The Romantic Imagination

During the eighteenth century a new way of thinking appeared, this was the time of romanticism. Nowadays, a lot of people assimilate Romanticism with love and "romantic" behaviour. But, Romanticism has rarely love as a subject. It is more an international artistic and philosophical movement, which redefines the fundamental ways in which people in the Western cultures thought about themselves and about their world. The two main countries in which Romantic Movement rose are England and Germany, and not the country of romance language themselves. It affected all the art. This movement really started in 1770's and it continued in the second part of the nineteenth century. This movement appeared later in American literature than in Europe, and also later in some of the arts, like music and painting than in literature. This age of Romantic ideas took place at the same period than the "age of revolution". Revolutions occurred in America in 1776 and in France in 1789. It was a period of upheaval in political, economic, and social traditions. It was at this period that witnessed the initial transformation of the industrial revolution. The core of the Romantic movement was a revolutionary energy. Romanticism also consciously set out t

As we are going to see now by studying four major romantic poets who are Percy Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and William Blake, we would realise that as if all these persons were really influent in Romanticism, they did not share the same point of view on the question of the imagination.

William Blake saw the human imagination as something essential to human understanding of the world. He saw mentality as a "mental construction". For him if imagination is used to make the connection between man and Nature, the individual gains freedom from the restrictive bonds of unimaginative thought. He expressed his belief in the imagination by attacking what he called the "mind-forg'd manacles". Unimaginative thought imposes chains on the human spirit. He thought that the exterior, sensory world has no inherent meaning, but become meaningful thanks to the contribution of the human imagination, thus he means that reality is a product of human's mind. In his poem entitled Songs of Innocence, the main symbol is the child. The poem is narrated from the point of view of a child and represents the youth of the human imagination. It is the human imagination that gives meaning to the world. For him, the innocent can be truly happy because he does not know the wonders of the imagination and so does not really know nature. The innocent is naively limiting himself because his description of the world is based upon what he has been taught and not a creation of his own imagination. In his poem, The lamb, he expressed the innocent's view of the world as a creation of God and not a creation of the human imagination. In it, the innocent asks; "Little Lamb, who made thee? / Dost thou know who made thee?" . The innocent is only able to conceive of the origins of the lamb being due to a creator god and not as a product of his imagination. In opposition to the world of innocence is the world of experience. In the Song of Experience, anther of Blake's poem, he depicts a world of where the inhabitants are self-limited to sensory experience and not imaginative. This person is self-limited because he does not allow his imagination to run free, but relies on the sensory knowledge. According to Blake, the urban setting is also restrictive for the imagination. In his poem entitled London, he describes a world of life in death. London represents the fallen world, a world where there is no imagination. The Urban setting is fill of sadness and misery and lacking imagination and energy.

For Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the imagination is the only way to reconcile oppositions. He distinguished two forms of imagination. At first there is, for him, the Primary imagination which is " the living power and prime agent of all human perception... a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am". It is the creative element in all-human perception, which is separate from God by virtue of being finite. In that, it part creates the world, it perceives, it is analogous to God's act of creation. The second one is the secondary imagination which consists in "an echo of the [primary], coexisting with the conscious will... identical with the primary in the kind of its agency... differing only in the mode of