Ozick on Romanticism

During our last class discussion of Shelley's advocacy of poetry, Professor Powers dropped Cynthia Ozick's name as a decidedly non-Romantic read. I'm beginning to realize how intrinsically influenced by the Romantics I am (we are), and I'm wondering how a different perspective sounds. So I decided to investigate.

For starters, I read her essay "A Youthful Intoxication." The following excerpt best explains the catalyst for her conversion, an argument of another literary thinker:

And reading on and on in a fever of introspection, I was beginning to undergo a curious transformation: not the spirit’s visionary turning, but one willed and chosen. I had become the Ancient Mariner — only in reverse. Gazing down at the water snakes writhing below, Coleridge’s mystical sailor is all at once seized by a burst of joyous sanctification: to his transfigured senses the repulsive creatures of the sea are now revealed as blessèd things of beauty. But I, pursuing passage after passage of Baeck’s reprise of the incantatory romantic — its transports and exultations, its voluptuously nurtured sorrows, its illusory beauty anchored in nothing but vapor — I came to see it all as loathsome, no different from those mindlessly coiling water snakes. What did it lead to? The self. What did it mean? Self-pride. What did it achieve? Self-delusion and delirium. That way lay Dionysus. I chose Rabbi Baeck.

Of this "Rabbi Baeck," she refers to Leo Baeck, author of Romantic Religion, and she describes him as "consumed, beyond the vastnesses of his own multifaceted tradition, by Greek and Christian thought." She explains that his book caused her to rethink her former emphasis on "mere mood" and instead focused "on humane conduct over the perils of the loosened imagination."

To me, Ozick convincingly argues for Romanticism's tendency toward narcissism. Perhaps that explains why Emerson occasionally annoys me. Poetic beauty and literary value seem subjective to Romantic thinkers, so subjective that - paradoxically - only the liberated few attain its "illusory beauty" and achieve its divinity.

Yet Shelley seemingly argues the opposite. Rather than tend toward the self, literature/poetry/art benefit the whole of society. He argues for poetry as moral informant, as societal foundation. Apparently selfless aspirations (duties?). How refreshing that he doesn't declare himself divine...well, then again he does claim that "the passions purely evil have never formed any portion of the popular imputations on the lives of poets."

Reading about the delicate, quasi-divine natures of poets exhausts me. Perhaps that's why I find Ozick refreshing, at least for today.

A parting thought. She concludes her transformation explanation with a caveat: It is not an essay to write stories by; stories crave the wilderness of untethered feeling.

So, does she essentially denounce non-Romanticism for the sake of writing? Does she adopt an illusory beauty anchored in nothing but vapor in order to produce valuable literature? Is this the only way to produce good literature? Does poetry - all literature - necessitate some degree of Romantic thought? Or does the adherence to this specific "valuable" qualifier only confirm our post-Romantic gauge?