James Rovira

Chapter 7 of Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms: “Postcards from Waterloo: Tom Verlaine’s Historical Constellations” (pp. 121-143) by Len von Morzé, Associate Professor of English, University of Massachusetts, Boston.

• Chapter summary
  • Capitalizing on the anxieties and ambivalence surrounding the figure of Napoleon, Len von Morzé’s “Postcards from Waterloo: Tom Verlaine’s Historical Constellations” explores Verlaine’s use of repetition in his appropriation of Napoleon’s Waterloo as well as Romantic-era texts in order to create contexts for his own work. Von Morzé describes how Verlaine “enframes” the past within his music to legitimate it, thus guiding his self-narrative. Comparing Verlaine to his one-time lover, collaborator, and peer Patti Smith for contrastive purposes, von Morzé emphasizes that Verlaine saw in his Romantic predecessors an “elective affinity” with the Romantics rather than the stronger sense of reenactment Smith had during this period. Ultimately, von Morzé draws out compelling parallels between the two waves of English Romanticism and the two waves of punk rock, positioning Verlaine in a space between poetry and rock because he “could not fully embrace the commercial aspects of mass culture.”
• Music
  • Tom Verlaine, “Postcard from Waterloo”
  • Television
    • “Little Johnny Jewel“
    • “The Dream’s Dream”
    • “Foxhole”
  • Tom Verlaine
    • “Flash Lightning”
    • “Coming Apart”
    • “Penetration”
  • Television
    • “Venus”
    • “Marquee Moon”
  • Tom Verlaine
    • “Without a Word”
    • “Present Arrived”
    • “Words From the Front”
  • Patti Smith, “Land: Horses / Land Of a Thousand Dances / La Mer(de)”
  • The Ramones, “I Just Want To Have Something To Do”
  • ABBA, “Waterloo”
•  Literature
  • Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History
  • Walter Benjamin
    • Illuminations
    • “Theses on the Philosophy of History“
  • Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte“
  • Beckett, Waiting for Godot
  • Patti Smith, Collected Lyrics
  • Arthur Rimbaud, Une Saison en Enfer
  • William Blake
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
    • “Kubla Khan“
    • “The Eolian Harp“
  • John Keats
    • Letter to George and Tom Keats, 21 or ?27 December 1817 describing “negative capability“
    • “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”
  • Tom Verlaine and Patti Smith, The Night
  • Walt Whitman
  • Allen Ginsberg
  • William Wordsworth, “Lucy” poems
  • Charles Baudelaire
  • Emily Dickinson
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