Ep. 85 — Storms, Stars, and Self-Destruction: The Dark Side of Romanticism

In this darkly delightful episode, we stop swooning over daffodils and start whispering to ghosts. Welcome to the stormy underworld of Romanticism—the side that’s drenched in moonlight, mourning, madness, and metaphysical despair. We explore what happens when emotion becomes obsession, beauty turns to terror, and the soul starts writing poetry with a quill dipped in melancholy.

From Charlotte Dacre’s guilt-laced internal ruin to Novalis’s cosmic marriage proposal to death itself, we examine poetry that doesn’t just feel—it devours. Along the way, we meet snowbound nihilists, disillusioned philosophers, and poets who would have had thriving TikTok trauma-core accounts.

And yes, we talk about the real monsters—like Matthew Lewis, who made Gothic horror loud, excessive, and weirdly seductive long before horror movies knew how to scream.

In the end, we discover that the Romantics weren’t just dramatic—they were timeless. Their hunger still echoes through our curated sadness, moody playlists, and spiritual search engines.

Featured Poets and Works:

• Charlotte Dacre – “The Confession”

• James Thomson – from Winter

• Friedrich Schiller – from The Gods of Greece

• Novalis – from Hymns to the Night

• Matthew Lewis – “The Fragment”

Themes Explored:

• The Gothic as emotional architecture

• Nature as beautiful annihilation

• Spiritual grief and divine silence

• Death as intimacy, not destruction

• Emotional excess as both truth and performance

• Modern culture's Romantic inheritance: from curated sadness to hashtag despair

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Tags:
#Romanticism #PoetryPodcast #GothicPoetry #Novalis #CharlotteDacre #DarkRomanticism #ModernMelancholy #TheSublime #PoeticDespair #PerfectlyPoetic