ROMANTIC POETRY

NOTAS
• Belief in a world that transcends what is perceived by the senses.
• “Humanity has become separated from nature, which leads to a false characterization of
external nature as ‘fixed and dead. The romantic poet seeks a way to reactivate the world by
discovering the creative perceptiveness which will allow the writer to draw aside the veils which
modern living has laid across the senses and seek a perception where the false separation of
Nature (fixed, external objects) and nature (the living being of the perceiver) can be reconciled:
a new synthesizing vision. The romantic thinker often feels that such a faculty is not an
invention, but a rediscovery of the truth about the way we perceive and create which has been
lost in the development of more complicated social forms and the growth of rational and self-
conscious theories of human thought” (Routledge).
• Imagination as the way to get a panoptic vision, to get to the ultimate truth of that
transcendental world. Imagination as a principle.
• Intimate self-revelation of the poet. The poet is seen as a prophet, bringing about change in
society. However, despite the poet’s heightened sensitivity, he did not elevate himself above
his reader, but spoke as a “man speaking to men.” The difference between one level of
imagination and another is a question of degree, not of nature.
• Medievalism, recovery of the ballad and the folk-song.
While in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Middle Ages had suggested barbarism, superstition
and ignorance, to the Romantic poets and artists, they suggested an age of faith, idealism and
adventure. For example, the basic medieval element, the quest romance, was used to show
an internal quest for self-knowledge (Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner).
• There is a growing interest in the ballad as a form. The focus shifts from the story (traditional
ballads) to emotion (lyrical ballads).
• New literary theory.
The Romantic poetics favour the poetry written in the language used by simple rural folk.
Wordsworth, for instance, advocated the use subject matter that was common and considered
unpoetical. Simple situations. Rejection of elaborate or complex poetic diction
• Desire to rediscover a “living language”
• References to nature and natural objects. Nature as a theme (different from neo-classical
view of nature as ornament)
• Direct expression of emotions.
“Good poetry is the overflow of powerful feelings” (opposite from neo-classical age of reason)
“Good poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity” (emotion restricted while in the first
definition there is no boundary to feeling)
• Attraction towards the exotic, the unknown, the past, the supernatural.
• The noble savage
• Concern with the experience and insights of childhood
• Individuality. Man as an individual, not as a group.
LITERATURA INGLESA CONTEMPORÁNEA
Romanticism (18th - 19th century; 1780-1830) The period in which nations were formed.
Works as a bridge between the Enlightenment worldview and the values of a modern industrial
society.
Changes (19th century: peak of industrialization in England)
- from handmade production to industrial production. Development of factories.
- migration, communication
- Warfare conducted on a world scale. Imperial expansion.
Importance of the individual and his feelings and intuitions. Emotions are dealt with through
different resources. External phenomena (nature, weather) is in relation with inner feelings.
Belief in a spiritual world, untouched by logical reason.
[[Questions rational thought as the ultimate way to understand the world. Reaction to
Enlightenment (1750-1850: immediately previous to Romanticism). Use of rational thought
and the senses as the “authorized” way of conceiving the world [positivism]. Through
observation of the world and the application of Reason, Natural laws are revealed to man. The
universe is rational and orderly. In the same way, there was an emphasis on social institutions
and codes of behaviour (structures); decorum (no excesses) and stability.
Art: reliance on established literary conventions (patterns to be followed); in favour of elevated
diction and stylized formats (sophisticated language to appeal to the reason of the readers).
Man governs and controls nature, and uses it for his own satisfaction → gardens in castles:

symmetrical, neat and organized, follow conventions.

The first Gothic manifestations paved the way to Romanticism. ]]
All poets were interested in the creation of New Nations (1788-1824)
First generation of romantics: they lived the French Revolution (1789) as adolescents or young
adults. They were politically committed and believed in the concept of freedom (energy &
impulse). The FR showed how ordinary, disadvantaged people, can seize the power (we are
all equal, we all come from the same union). Blake (1757-1827), Wordsworth (1770-1850),
Coleridge (1772-1834)
Second generation: Byron, Shelley (1792-1822), Keats (1795-1821). They lived the most
negative aspects of the Revolution. No more monarchy but authoritarian government. Focused
on other countries’ revolution: Italy and Greece. Interested in other new nations (they even
fought)
Trascendental world (the world as it is): a world that transcends what is perceived by the
senses and Reason. Modern living has laid a veil across the senses. By discovering a creative
perceptiveness, exploring his emotions, the writer can reconcile the false separation of Nature
(fixed, eternal object) and nature (the living being of the perceiver). It reflects the union
between man and nature (pairs) and God1. Man is part of a larger structure, the divine is within
man: by learning about the trascendental world you learn about men and viceversa.
Man is no longer in control: awareness that our perception is limited → Enlightenment → use

of senses (experience), institutions (education, focus on society and social rules, religion [a

coded body of belief]) and reason prevent us from seeing the real world since they make things

rigid and not all things can be proven (“laws of nature”). Focus on society and social rules.

1
chequear por qué para algunos románticos es así pero no para todos. Creo que para Blake:
([men=nature]+god)
In Romanticism, there is a synthesizing vision, a re-discovery of the truth about the way in
which we perceive and create that has been lost in the development of more complicated
social forms and the growth of rational and self-conscious theories of human thought.
The individual and his emotions are more important than society. “Every man’s genius is
peculiar to his individuality”. Visionary aid.
Senses lack the power of revealing form = nature has no outline, but imagination (the divine
presence in man, the way in which we get a panoptic vision) does.
Imagination
- The way of learning about the world
- Reconciles the inner vision (nature) and the outer experience (Nature)
- Envisions a sense of continuity between man, nature and the presence of God.
- It has different levels and we can move from one level to another (everyone can
enhance his/her perception, or lose it)
- the poet as “seer” and a prophet
- the senses (though important in Romanticism) and reason are limited, they only show
us a portion of reality.
- value of intuition, dreams, imaginative power and perception.
Nature: it is a language, a system in which every natural fact is symbol of a spiritual fact; the
poet has to decode and reveal the correspondences between nature and man. Know nature,

know yourself. The poet is seen as a prophet but as an equal to the rest of men → use of

simple language to communicate the visions of the trascendental work.

Rousseau: the noble savage → man is born innocent and is then corrupted by society

LITERATURA DE LOS EEUU

Romanticism in Europe: end of the 18th century. Industrial revolution.Transcendentalism. We
can all overcome our limitations and get an expanded perception by cleansing the doors of
perception: not being limited by the senses. (Blake)
Blake: criticism to institutions: they’ve put limits to realities that are wider. Eg: religions→

through rational thinking they created a myth that puts faith into a box with rules and

punishment. We believe that church equals God. There is something beyond that can’t be

measured, but church does not represent all that God is. It regulats te experience and it puts

limits to it. Institution created by men not by god.

