This World is Poison

Romantic Pessimism in The Psychedelic Furs’ Book of Days

Richard Butler, “Noisymouth”, 2013

Romanticism can be edifying: a tale of the ways of Spirit-in-the-World, elaborated in Wordsworth’s chronicles of the lake district or Caspar-David Friedrich’s exhilarated man standing on a mountaintop. But too much exhilaration usually leads to disillusion, even exhaustion, and that is also part of the Romantic legacy. Pessimism as…