The New Romanticism

A Response to Ted Gioia’s New Romanticism

If you haven’t read Ted Gioia’s 25 Propositions about the New Romanticism, I’d highly recommend it. Directly after reading it, I read Joe Carlson’s intro to The Sacred River: A Coleridge Reader on the Imagination and something clicked.

Here’s the imagined conversation I had in my head with Ted Gioia:

Ted Gioia:
In ages of intense Rationalism, [the most important] things get marginalized—or in some cases eradicated. It’s no coincidence that people are struggling in the current environment to find love, friendship, trust, etc. The rationalist system is not built to foster these human connections—even the largest data center can’t generate them.

Me:
You’ve put your finger on the crisis at precisely the right level—not politics, not platforms, not culture (which is an abstraction), but anthropology. What kind of creatures are we, that we are flung from a world that no longer feels livable?

The things impossible to us—love, beauty, friendship, faith, forgiveness—aren’t accidentals. They’re not ornaments on a rational system of survival. They’re the essence of being human.

Ted Gioia:
…when I dug deeply into the history of the original Romanticist movement, circa 1800, I stopped laughing. The more I probed, the more I was convinced that this provided a blueprint for countering the overreach of technology, the massive expansion in surveillance, and the centralization of both political and economic power.

Me:
Historical parallel! Now you’re buttering my bread! The first Romantic movement wasn’t just dudes getting the feelies. At its best, it offered a reordering of knowledge and perception that made it possible to re-inhabit the world.

And that reorderer, like Jim Croce, had a name.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Two Roads Diverged in a Post-Post-Modern Wood

If the New Romanticism is going to be more than a mood (or worse, an aesthetic, bleh) it needs an answer to a question you’re circling, implicitly:

Why does the world feel false?

Not inefficient. Not unjust (though often that too). But false. Hollow. Why is simulation theory on the rise?

We can’t solve that by simply turning the emotional volume up, not even too 11. Romanticism fails when it confuses intensity for truth. (Which I don’t think you are doing Ted [can I call you Ted? We have only met here this one time, in my imagination]).

This is why Coleridge makes a great Spirit Guide for this moment.

He saw that the crisis wasn’t reason growing powerful, but that reason had been severed from the faculty that makes knowing meaning possible.

He called that faculty the imagination.

Imagination Is Not Fantasy

One of the quiet tragedies of modernity is that we treat imagination as make-believe, for creativity, and fantasy.

But Carlson shows in The Sacred River that, Coleridge understood imagination as the living power and prime agent of all human perception. Not image-making, but meaning-making. Not invention. Recognition.

In other words, the imagination is the faculty by which reality is intelligible.

Before reason can judge whether something is true or false, the imagination has already done the deeper work of grasping what a thing is, what it means, how it belongs within a whole.

This is why it sounds like a clear silver bell in the frost covered air when you write, “The most important things in human life can’t be reduced to software code or numbers on a spreadsheet. Here are some of them: Love, Trust, Compassion, Friendship, Forgiveness, Faith, Hope, Charity, Creative Expression, Integrity, Nature, Kindness, Beauty.”

It’s not that these things are merely complex. They’re participatory.

They require a knower who’s inside the world, not standing over it. You can’t coerce the raw date of reality into providing participational communion.

A World That Speaks

Coleridge’s vision rests on one claim: The world isn’t mute.

Creation, for Coleridge, is language. Mountains, rivers, faces, seasons aren’t raw materials waiting for meaning to be drawn from them by use or imagined projection. They’re already meaningful. Already communicating.

The imagination is the faculty that understands that speech.

Coleridge calls the primary imagination “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation.” Meaning doesn’t originate in us, nor is it imposed by systems. It’s received, through a living engagement with reality. Imagination is fluent in the language of creation.

Modern life is claustrophobic, airless, stripped of awe. Coleridge explains why.

A world treated as data gets garbley. You calculate data.

We plug the ears of our imagination to the life giving voice of creation so our soul starves.

Why This Matters for AI

One of your sharpest insights Ted, (and yes, you caught me monologuing, but I didn’t forget we are in a conversation) is that rationalist systems increasingly imitate religion, complete with rituals, dogmas, and promises of salvation.

AI is about to let a lot of people down.

AI simulates outputs of the secondary imagination (art, language, music, story) by rearranging calculable symbols. But it has no access to the primary imagination. It doesn’t participate in being. It doesn’t bear the creator’s image.

Coleridge gives us the reason for the uncanny valley. AI can remix meanings, but it can’t hear them. It can mimic language, but it lacks imagination, the organ of understanding. It is calculation without communion.

This is why the rationalist system both despises and desperately wants the truly human. It needs what it can’t generate because it can’t be reduced to calculations.

The New Romanticism is right to resist this.

Coleridge shows how to resist without falling into fantasy.

Ted Gioia:

The goal isn’t to stop Rationalism. The goal is to make it serve human ends.

Me:

Coleridge might just show us the way.

He offers enchantment without escapism, meaning without subjectivism, critique without nihilism, imagination with room for reality and fantasy alike.

This is Romanticism’s rebel yell. Not rebellion for it’s own sake, but rebellion against dehumanization because it loves humans.

It’s a Romanticism that can restrain technology, not by nostalgia, but by remembering what kind of thing we are as humans and learning to be that well now.

But Ted, if I may offer one small note of caution (to sharpen the path forward).

Ted Gioia:

(I haven’t been able to stop you yet.)

Me:

Not every Romantic reaction leads somewhere livable.

Some Romantics responded to rationalism by treating form itself as the enemy. Law, structure, mediation, even creation were treated as unwanted limitations (the gnosticism of Blake and the libertinism of Byron, for example). That path burns bright, but it collapses inward. It can’t sustain.

Coleridge matters because he doesn’t reject form. He reconciles the subject-object split of enlightenment rationalism by looking to heal the divide within us. The flungness comes, not from the world’s rejecting us, but from the cracks in our imagination.