ANDREW SANDERS - THE LITERATURE OF THE ROMANTIC PERIOD 1780-1830

Gibbon, the greatest English historian of the 18th century, a sceptical product of the European
Enlightenment and of a culture which had come, not simply to appreciate the significance of
“sensibility”, but actively to indulge it. He questioned both a providential reading of history and
the assumption that modern Europe was singularly blessed in its inherited forms of
government and religion. The influence of his iconoclastic rationality was to be felt in the work
of a new generation of writers who often distrusted reason and who earnestly sought to
redefine the intellectual and political assumptions of is fathers.
The period 1780-1830 is an age obviously moulded by the impact of the revolutionary
upheaval in France. Writers’ neutrality need no mean they were swimming against a
contemporary tide. The variety of ways of writing, thinking about, criticizing and defining
literature that co-exist in this period are especially diverse and the distinctions notably sharp.
Revolution in France based on metaphysical abstractions. Romantic themes: the significance
of the imagination, the nature of religious feeling, the soul-expanding effects of travelling.
Gothic fiction
Tribute to the power of mimetic art. Everyday delights are evoked by representations of danger
and pain. Pain and terror are capable of producing delight, not pleasure, but a sort of
tranquillity tinged with terror. The sublime (ideas of vastness, infinity and astonishment) could
be experienced in the contemplation of nature. (LIT LAT) Gothic fiction is essentially a reaction
against comfort and security, political stability and commercial progress. Above all, it resists
the rule of reason. Ann Radcliffe drew a distinction between the representation of terror and
that of horror: terror expands the soul, awakens he faculties to a high degree of life, while
horror contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them. Drake categorizes objects of terror; into
the first category, he placed those which owe their origin to the agency of superhuman beings,
and form a part of every system of mythology; into the second he put those which depend
upon natural causes and events for their production. Labyrinth. The term “Gothic” has been
taken to cover a number of anomalous texts which allow both for a convergence and for a
conflict of the natural and the supernatural. Frankenstein deals with philosophy and nature,
the origins and meaning of life, the myth of prometheus, the enterprise of modern science; it
is a morally probing exploration of responsibility and of the body of knowledge which we now
call science; an imaginative exaltation of the principles of liberty and human rights.
The conflicting, even contradictory, pulls of passivity and active commitment have often
determined the subject-matter and mood of English poetry. These tensions are especially
evident in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a period marked as much by
evangelical religion as by international political engagement, by a moralizing spirituality as by
a struggle for liberation. Pious sentiment and moral conviction went hand in hand with
campaigns for political action (battle against slavery). In other cases, an insistent
internalization of religious experience, and an emphasis on private and public morality,
seemed to preclude a preoccupation with constitutional and legal reform. Whereas the various
crises created by the evolving nature of French revolutionary politics presented a series of
unresolved dilemmas and inspiring impulses to sympathetic English observers, a contrary
impulse towards contemplation and withdrawal also tends to mould intellectual and religious
life in the period.

BBC ARTS + NOTES

Blake - radical protest and the imagination
The first of the English poets to assault the principles of science and commercialism in an age
when the twin imperatives of industrialisation and ‘system' were beginning to dominate human
life. Everything he wrote was filled with a yearning for spiritual reality, and for a redefinition of
the human imagination beyond the Newtonian precepts of order and control. He redefined the
poetry of radical protest.
Born 1757 in London, his recognition as an artist and poet of worth began when Blake was in
his sixties.
Blake's early childhood was dominated by spiritual visions which influenced his personal and
working life. A passionate believer in liberty and freedom for all, especially for women, he
courted controversy with his views on Church and state.
After following a traditional artistic career as an apprentice engraver he attended the Royal
Academy, but he clashed with the ideals of the Academy's founding members.
In 1782 Blake married Catherine Boucher, who he taught to read, write and draw and would
aid him in the production of his work.
After leaving the Academy he set himself up as an engraver and illustrator, publishing his own
work.
Coleridge and Wordsworth - nature and the sublime
The generation of Romantic poets that helped to redefine the concept of nature as a healing
and spiritual force. The first to recognise the redemptive powers of the natural world.
Wordsworth: Born 1770, lake district, rural. His mother died when he was eight, an
experience that shapes much of his later work. His father died when he was attending
Grammar School, leaving him and his four siblings orphans.
He graduated from Cambridge in 1791 and before his final semester he travelled to France
and Europe. During his time in France he fell in love and had a daughter, Caroline, in 1792,
but the political situation in France at the time made it a dangerous place 2 and Wordsworth
was forced to leave his young family behind. He returned in 1802 to meet his daughter,
together with his sister. His contact with the French Revolution brought about WWs interest
and sympathy for the life, troubles and speech of “the common man”.
Interest in philosophical books: rationalism clashed with his own view, what made him give up
the pursuit of moral questions.
90s: His increasing sense of anguish forced him to formulate his own understanding of the
world and of the human mind in more concrete terms. The theory he produced 3 and the poetics
he invented to embody it, caused a revolution in English Literature.
Upon being born, human beings move from a perfect, idealized realm into the imperfect, un-
ideal earth (Platonic). As children, some memory of the former purity and glory in which they
lived remains, best perceived in the solemn and joyous relationship of the child to the beauties
of nature. As children grow older, the memory fades, and the magic of nature dies. Still, the
memory of childhood can offer an important solace, which brings with it almost a kind of re-
access to the lost purities of the past. And the maturing mind develops the capability to
understand nature in human terms, and to see in it metaphors for human life, which
compensate for the loss of the direct connection. (Correspondances)
Poetry results form the spontaneous overflow of emotions:
1. recollected in a state of tranquility
2. the poet then surrenders to the emotion so that the tranquility dissolves and the
emotion remains in the poem
As a poet in the launching of the romantic era, he made explicit emphasis on feelings,
simplicity and the pleasure of beauty over formality, rhetoric and ornament.
Wordsworth eventually settled in England with his sister and influential friend Samuel Taylor
Coleridge (1795). Together they wrote Lyrical Ballads (1798) in which they sought to write
poetry in “common” speech for the people and argue against the hierarchy of the period which
valued epic poetry above the lyric. First published without the names of the authors, it was the
book that arguably defined the Romantic movement.
1802: marries a childhood friend, had 5 children (2 of which died in 1812). In 1847 his daughter
dies and he loses the will to write (stops writing the prelude); he dies in 1850.

