cannot be turned in to a money making opportunity!

Blake and other Romantic poets, Shelley, Byron and of course Burns; he of the ‘red red rose’, sought to highlight the struggle between seeking a radical answer to, or a blissful escape from the emotional furnace of the massive transformation of the Industrial Revolution and the triumph of capitalism, and the chartered company created. In Blake’s 1794 poem, ‘London’ he says;

I wander through each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe…

In every voice…The mind forg’d manacles I hear.

Wordsworth and our local boy Coleridge did a lot of rambling around the Quantock Hills in Somerset, enjoying the delights of nature and musing on life while writing the ‘Lyrical Ballads’.

Isaiah Berlin, a prominent 20th. century philosopher summed up the Romantic Movement as;

‘a new restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded …perpetual movement and change, and effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning…’

Of course this emphasises that The Movement was linked to a ‘rediscovery’ of nature, for example Goethe in Germany, and an era of revolutionary upheavals; USA (1776), France (1789) Chartism in the UK (1838/39) and the 1848 revolutions throughout Europe.

One other key feature of the Romantic Movement was a re-interest in all things Gothic; from literature to architecture, the latter led by the likes of John Ruskin in the mid nineteenth century and then William Morris, leading into Arts & Crafts movement.

Of course a lot of this remembered stuff was/is very man-ish, however there are some notable exceptions in for example the Bronte sisters and Mary Shelley, whose Gothic novel ‘’Frankenstein’ is still popular.

So, in all on St.V’s day, a lot of focus on emotion and feelings; What is the meaning of life?