‘Webbed with Golden Lines’: Saul Bellow's Romanticism

Attaining prominence in the post-war era, Saul Bellow is one of the most widely read and intellectually eclectic novelists of the Jewish American School.1 Bellow's frequent references to Romanticism form a dominant design within his culturally diverse fiction.2 Taken from Bellow's Herzog, my title indicates the two levels on which Bellow's Romantic allusions operate. At one level, this ‘webbed’ pattern of ‘golden lines’ suggests how Bellow interlaces his own prose with the poetry and philosophy of British Romanticism to govern readers' responses to his portrayal of epiphanies. On another, Herzog's moment of inter-connected vision signals Bellow's investment in a Coleridgean and Wordsworthian imagination that reveals the all-pervasive spirit of the ‘[o]ne Life within us and abroad’3. This metaphysical dimension to Bellow's web of ‘golden lines’ finds a further affinity with Shelley's later notion of the ‘web of being’.4