2
The Reign of Terror (Paris)--> a period during the French Revolution in which multiple death
sentences were produced (1793/4).
3
Similar to Freud’s: acceptance of the importance of childhood in the adult psyche.
Coleridge: born in 1772 the son of a clergyman in England. His career as a poet and writer
were established after he befriended Wordsworth and together they produced the Lyrical
Ballads. First generation of romantic poets.
For most of his adult life he suffered through addiction to laudanum and opium. His most
famous works – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan and Christabel – all took
supernatural themes and presented exotic images, perhaps affected by his use of the drugs.
Coleridge's legacy has been tainted with accusations of plagiarism; he had a propensity for
leaving projects unfinished and suffered from large debts.
Coleridge also looked inward, as well as outward, and in his meditative poetry he enlarged the
boundaries of the individual sensibility; he introduced into his verse all the nightmare and
drama of his opium-induced visions, so that human nature itself was enlarged and redefined
as the subject of poetry.
Together Wordsworth and Coleridge helped to create a new definition of the sublime and the
beautiful, evincing an aesthetic very different from the orthodox classical principles of formal
symmetry and proportion.
Byron, Shelley and Keats - celebrity and the individual
They were followed by another generation of English Romantic poets who in one form or
another fashioned the modern notion of the individual poetic voice. From Byron came the idea
of the writer as hero or celebrity - he inaugurated the cult of personality in literary terms. From
Shelley and from Keats came the notion of the poet as the isolated genius, sorrowful and
suffering. They confirmed the status of the poet as above the ordinary laws of society.
William Wordsworth's reputation is defined by his poems of nature, but his early life was
dominated by the French Revolution and the libertarian ideals of the time.

KATHLEEN RAINE - “WILLIAM BLAKE”

A painter and poet ignored by biographical dictionaries and critics of poetry and painting. He
spent his childhood in the very heart of London (Soho), where, but for some years spent in the
country, he lived his entire life. He loved to be near the river Thames, visible manifestation of
the River of Life that so often appears in his poems and in his designs. London was to Blake
bot Pandemonium and Celestial City. The blood of human suffering ran down its walls but
heave was near at hand. In that time, green fields were within a walking distance of Soho. As
a young boy, he saw angels walking among the harvesters in the cornfields of Peckham Rye.
Sense of pastoral beauty → acquired by those who live in the country or inbetween. Blake’s

pastoral world has the double intensity of the natural world, seen and known, and of a Lost

Paradise, radiant in the visionary distance of memory. From his very childhood, Blake knew

two worlds: the innocence of green fields and the experience of industrial revolution. He

desired to see a marriage of heaven and hell, and, for him, the indestructible purity of the

human spirit is not lost but it returns, at the end of the circle of destiny, to its original innocence

again. Blake’s vision of a reconciliation of two contraries - of good and evil, innocence and

experience, may have arisen of his own early memories of city squalor and suffering, side by

side with the world of the contryside.

Freedom as a boy → those years in which poets gather the impressions and sensations upon

which they draw. He never went to school at his own request and chose to be apprenticed as

an engraver4, rather than enter upon the more precarious career of a pure artist. He had to
make drawings of many of the monuments of kings and queens in Westminster Abbey. He
made a Gothic stress on line characteristic of religious art: a clear outline was privileged over
the chiaroscuro school. “Nature has no outline, but imagination has”. Essence as against
appearance, or accident, which is the subject-matter of, say, the French imprssionists. He
went back to medieval art, the product of a Christianity still irrational and imaginative. For him,
the secular and the spiritual were undivided, the world is dominated by a single hierarchy of
values that includes both heaven and earth in a single vision: “everything that lives is holy.”
Blake never lost his link with the men who work with their hands: he was a poor Londoner and
a man of the people. He suffered both sorrow and indignation on account of the frustration of
his genius by poverty and the neglect of his contemporaries.
Prophet by direct knowledge → He found himself between the worlds of artists and the world

of artisans, between the city and fields and between the rural England of the 18th century and

the industrialized England of the 19th.

Wife: the illiterate daughter of a market-gardener, from a densely populated working-class
district (industrial landscape). They married in 1782 (25).
His brother dies and Blake, who had nursed him constantly during his illness, saw his spirit
“ascending heavenwards, through the matter-of-fact ceiling, “clapping its hands for joy””. He
believed he often visited him, inspirit, throughout his life, and gave him the secret of the
process by which he produced the illuminated pages of his poems, printed and coloured by
hand by him and his wife. [Visionary aid] He published his poems in that way not from choice
but from necessity since no publisher would pint them. In vision and technique alike, Blake
was close to the Gothic middle ages.
SYMBOLOGY [see 4 zoas]
OOTHOON AND THE DAUGHTERS OF ALBION: nymphs, not of springs and forests but of
looms and mills, suffering and toiling at the cruel machines of the Industrial Revolution. [the
English nation]
These gods and goddesses are unmistakably English, yet they belong to the modern world
and are rooted in the tradition of Christianity.
Blake could never reconcile himself to his isolation, or understand why things that for him were
clear, should, to the general public, seem incomprehensible. Often he found himself forced to
engrave the designs of artists far inferior to himself in invention, whose more insipid and
conventional work was acceptable to their contemporaries. Blake suffered the daily and
explicit humiliation of working in the service of artists inferior to himself. Blake learned a dee
humility. Blake became angry with Hayley (his patron) for he attempted to persuade Mrs. Blake
that her husband must be made to see reason. He concluded “Natural friends are spiritual
enemies”. During the time he spent with Hayley he was taken to trial because he fought with
a soldier (a crude figure from the World of Experience, ugly symbol of the world of tyranny and
brutality “Damn he King; damn all his subjects, damn his soldiers, they are all slaves”.) Hayley
saved his natural life thanks to his influence.

4
A craft that, before the Industrial Revolution, lent a dignity to manual work that he machine has
largely destroyed.
Blake was to have no disciples, as painter or as poet, until the last years of his life.
Mortal body: only an excrementitious husk or covering over the immortal.
His human bodies are not like the aspiring figures of Baroque art, that seem to be pulled
upwards by the force of heavenly gravitation acting against the downward pull of earth; they
seem, rather not subject to any stresses and strains at al, freely-moving spiritual beings,
passing through air and fire unhindered.
Swedenborgian philosophy: the material body of man is not his real body; the Resurrection of
the Body is a resurrection from, and not a resurrection of, the material body. It is the
imaginative immortal body of man that Blake represents. The existence of such a body is a
matter of faith. Earthly body is that portion of Soul perceived by the five senses.
In a world wholly conceived by the imagination, the senses but play the part of instruments.
His genius lay in his ability to see the body as an expression of the soul, the natural forms of
the temporal world as expressions of eternal archetypes.
[It is precisely because his forms are imaginary that they have clear and distinct outline; for

the senses, so Blake believed, have not the power of revealing form; the esemplastic’ power

belongs to the imagination alone. The imagination is the divine presence in man; and his
theory of the imagination is thus one that makes him a religious artist.] → true of Coleridge too.
Lyrical form in poetry is what outline is in drawing or melody in music - the contour drawn by
imagination, the trace of spiritual life. Blake’s vocabulary is as simple as that of a child, and
his symbols are few and universal (rose, sunflower, lion, lamb, beetle, ant, little girl/boy). It is
a question of transparency: every lyric is a window into the imaginative world. These
archetypal symbols focus multiple meanings, soundings into the unconscious, into the
universal source of myth. Religion and simplicity: comprehensible to the unlearned,
incomprehensible to the unwise.
Two levels of symbolism
1. Linguistic symbolism (uses words - the perfected instruments of conscious thought) →

extracting multiple meanings from words placed and held in complex relationships as

elaborate as magnetic fields.

