"FOR THE GOD OF THINGS AS THEY ARE..."

Yesterday evening, I posted about William Butler Yeats, raising the question: How did this poet become one of the greatest Romantic poets--and the greatest poet of the Twentieth Century--some 50 years or more after the commonly accepted "end" of the Romantic Revolution in literature? And deep in the heart of the Naturalist/Realistic era?

In a comment, John Joseph Enright pointed out that almost the same thing could be said of Rudyard Kipling, born in the same year as Yeats (1865), dying only three years before him (1936), and, like Yeats, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. In fact, Kipling was the youngest writer ever to win the prize and the first writer in English to win it.

A little research reminds me that we are supposed to refer to Yeats and Kipling as part of the "neo-Romantic" movement. This would dispose of my question how Yeats carried the full force of Romanticism so far into the Twentieth Century, but dispose of it at the cost of a dubious premise: that the Romantic impulse of Yeats (and Kipling) was a renewal or rebirth of Romanticism--not a continuation of the Romantic Revolution. I don't think this fits with the dates or the continuity of great Romanticism through Hugo, Kipling, and Yeats--all writing great work during the decades after 1850.

Whether or not "neo," there can be no doubt that some of Kipling's work expresses the essence of Romanticism--the deeply held values the proceed from an individual's choices and how these shape a life. Both the narrator of "Gunga Din" and Gun Din capture the nobility of human values that drive choices and actions.

Ayn Rand reportedly did not care much for poetry (although she described "Anthem" as a poem), but she did like Kipling. At the graveside "service" for Ayn Rand, David Kelley read the poem "If," her favorite. But she also loved another poem by Kipling, one far less well-known, "When Earth's Last Picture Is Painted." The themes are a Romantic classic: the creative power of the poet and the esthetic validity of each artist's sense of life...

But surely it is the final phrase in this poem that caused Ayn Rand to love it because it ties together the great Romantic theme of the validity of the individual's sense of life with her own highest aspiration that that her sense of life reflect "things as they are."

Here is the poem:

When Earth's Last Picture Is Painted

When Earth's last picture is painted
And the tubes are twisted and dried
When the oldest colors have faded
And the youngest critic has died
We shall rest, and faith, we shall need it
Lie down for an aeon or two
'Till the Master of all good workmen
Shall put us to work anew
And those that were good shall be happy
They'll sit in a golden chair
They'll splash at a ten league canvas
With brushes of comet's hair
They'll find real saints to draw from
Magdalene, Peter, and Paul
They'll work for an age at a sitting
And never be tired at all.
And only the Master shall praise us.
And only the Master shall blame.
And no one will work for the money.
No one will work for the fame.
But each for the joy of the working,
And each, in his separate star,
Will draw the thing as he sees it.
For the God of things as they are!