Travel like a Romantic Poet

What can we learn from the summer adventures of history's artists?

I never bade you go

To Moscow or to Rome.

Renounce that drudgery,

Call the Muses home.

(W.B Yeats, Those Images)

If Ryanair existed in the early 19th Century, would the Romantics be frequent flyers? In the summer of 1818, between the months of June and August, John Keats and his friend Charles Brown did a walking tour of Northern England and Scotland. They went to the home of Robert Burns in Ayr, visited his grave, and dwelt in natural landscapes both beautiful and grand. Keats wrote that he chose to spend “four months tramping in the highlands’ to ‘load me with grander mountains and strengthen more my reach in Poetry, than would stopping at home among books.”

It is an interesting idea, the urge to travel as both a means of creative stimulation. It calls into question what travel and holidaying should actually be for. In our times, vacations have become marker of status and ways to show off on social media. During the summer months, scrolling through your Instagram feed will invariably reveal the glamorous lives of everyone you know holidaying in far-off, exotic destinations, Aperol-spritz in hand. 

Now, people put themselves up in expensive hotels, disconnected with local communities and customs. But this is no better than ‘stopping at home among books’ in Keats’ words. This kind of travel, commercialised and often vain, does nothing to metaphorically widen horizons, or make you a more open-minded individual. Travel is most rewarding, most fruitful, when it is spent truly getting to know a place. 

But travel, for the ‘intellectuals’ of the past, has traditionally been a way to expose oneself to the natural beauties and national genius inherent to foreign cultures. It can be argued that those native to the British Isles, especially, are more in need of such voyages — islands can tend to be more insular than countries which share borders, languages, and customs with each other. Perhaps this is why some of Britain’s most celebrated writers have taken it upon themselves to embark on voyages and adventures to the continent.

Such excursions to the (mainly Western) European continent and its heritage, lingering with the remnants of awe-inspiring antiquity, seemed to be a rite of passage for the great artists and writers of history. As though, through being surrounded with relics of the past and ruins of classical genius, the contemporary traveller, too, can be inspired to further excel in creative endeavours.

The Shelleys and Lord Byron passed a “wet, ungenial summer” in Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva, and came out of it with Frankenstein. Mozart, as a young man, travelled to Italy three times, networking, performing, and declaring “I simply love travelling” in a letter. In his journeys across Scotland, Keats found the inspiration and vitality to write some of his last and greatest works, despite his failing health.

Though it would be contrived and, what’s worse, pretentious, to think that holidays should be had for the sole purpose of enlightenment and self-discovery. Indeed, the celebrated thinkers of the past are not so different from today’s influencers, travelling to Bali to ‘find themselves’ on soul-searching missions funded by generational wealth.

Yet adventures, holidays, and all such things, are most valuable when we find genuine fulfilment within them. And this, of course, comes in different forms for each of us. For W.B Yeats, a good journey was travelling to Majorca in 1935 to translate the Upanishads from Sanskrit to modern English. I imagine that a holiday with family and friends to the same place today, that island of beach resorts, nightlife, and historical remains, could be just as memorable. What is less worthwhile, when summer holidays are concerned, is the incessant pursuit of validation through social media posts made with intentions of showing off, rather than appreciating special moments abroad. 

When we travel, expecting to ‘find ourselves’ is a bit redundant — seeing new places is, nonetheless, a worthwhile endeavour as long as we attempt to truly connect with where we are, with new peoples and customs. This task is made more difficult now that many travel for the sake of demonstrating status and glamour.

So if you choose to relinquish the tools that hinder genuine connection with a place, perhaps you, too, could write the next Frankenstein, be infused with the creative genius of Burns, translate the Upanishads. Or really just find fulfilment beyond surface-level tourism — dare I even say, ‘find yourself’?

‘Time to put off the world and go somewhere

And find my health again in the sea air,’

… ‘And make my soul before my pate is bare.’

(W.B Yeats, Beggar to Beggar Cried)

Image from Wikimedia Commons