2. Non-linguistic symbolism: the unconscious is innocent of words, but it formulates in symbolic
forms. The art of using symbols has been largely lost with our long established habits of verbal
thought which results in fragmentary symbolism. Independent of the words in which the
symbols are described. The languages of myth and poetry express not rational concepts, but
resonant potencies of meaning that extend beyond the narrow spectrum of conscious thought.
Blake wrote about, or engraved, the real existing figures of his imaginative world as if they had
an actual existence independent of art and of Blake himself.
Blake combined the symbolic imaginative genius of antiquity and the psychological insight of
modern man. His reasonable and calm attitude to his visions is more akin to the intellectual
honesty of a twentieth-century scientist; and yet his visions retain the quality of holiness, that
has at all times characterized the religions, and that fulfils an irreductible need of the human
soul. These beings that he has created have arisen from the depths of the poet’s unconscious,
in all the energy and beauty of life, violent, shape-shifting forms of the eternal powers that
mould man, the impulses that determine and control our life, from beyond the little world known
to our reason. The poetic process in which Blake excelled was neither verbal nor visual; it was
symbolic and mythological. He was a creator of symbols, whose potency does not depend
solely on the medium through which they are expressed.
Religion. Swdenborg, Boehme, St. Teresa, Kabbala, Gnosticism, Hindoo. Art: Gothic tradition.
His religious wisdom he drew from the human imagination, which he called, indifferently, the
Bosom of God, the Saviour, the Divine Humanity, and Jesus.
Like contemporary psychologists, he distinguished clearly between the selfhood (the ego as
we should say) and he “humanity” the real man of which the ego is only a part. Blake’s spiritual
aim was a widening of consciousness, a destruction of the selfhood, that would enable the
real humanity to come into being. Good and evil, as we conceive them, have little meaning in
the world of the gods and goddesses, of the unconscious regions of the psyche, that obey
laws unknown to reason and convention (a new conception of the nature of man implies a new
morality). Blake was the prophet of a new morality, a marriage of heaven and hell, of reason
and energy, of the conscious and the unconscious halves of man’s original wholeness.
Legalistic morality is, for Blake, the greatest of spiritual evils. The Divine Humanity is the
potential human Self that lies beyond the conscious ego and its moral formulations. Painting,
music and poetry were, for him, three ways of “conversing with paradise” - of awakening and
bringing into consciousness and reality the latent contours of the Divine Humanity. Blake
stands as a bridge between the religious intuitions of the past, and the psychological science
of the present day.

KATHLEEN RAINE - “A NEW MODE OF PRINTING”

Blake was proud, argumentative and violently opposed to current fashion, in his art and his
philosophic and religious ideas alike. Politics: radical. No interest in making money. The
political and moral subversiveness of his early works provides one possible explanation on
how Blake came to be his own publisher.
Blake first used the method of “illuminated printing” in about 1788, but the idea has been
previously stated in his dramatic farce in 1784. Publishing without being subject to the expense
of letter-press. Supernatural inspiration: his dead brother’s spirit directed the method. Outline:
impervious liquid. Plain parts and lights: eaten with aqua fortis.
The watercolour illumination he owes too to supernatural inspiration: Joseph the sacred
carpenter appeared in a vision and revealed that secret to him. [visionary aid]
Colours: few and simple. Advantage of the method: he could print copies as he needed them,
whenever he found a purchaser. 1789 Songs of Innocence. There are great variations: each
copy has its own colour-range and is a unique creation. Some of the copies which have
survived are thought to be coloured with Mrs Blake, who did the binding.
Blake engraved some of the illustrations of a German book of simple incidents from real life
for children that was translated by Mary Wollstonecraft. She was influenced by Rousseau,
whose view of childhood contrasted strongly with the pedagogic habit of mind the the Age

of Reason → the unfolding of the imagination of every creature, in freedom, is the only true

education. Every child is unique. “Infancy has a manner of perceiving, thinking, and feeling
peculiar to itself. Premature instruction is without regard to the peculiar genius of each.
Besides the constitution common to its species, each child at its birth possesses a peculiar
temperament which determines its genius and character and which it is improper either to
pervert or restrain, the business of education being only to model and bring it to perfection. All
the vices imputed to malignity of disposition are only the effect of the bad form it has received
… there is not a villain upon earth, whose natural propensity, well directed, might not have
been productive of great virtues.” Man is born innocent and then corrupted by society. For
Blake, a book for children and about childhood should reflect that belief. There is not a bad
man who had not something very good about him, every man’s genius is peculiar to his
individuality. “Everything that lives is holy” not by virtue of any added qualities, but in essence.
Childhood is the purest essence of the spirit of life, and instructions can add nothing to Being.
Joy is the essence of life and all life seeks joy as its natural state. Birth means to begin
forgetting about the real world, before being born (“falling”), man is one with nature and god.
Current view of childhood (enlightenment): Locke → (behaviourism; brain-washing) a passive
state to be “formed” by “instruction”. In an early, unpublished poem, Blake describes the
consequences of “forming” a child according to the laws of mechanistic rationalism (nature
governed, measured and explained by man), imposed all from outside and regardless of the
mysterious formative laws of life itself. By compelling sb into conformity, you denied him life.
Life is immeasurable, not to be captured or contained within the quantitative “laws of nature”.
All Blake’s most characteristic and beautiful images are of the minute, the holiness of life is no
less in the tiny than in the vast, it’s omnipresent. The supreme symbol of the holy in the minute
is the Divine Child. The dignity of every living essence is not relative but absolute.
Platonist → there are innate ideas born with every man which are “truly Himself”. Eg:
Knowledge of ideal beauty. For Blake, innate ideas are corrupted in the real world.
Before the Terror and the ensuing slaughter of so many of the early liberal supporters of the
French Revolution, he was a Republican and had hailed revolution fas an expression of
freedom and of that spirit of life which was, for him, in whatever guise, holy. Then, he changed
his mind about the value of political solutions. He believed that the arts could only flourish in
peaceful states. He supported the national cause against Napoleon, but “the happy country”
of which he called himself a citizen was the “Kingdom not of this world”.
Jung → the ambivalence of the archetypes: no psychic energy, or mood of the soul, is merely
good or merely evil; the face turned depends upon circumstances. (also Hinduism and
Buddhism; the ancient Greek religion; Jewish mystical tradition) This truth was
understood by Boehme, a Christian mystic, and Blake followed him.

