Anti-intellectualism as romantic discourse

Daedalus, Spring 2009 by Ratner-Rosenhagen, Jennifer

Than is our continent's, the old.

You have no ruined castles' rot

Nor marbles cold.

Nor is your inner peace affected

In your present active life

By useless thought which recollected

Lead to useless strife.7

From across the Atlantic, Goethe imagined a world that promised not the absence of intellect, but rather an "inner" life returned to its right state : innocent, sloughed free of encrusted traditions, and liberated to know itself and the universe in terms of its own making.

Countering Goethe's vision of American imaginative freedom and innocence was the stronger romantic current that viewed American intellectual and cultural life as torpid, formless, and crude. Some of the most potent denunciations of American cultural apostasy came from the Austrian romantic poet, Nikolaus Lenau. Unlike most romantics, who formed their strong views of American intellect having never stepped foot on the continent, Lenau made the transatlantic voyage for a six-month stay in northwestern Pennsylvania from 1832 1833. He came steeped in the romantic longing for America shared by many German-speaking liberals of his generation, who envisioned it as paradise of untamed nature and untrammeled liberties - the poet's natural environment.

Almost immediately upon arrival, however, Lenau's exalted image of America began to collapse. Expecting a sublime landscape, he discovered a dreary, monotonous, and cold country gripped by winter. After just eight days in America, Lenau concluded that such an uninspiring environment could not create a nation of poets, only a people who lacked an eye for beauty and ear for song:

The American has no wine, no nightingale. . . . [T] hese Americans are incredibly loathsome, small merchant souls. Dead, stone-dead to the life of the mind are they. ... I think it seriously and extremely significant that America has no nightingale. It seems to me like a poetic curse. A Niagara voice is necessary to teach these scoundrels that there are higher gods than those that are struck off the mint.

His firsthand accounts, excessively stylized and hastily spun as they may be, present America as intellectually desolate and culturally grotesque, a study in debased imagination and stunted intellect "in all [its] frightful banality."8

Lenau's frightful Americans had no nightingales flying above, but, making matters worse, they had no firm ground below. Using metaphors from nature "roots," "soil," and "earth" - Lenau employed a romantic vocabulary to question the very grounds, or foundations, of American cultural and intellectual life. His objections were quite literal : American soil failed to nourish a vibrant cultural ecosystem at its roots. Whatever traces of culture existed "have in no sense come up organically from within," he wrote. American culture was "groundless" [bodenlos], for its people lacked the shared historical, moral, and spiritual foundations vital for collective imagination. Without roots in collective memory and tribal affections knitting the people to each other and to a homeland, he insisted that America was not a nation so much as a contractual arrangement: "That which we call fatherland is in America nothing more than security for one's assets. The American knows nothing, seeks nothing but money, he has no ideas consequently the state is not a moral and intellectual . . . Fatherland, but merely a material convention." Americans' single-minded pursuit of the here and now made Lenau thankful for the "Atlantic ocean" for providing an "isolating belt" protecting "the spirit and all higher life" back home from the deadening anti-intellectualism of America, "the true sunset land" - or, "mankind's far west."9