Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish — reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!

Last week, I reviewed the illustrated travel journal A Fine Romance by Susan Branch.

The Romantic Revolution, a BBC documentary, currently streaming on BritBox, tells the stories of the European painters, poets, and composers who fought against the primacy of reason (Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution) by elevating the imagination (Romantic Movement).

I realized that I was only taught the romantic parts of the Romantic Movement — not the revolutionary parts. I studied poems about Grecian urns, daffodils, and albatrosses. I didn’t learn about William Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, or The Raft of the Medusa.

The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault

The documentary frequently talked about how the culture of the 1960s and 1970s drew from the concepts of the Romantic Movement. I’m seeing similar themes today.

The Romantic Revolution feels relevant to the activism of today, from Black Lives Matter to anti-ICE protests to the way that Missourians just voted, by a wide margin, against two ballot proposals championed by our conservative governor and a host of dark money organizations. We’re following the Romantic ideal that power belongs to the people.

When we hear the advice “touch grass,” we’re hearing the Romantics warn that humanity needs the nurture of nature. YouTube is filled with videos of advice about how to fight the urge to scroll by engaging in creative activities, like the Romantics pursued.

This video talks about what modern workers, worried about AI, can learn from the people who lost their ways of life and work to computers in the 20th century, echoing the realities of the Industrial Revolution:

Michael Pollan’s recent books explore the uses of drugs, harping back to the 1960s and 70s. Both Pollan and the hippie drug use owe something to the experiments with opium that led Samuel Taylor Coleridge to write “Kubla Khan” and Thomas de Quincey to write Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Personally, I think I will stick to touching grass, keeping an illustrated journal, and engaging in activism as ways to express the Romantic Revolution in the current age.

There are downsides to the romantic mindset, like a zeal for cultural preservation that can be warped into xenophobic nationalism. There are downsides to the enlightenment mindset, too, like a tendency to run roughshod over culture in pursuit of a mechanistic efficiency that strives to make society run like a machine.

There seems to be a way of reading history as a pendulum swinging between two extremes. I suspect, like most swinging pendulums, that we might find the most peaceful place at the point of balance. Maybe balance looks like appreciating culture — both our own and everyone else’s. Maybe balance looks like realizing that reason and imagination are not mutually exclusive states of being — some of my best moments come from a blend of the two.

The Romantic Revolution is a documentary that is lovely to watch with imagery and music that captures the past and the present and helps us think deeply about what it means to be human.