MARTIN K. NURMI - “ON THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL”

1. Blake’s Ideal of Expanded Sense Perception → returns man to Eden
“He who wishes to see a perfect Whole must see it in its Minute Particulars, Organized”
Extreme humanist: Man is not merely capable of divinity, but is, even in his fallen state, divine
in essence. The terms “human” and “divine” are interchangeable.
The Fall came about because man, in creating a false material philosophy, failed to perceive
the divinity of his own humanity and thus strove to create abstract gods that were somehow
more than human. Man’s restoration to Eden (restoration of the original unity
[man+natura+god], man becomes divine again) was to occur when man’s now divided
natures, the warring Zoas, were reunited by true philosophy and religion in the vital harmony
of the Human state.
The ultimate order of the cosmos when perceived by that synoptic vision which perceives
the grand order of all things at oce, takes on the real or eternal form of “Ona Man” (Christ).This
synoptic vision allows us to perceive the whole by providing us a general view of it.
Only by spiritual sensation can we know the human character of the cosmos. There are four
levels of perception (four-fold vision), the differences between them being psychic instead of
spatial. As such they may be gained or lost. 5
1st level of perception: single vision of materialism or “Newton’s sleep”. We perceive only the
material object, we fail to recognize the human nature of creation. The ordinary apparent
identities of things are analogous to phenomena of perspective. Requires only a limited
amount of imagination, which departs from the abstract ideal of a noumenal, independent
perception (4th level)
2nd level of perception: imaginative form. In comparing objects we are applying some level of
imagination.
3rd level of perception: comprehensive view. An affective state in which objects undergo a
transformation because the perceiver undergoes one: he begins to view all things in a state of
delight somewhat akin to the sexual delight. Man can begin to know directly by perception that
on Earth there are only shadows, that the Real is elsewhere.
4th level of perception: visionary gleam. Glimpse of the infinite. Enables man to see all of
existence synoptically as “One Man” (a synthesis of the whole =/= panoptically → whole).

Christ welcomes those who have awakened from “Newton’s sleep”. Now all things are

permanently and imaginatively transformed, making them into symbolic (“real”) forms which

reveal the significance of those objects to the life of man.

The Vision is not “other-worldly” in the sense that it enables us to transcend the limited sphere
of practical life, but it reveals the order and unity of life as a whole, so that our practical life is
transformed by the knowledge that “everything that lives is Holy” As the Eye is formed, such are
its Powers. You certainly Mistake, when you say that the Visions of Fancy are not to be found in this
World. To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination, & I Feel Flatter’d when I
a told so. If the doors of perception were cleansed and everything appeared to man as it is,
infinite, there would not only be a general transformation of men’s view of this world, but also,
be a literal transformation of this world itself, and apocalypse: men would re-establish society
on a new foundation, forming laws of freedom and love instead of repression, abolishing every
kind of tyranny that prevents man from realizing his potentialities, and celebrating the divinity
that is in every man. [Revolution]
Spiritual perception is flexible. However, Man must keep the larger order of things in mind if
he is going to realize his potentialities for beauty and joy, individually and socially even when
using the practical vision needed for everyday life, so ordinary actions are consistent with it.
2. His Doctrine of Contraries → what life will be like in Eden
The simplicity of Eden is the simplicity of wisdom when combined with vision (innocence).
Edenic Human life is characterized by a dynamic creativeness. A Human world must be
informed by opposed yet positive and complementary forces which, when allowed to interact
without external restraint, impart to life a motion and a tension that make it creative.
Blake’s contraries (cosmic forces) neither progress (Hegel), disappear (Cusa) nor alternate
(Tsao Yan) because they polarize human life and are immanent in every individual.
- Contaries freely interact, the only “progression” there is in this world is that of continued
creativeness, and not an abstract systematic progression.

5
Different from Locke’s spiritual perception, a superior kind of physical sense perception that allows
spirits to see secondary qualities, imperceptible powers in objects, which produce primary or
perceptible qualities.
 - The contrary forces of life do not become in any sense identical in the cosmic man, but
remain as oppositions which give the cosmos (God, man, and all of creation) its Human
vitality and energetic nature.
- Blake’s contraries interact simultaneously instead of functioning alternatively.
Everything has an eternal “identity” in the cosmic scheme as either active or passive contrary.
Negations are not contraries for such an opposition would produce only destruction, they act
positively in complementary directions (creative imagination / ordering reason; idea / form). To
see qualities of things as vital, necessary contraries is to live in a Human world of vision and
imagination, whereas to see them as negations is to live in the fallen world of materialism and
repressive social, religious and politic laws (contraries are distorted and divided into good and
evil). Every individual contains the two contraries and is itself, in turn, “identified” as one of the
contraries (immanent) in the unity of the cosmic One Man, of whom we are Members.
Materialists apply to the contraries the normative moral designations of “good” and “evil” and
make them abstract, cut them off from substance and give them a spectral independence as
moral and political laws, and even as gods. The abstract thinkers have mistaken the nature of
the Real and can’t see that everything that lives is in an organic vitality of contrariety, and
when they do, they do so in normative moral terms, which imply the need for one of the
opposed forces to suppress the other.
Men must reject the divisive moral categories which now pit one half of creating against the
other half in destructive conflict, and learn to see creation as a Human unity in Christ.
In the last part of The Marriage there sounds a slightly less positive note, in the shift back to
ironic point of view in which anyone who embraces energy becomes a “devil”. Blake found
that the dialectics of his initial formulation of the doctrine of contraries, in which the oppositions
now splitting this world could in fact be transformed into fruitful contraries. He no doubt saw
that the intellectual battles of an Edenic mental war of art and science were not to be fought
las long as corporeal wars take place.

ANDREW SANDERS - William Blake

William Blake (1757-1827) worked in obscurity: his most circulated works amongst his
contemporaries were Songs of Innocence and of Experience of which only 22 of 1st ed. and
27 of 2nd ed. copies were printed.
He was born into a Dissenting tradition; he remained a religious, political and artistic radical
throughout his life.
From his childhood, he insisted that he had been granted visions by God and that he could
translate and interpret those visions as designs which interfused picture and word.
Blake’s works interrelate image and text: he had been trained as an engraver, he would
transfer the written text of a poem to an etched copper plate and accompany it with appropriate
illustration or decoration. The page was elaborately hand-coloured. Text and picture together
form a total text in which different signs prove to be co-operative, manifold and even
contradictory.
Blake’s literary sources and inspirations range from the Bible an the Bible-derived epic
structures of Dante and Milton to moralizing children’s poetry, the hymnological tradition in
English verse6 and the records of the eccentric Swedish visionary and mystic Emanuel
Swedenborg (1688-1772).

