Ashleigh Kennedy--Gary Snyder response #2

Sacred Nature in Romanticism

Generally, when thinking about the Romantic Movement a revolt against the aristocratic form of social and political customs comes to mind. The radical movements of Mozart, Beethoven, Edgar Allan Poe, and J.M.W. Turner are just a few to mention in relation to the change in tradition. However, romanticism also focuses on the untamed nature and its picturesque qualities. Snyder (1990, p. 86) writes, “The idea that the “wild” might also be “sacred” returned to the Occident only with the Romantic Movement. This nineteenth-century rediscovery of wild nature is a complex European phenomenon—a reaction against formalistic rationalism and enlightened despotism that invoked feeling, instinct, new nationalisms, and a sentimentalized folk culture.” However, pre-agricultural people also deemed certain areas of the wild to be sacred and gave them special care. So, it was between the time of the early agrarian civilizations and the time of the Romantic Movement that the wild was considered bad and ineffective and was destroyed. Sacred groves, forest shrines, natural places of worship in the wild were “weeded-out”, and the connection between land and religion was ignored in order to form a more functional use of the land. This has become a similar pattern in recent centuries as the wild has been unprotected and used to establish and build our country upon. Forests, for example, are constantly being hacked down and replaced with neighborhoods, and rivers are polluted as waste materials sweep downstream. The sacred importance of land has been thrown to the side and it is at the point where it is almost becoming too late to save what we have left. Attempts at preserving the wild has been shown through the establishment of national parks. The parks have the ability to bring peace and solace for those who tred upon them, which shows the exact importance of the wild that the Romanticists felt.