Requiem

Stevenson was by conviction and by temperament a Neo-Romantic, or more precisely a Romantic 2.0. Although Stevenson’s immense success and his international reputation rested more on his novels than on his poetry, Stevenson’s verse, most notably collected in A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885), a best-selling volume marketed as a quaint, sentimental gathering of children’s poetry, reflected his place within a late-19th century literary movement that came to be known as Neo-Romanticism. Neo-Romanticism was something of an umbrella term applied to fin de millennium writers as well as to painters and composers to define the last of the old school Romantics, even as the volatile era of Modernism with its focus on radical experimentation with artistic forms was beginning.

By contrast to radical Modernism, the Neo-Romantics worked familiar forms into reassuring arguments, works that sought to inspire, delight, and engage. Indeed, the commercial success of the Neo-Romantics in writing, most notably Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), A. E. Housman (1859-1936), Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), and Nobelist Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), in many ways fueled the Modernists’ disdain for conventionality and for market success. With the death in 1850 of the towering figure of William Wordsworth, the daring and uncompromising architect of the Romantic spirit, at the age of 80, the new generation of poets convinced of the continuing viability of the Romantic revolution, among them Stevenson, strived to maintain that movement’s credo of embracing the tonic wonder of nature, relying on the excavation into the most extreme expressions of the emotional life of the poet, and supremely its faith in the visionary role of poets to explore the mysteries and wonders of their world and in turn to ignite their readers with the inspirational gospel of empowerment and spiritual animation.