6
However, the very subtlety and elusive ambiguity of most of Blake’s lyrics have generally
denied them repetitive melodic musical settings and over exposure in narrow or sectarian
contexts.
Blake’s work is in many ways both eclectic and syncretic. It is pervaded with the symbolism,
imagery and prophetic utterance of the Bible but Blake also identifies himself both with Milton
and with the angels, both fallen and unfallen, who figure in Milton’s narrative.
Blake became disillusioned with Swedenborg’s all-embracing “Church of the New Jerusalem”
and parodied the pompous declamatory style of Swedenborg’s writings. His redefinitions of
Swedenborg’s cosmology included the celebration of “contraries” and the opposed ways of
feeling, seeing and believing which were closer to obscure mysticism. Boehme argued that
God the Father was the undefinable matter of the universe containing the germs of both good
and evil.
Blake sees Heaven as forming part of a framework which must merge with the creaive energy
of Hell rather than stand in opposition to it. The “doors of perception” are cleansed by an
apocalyptic transformation of categories so that contraries meet in newly energetic formations.
The contraries of Blake’s symbolism ought to be perceived as integral elements in the dynamic
of synthesis which he saw as implicit in creation.
Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) describe contrary states of feeling
and seeing. The songs of both books are interrelated, not simply as reflecting oppositions, but
as a series of shifting perceptions. The work suggests a kind of dialectic in which there is a
falling away from Edenic innocence to experience and a progress towards a Christ-inspired
“higher” innocence and a future regain of paradise. Hymn-like simplicity, nursery-rhyme
rhythms. The Songs of Innocence frequently suggest challenges to and corruptions of the
innocent state; infant joy/suffering. The “wisdom” of the old is generally equated with
oppression in the Songs of Experience, poems with a far greater satirical, even sarcastic edge.
Parents, nurses, priests, and the calculating force of human reason serve to limit and confine
what once was innocent. At the end of Songs of Experience the piper who had introduced the
first sequence is replaced by an “Ancient Bard” who sees “Present, Past and Future”, who
moved beyond a past state of innocence into a present awareness of the Fall; as a poet, he
has heard the word of God: he is aware that the fallen condition of humankind need not be
permanent.
Blake’s proclamation of liberty takes many forms in his later mythological work, generally
known as the Prophetic Books.
A prophet, according to Blake, is a Seer, not an Arbitrary Dictator. Men are admitted into
Heaven not because they have governed their Passions, but because they have Cultivated
their Understandings. Blake’s search for new patterns of religious symbolism and experience,
and his creation of an experimental mythology was an essentially Protestant yearning for an
imaginative faith free of dogmatic assertion. Heretical belief that Christians were set free by
grace from the need to observe the old, restrictive moral law.

ANDREW SANDERS- WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

To his public, an uncommitted radical despite his strong sympathies with the ideas and the
achievements of the Revolution and the passionate radicalism of his unpublished work. Poetry
of rural place, character and of communal relationships. Find an appropriate language to
describe humble and rustic life, because in that condition “the essential passions of the heart
find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity” and because they “speak a plainer and
more emphatic language” For WW, no such alternative to “standard” English seemed
appropriate to poetry, however radical his desire to break with the artificialities of the tradition
he ad inherited from the poets of the eighteenth century. His viewpoint on humble and rustic
life demanded an expression of passions and values which stand apart from those of an
exclusively aristocratic or urban civilization and from the decorous language of pastoral
tradition. His early poetry is radical because it attempts to shift a literary perspective away
from what he saw as gentility and false sophistication. Ambition to begin a process of literary
reform.
His early poetry is also marked by protest against unnecessary or imposed suffering, injustice,
incomprehension and inhumanity. This is because he is against the physically ugly and
socially challenging background of the rapid pace of the industrialization of much Britain at the
end of the 18th century. Growing up surrounded by mountains, he developed an acute
sensitivity to wild nature and to the co-operative workings of humankind and nature. He
defined himself through his perception of the natural (as opposed to the mechanical) world
around him and tended to order his political and social ideas according to the patterns of
mutual responsibility he observed in rural (as opposed to urban) contexts. The intensity of his
expressed love of nature and its teachings seem to preclude the perceptions related to the
acute class division inherent in urban industrialization, in the related depopulation of the
countryside or in the explosion of social questioning of the FR. The understanding of society
is essentially secondary to, and derivative from, the primary and essential experience of a
natural world still largely undamaged by human mismanagement. Redefinition of the proper
subjects and objects of poetry.
- morally educative influence of nature
- interrelationship of a love of nature and a love of humanity
- seeks retired life and solitude: imagination is at its freest, it is possible to observe the
surroundings without distraction. WW’s ambition to speak as “a man speaking to men”
implies not only a listener but a community of listeners. The solitary walker should not
be seen as an isolated or self-centered speaker. The interlocutors in his poetry are all
engaged in conversation by a narrator, and the words of all serve to alter and expand
the narrator’s perception. He sought to move from solitary contemplation to public
statement.
- WW’s poetry moves beyond the mere loco-description of his predecessors who sought
to order nature selectively: ecstatic accounts of the awing grandeur of nature; delicacy
of occasional observation; incantatory recall of sight and sound (ODE). His
representation of nature is dynamic, panoramic, variously lit, multitudinous and shot
through with the creative energy of God. Landscape in WW is at once useful and
massive, historic and impersonal, peopled and empty, readable yet infinitely larger
than its reader.

KATHLEEN RAINE - “WORDSWORTH: A REMEMBERED EXPERIENCE”

