Romantics and the Romantic Imagination

Romantic imagination with reference to Romantics:

“Imagination is a seeing, reconciling, combining force that seizes the old, penetrates beneath surface, disengages the truth lying slumbering there, and, building afresh, bodies forth anew a reconstructed universe in fair forms of artistic power and beauty”.

                                                                                                                (Keats)

For Romantics, imagination is a truly creative faculty; rather than simply re-arranging materials fed to it by the senses and the memory. Imagination is a shaping and ordering power, a modifying power which colors objects of senses with the mind’s own light.

An auxiliary light,

Came from my mind, which on the setting sun,

Bestowed new splendor,

For Wordsworth, the imagination must be subservient to the external world, because that world is not dead but lying and has its own soul, distinct from the soul of man. Nature was the source of his inspiration, and he neither could deny to it’s an existence at least as powerful as man’s.

“Imagination is the most important gift that a poet can have. It is the divine capacity of the child who fashions his own little worlds.”

Coleridge says that:

“This world of imagination is the world of Eternity; it is the divine bosom into which we shall go after the death of Vegetated body. This world of Imagination is Infinite and Eternal, whereas the world of Generation, or Vegetation, is finite and temporal.”

The Romantics were concerned with the things of the spirit and hoped that through imagination and inspired insight they could both understand them and present them in compelling poetry. They were convinced that, though visible things are the instruments by which we find the reality, they are not everything and have indeed little significance unless they are related to some embracing and sustaining power.

For Shelley:

“Imagination is the most important faculty of human mind. Unlike the reason, which is analytic and melancholic, the imagination is synthetic and organic; it works for man’s moral good and allows a man to put himself in the place of others. Although all men possess imagination in some degree, the faculty is pre-eminent in pots.

Imagination can be considered as the mind acting upon the thoughts so as to color them with its own light, and comparing from them, as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the principles of its own integrity.”

The Romantics stand in some essential relation to truth and reality, and they were at pains to make their poetry pay attention to them. For Blake, imagination is nothing less than God as he operates in the human soul. It follows that any act of creation performed by imagination is divine and that in the imagination man’s spiritual nature is fully and finally realized.

Blake says:

“Whenever a person imagines something, his thoughts are not illusions but the real world, but undeceived depictions of a world that is not only unreal, but also known to be so”.

Wordsworth says that the role of imagination in Romantic Literature is to react against the “multitude of causes unknown to former times [which] are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminative powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.”

The Romantic poets agreed, their task was to find through the imagination some transcendental order which explains the world of appearances and accounts not merely for the existence of visible things but for the effect which they have on us, for sudden, unpredictable beating of the heart in the presence of beauty, for the conviction that what then moves us cannot be cheat or an illusion, but must derive its authority from the power which moves the universe.

The strength of Romantics comes largely from the way in which they throw a new and magic light on the common face of nature and lure us to look for some explanation for the irresistible attraction which it exerts. In nature, all the Romantic poets found their initial inspiration. It was not everything to them, nut they would have been nothing without it; for through it they found those exalting moments when they passed from sight to vision and pierced as they thought, to the secrets of the world.

It is some lively or apt description, dressed I such colors of speech, that it sets before your eyes the absent object, as perfectly, and more delightfully than nature.