Belief in a new dawn after the French Revolution, in mankind’s innate goodness, once freed
from tyranny. The politics of time however is a secondary matter to the politics of eternity,
which is he real concern of the “unacknowledged legislators of the world”, the poets.
When He returned to the loved places after his adventure in London and France, these were
no longer the places he remembered for he was no longer the same child. His story tells of
Paradise Lost, a loss unaccepted by him, for despite he returned to his childhood home he
never again re-entered the living experience of “nature” he had known. For he himself had
undergone the first shocks of a revolution which was not to realize those high hopes of his for
mankind, but rather to sweep away that rural culture which from time immemorial had been
the norm of human life on earth: not for the Promised Land but for the exile of modern industrial
cities. He had left that primordial world and its timeless ways to become a stranger in a strange
land (Cambridge).
Wordsworth experience is an affirmation of the timeless, the permanent and a celebration of
the enduring grass roots of life, in harmony with the cosmos itself, whose children we are.
Nature’s protective embrace and the wisdom of her teaching. People moved in, not through,
their world. His greatness lies in bearing witness to that age-old norm, the ever-changing
never-changing epiphany of nature.
It was Wordsworth decision to “choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate
or describe them throughout, as far as possible, in a selection of language really used by men”.
It may have been a political response to a changing society which threatened the age-old
norm. Being unlettered, theirs was a spoken language inherited from an ancestral past, a
regional speech which, like every oral tradition, possessed many virtues already lost to written
language. It has lost the resonance of ancestral memories of people inheriting words from
their ancestors and ancestral sanctities. He understood it as a language common to men
because it bore the universal deep experiences of life and death; the universal language of
Eden, escapes the hampering of poetic conventions.
WW’s political enthusiasms found an echo which had more to do with history than with poetry.
The pastoral Golden Age is an archetypal reality of the Imagination present in WW’s poetry.
But he was also the voice of a revolution of consciousness, a reorientation of the national soul,
sustained by the Christian religion within a framework of theological terms no longer adequate.
WW’s profound insight into nature was rather cosmological than theological.
The experience of the mystic went beyond those structures available to his time and place: for
him “nature” was alive, sometimes fearfully so.
A part in WW’s imaginative experience was surely the Greek revival, thanks to Thomas
Taylor’s translations of Plato and the neo-platonists.
- Pre-existence of the soul: descent of souls about to be generated on earth, who on their way
cross “the plain of oblivion” and “the river of forgetfulness” of which all must drink. Some souls
drink so deeply of this river as to forget entirely the heavenly world; others who drink less
deeply reach this world “not in entire forgetfulness”. This has no part in Christian theology. Life
is the soulsç’s “death” or forgetfulness, yet “haunted forever by the eternal mind” WW’s
describes the fall of the soul not as a belief but as a living experience.
- The one life that “rolls through all things” in nature. Plotinus says that whatever creature that
unfolds to the completion of its nature (its “purpose”, a “term pursued by inborn tendency”), it
must be allowed to be happy. WW’s poetry has the spontaneous simplicity of an immediate
thought which had come to the poet from the “grove”, which inspired in him the conviction that
even the very plants enjoyed pleasure.
- Plotinus: Nature images and reflects the soul. No political liberation from external “tyranny”
can effect that transmutation of mortal life. Alchemy can be transformative of nature.
(Coleridge and WW) WW discovers in nature its objective correlative; he finds its
correspondences in both the minute and in the vast, as Imagination continually discovers its
fitting symbols in the epiphanic flow of the world of nature daily opening before our eyes. WW
continually returns to a living experience of nature as meaning, a continual invitation to the
beholder to communion with the great cosmic mystery and the microcosm of Man.
He was not recording his individual experiences because they were unique, but because they
were universal. He assumed the role of Everyman, because it is through the uniqueness of
the individual self through whose mediation alone we perceive the world, singular to each yet
common to all. He took on to explore his own particular ego in the name of anonymity. His
own story as a window on the world, offering us images through which we can enter the world
as he experienced it. Nature as WW experienced it, is indeed everyman’s heritage, whether
born in the country or in the city.
ANDREW SANDERS- SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
Most of Coleridge’s early work is tinged by radicalism and by an urge to proclaim a political
cause.
1975: Coleridge meets Wordsworth, when Coleridge’s political commitment was at its height
and his denunciation of monarchy and aristocracy at its most fiery. Both had a revolutionary
enthusiasm for change in society and literature (10 years aprox.) and later in a compensating
ready response to a nature charged with the glory and power of God. Both visionary poems
“The Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan” were composed in the period of his closes association
with Wordsworth, from the midsummer of 1797 to the end of 1798.
The Ancient Mariner: C’s most memorable contribution to Lyrical Ballads, planed jointly with
Wordsworth. The poem takes the form of a voyage of discovery, but it is also a psychodrama
concerned with the guilt and expiation of a Cain-like figure, an arbitrary “murderer” of a
“Christian soul”.
“The Ancient Mariner” Religious voyage of discovery

Character Outcast Pilgrim

Experience Tangled, bewildering. Witness of an Definable spiritual milestones

invisible action which interpenetrates Progressively overcomes
the physical world. obstacles

Discovery Meanings concerning the Consequences of breaking taboos

interdependency of life

Route back Requires suffering → pain explored Requires suffering

in the context of benevolence

Truth as Affirmation of universal harmony Religious formulae

Kubla Khan (1979) much of its exotic imagery comes from C’s wide reading of mythology,
history and comparative religion. It remains a riddle, a pattern of vivid definitions amid a
general lack of definition, expressed with a rhythmic forward drive which suggests a mind
taken over by a process of semi-automatic composition.
1790: disillusion with France. 1798 → he distinguishes the “spirit of divinest Liberty” to be found

implicitly and explicitly in nature, from the false spirit of France (slavery).

1800: C notices the decay of an imaginative joy fed by “outward forms” → imagination is no

longer subject to external stiumuli; alternative inspiration → inward vision. With the dissipation

of his “visionary gleam” he grew more interested in the processes and implications of critical

theory of themes ranging from literature and the workings of the mind to religion and the

development of society. He speculates around the ultimate unity and indivisibility in Creation.
Contraries and complementary states of being that, unlike Blake’s, were interdependent, a
whole. Continuity in self-consciousness as the dynamic of human creativity.
Meditations on the nature of poetic imagination.
Fancy: It is the mode of memory emancipated from time and space. Fancy is what we call
memory. (Blake’s 1st and 2nd) Association of images is done mechanically without creative
power. Only combines images and impressions without fusing them.
Imagination: Creative power; unifies contrasting qualities and transforms to bring into unity
what it perceives.
- Primary imagination: prime agent of all human perception; a repetition in the finite
mind of the eternal act of creation, a reflection of the working mind of the Creator
himself. (Common to all human beings) Fusion of perception and the human individual
power to produce images, the power to give chaos a certain order, to form concepts
and produce communications (Blake’s 3rd)
- Secondary imagination: identical with the primary in the kind of its agency and
differing only in degree and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses,
dissipates in order to recreate (or where this process is impossible it struggles to
idealize and to unify) (only poets have it). The mind creatively perceiving, growing,
selecting and shaping the stimuli of nature into new wholes. The poetic faculty that
gives shape and order to a given world and also builds new ones. Demands to break
the existing power and combine pieces to form something new. It’s the poetic vision
which unifies and reconciles opposite and discordant elements. It’s the conscious use
of this power and creates new harmonies of meaning. The poet recreates the
transcendental world. (Blake’s fourth)
Notas de clase
Sources
Purchas’s Pilgrimage (mention in the preface): The book contained a brief description of
Xanadu, the summer capital of the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan. The text about Xanadu reads:
In Xandu did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace, encompassing sixteen miles of plaine ground
with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs, delightfull streames, and all sorts
of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure,
which may be moved from place to place.
Marco Polo: The previous quotation was based upon the writings of the Venetian explorer
Marco Polo who is believed to have visited Xanadu in about 1275. His description Xanadu
includes these lines: And when you have ridden three days from the city last mentioned
(Cambalu, or modern Beijing) you come to a city called Chandu, built by the Khan. There is at
this place a very fine marble Palace, the rooms of which are all gilt and painted with figures of
men and beasts and birds, and with a variety of trees and flowers, all executed with such
exquisite art that you regard them with delight and astonishment. Round this Palace a wall is
built and inside the Park there are fountains and rivers and beautiful meadows, with all kinds
of wild animals, which the Emperor has procured and placed there. This was the "sumptuous
house of pleasure" mentioned by Purchas, which Coleridge transformed into a "stately
pleasure dome".

KATHLEEN RAINE - TRADITIONAL SYMBOLISM IN KUBLA KHAN

Since positivism based on physical science substituted Christian and pre-Christian European
civilization as a context of reference for poetry, the discourse of such poets became
meaningless because its universe of reference is no longer known. Now, metaphorical
discourse is mistaken for naturalistic description, symbol is mistaken for image.
Coleridge: agent in the renaissance of poetry which followed upon a return to traditional values
and to the traditional symbolic language. He was one of the few man of his age to observe or
consider the question of dreams; he made several observations on the way in which the
dreaming mind will misinterpret some physical sensation. He has also written about the traits
of memory that link by association something read the day before with something remembered
from childhood. In reading Coleridge’s sources, the richness of his knowledge and the
vividness of his memory for the minute particulars of an image described or seen with his own
eyes are demonstrated.
The attempt to interpret the poem on Freudian lines gave place to Jung’s imaginatively richer
discoveries of an innate confirmation of archetypes which tend to appear in similar forms in
the myths of all religions, and also in dreams and visions. Plato: awakening of innate
knowledge we did not know ourselves to possess. There seem to be certain typical figures of
the Paradise archetype (as described in Genesis and, most of all, in Milton’s Paradise Lost)-
the tree, the river, the wall, the singing birds,serpent, the clash of swords, the fruit - of which
no single vision has all. This archetypal theme could be traced throughout the whole history
of European poetry and myth, for for imaginative poetry, far from being "subjective" and
"personal," tends to use and perpetuate traditional images in which "the age-long memoried
self" has been repeatedly embodied.
There is also a learning of the imagination, which becomes accessible only to those who know
how to use it to interpret the world. All poets cross a frontier from the personal world into the
world of those experiences which lie beyond the reach of our everyday conscious-ness, but to
which, in our moments of greatest vision—of expanded consciousness, we have occasional
glimpses.
The entire European tradition of imaginative poetry proves to be strung upon a single thread:
the same symbolic language and discourse of the world of the imagination. Far from
introducing obscurity and confusion, a knowledge of these themes draws aside a veil, so that
we read familiar works with a new clarity and depth of understanding.
Traditional art is at once the embodiment and the normal means of transmission of imaginative
knowledge. In Europe the symbolic language of tradition, woven and interwoven both within
and outside Christianity, is basically Platonic and neo-Platonic. When Coleridge was still a
schoolboy, the foundations of the great poetry of the Romantic movement were being laid by
the Thomas Taylor the Platonist, the first translator of Platonists (from 1780 to 1800) into the
English language. He also wrote essays on the neo-platonic use of ancient myths as the
natural language of metaphysical thought. It was of these themes that Coleridge’s mind was
full at the time he wrote the poem. Details of the imagery are of course added from personal
associations or recent reading, strung upon the common symbolic knowledge, “grammatically”
used. These symbols are the expression of certain basic elements in man’s spiritual
experience. They are like “the words of a language which speaks of the unspeakable”.
The tree of God (Jewish): symbol of the whole of manifested being, sometimes also
conceived as a sacred river (river of life) through which the creative power flows down from
the unmanifested source (a cave7), the divine origin, to the lowest plane of manifestation,
matter (invariably symbolized by water, on account of its continual flux): the sunless (the
farthest point from the source or divine light) sea.
Reflection in water: used by platonists, the temporal world as a reflection of the eternal forms,
a moving image of eternity (which is a sphere)
All knowledge, Plato says, is remembrance in time and by the individual of permanent
intellectual realities and the harmonious order which underlies all things (and not memory of
events of time or of the individual life).

7
Plato’s use of the symbol. Darkness.
Abyssnia: the country of the long-undiscovered source of the Nile, a symbol of all inaccessible
sources; the mountain summit of Paradise where the garden is traditionally situated (the Fall
is a “forgetting” of eternity; the summit of man’s consciousness is the state in which he
continuously lived before the fall). Also abyss: the depths of darkness or light.
Kubla Khan is at once, finished, and forever unfinished; and what remains to be written--that
to which the poet is at the end of the poem looking—is all the poetry which might be drawn
from the inexhaustible riches of the world into which he has seen. Therefore at the end of the
poem the poet himself, and his reader, has the sense of standing at the beginning, the
threshold itself of the archetypal world.
THE ANCIENT MARINER - MAURICE BOWRA
Cult of strangeness: an “outmoded” subject. Gothic influence. Gives concrete form to dreams,
fuses the heterogeneous elements of his reading and satisfies his own ideas of what a poem
ought to be. In the plan of the Lyrical Ballads, WW was to take the subjects “chosen from
ordinary life,” and Coleridge was to deal with situations in which the incidents and agents were
to be supernatural and to give a dramatic truth to the emotions that would naturally accompany
such situations, supposing them real. It should be as human and as compelling as poetry of
everyday things. The setting is not gothic, but a boundless sea with hopeless as well as
hopeful days. It touches on guilt and remorse, suffering and relief, hate and forgiveness, grief
and joy, vividly.
Since the supernatural was outmoded, he must relate it to sth which everyone knew and
understood and he did this by exploiting some of the characteristics of dream:
- curiously vivid quality (often lacking in waking impressions). The poem moves in
abrupt and distinct stages.
- Since the critical self is not at work, the effect is more haunting than most effects when
we are awake. If we remember them, we do so very clearly, even though they are quite
absurd by rational standards and have no direct relation to our waking life. It clings
to the memory, just as on waking it is difficult at first to disentangle ordinary
experience from influences which still survive from sleep.
- Stir elementary emotions in a very direct way, though we do not at the time ask why
this happens or understand it, but accept it without question as a fact. Its emotional
impacts change rapidly but come with an unusual force.
This imaginary world has its own rules, which are different from ours and yet touch some
familiar chord in us (myth). It has an inner coherence, which creates its own causal relations
between events, giving the sensation that things should happen as they do.
Coleridge has the aim of transferring from our inward nature a human interest and a
semblance of truth sufficient to procure for the shadows of imagination that willing suspension
of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. In ordinary dreams we do not judge
the objects to be real; - we simply do not determine that they are unreal.
Though Coleridge begins by appealing to our experience of dreams, he so uses it as to present
something which is more solid and more reasonable and more human than the most haunting
dreams. Coleridge exercises an imaginative realism: however unnatural his events may be,
they are formed from natural elements that appeal to common experience, and for this reason
we believe in them. Once we have entered this imaginary world, we do not feel that it is beyond
our comprehension, but respond to it as we would to actual life. He sees that his subject is
real both for the eye and for the emotions, that it has both the attraction of visible things and
the significance which belongs to actions of grave import. Amid all the strange happenings
nature remains itself, and its perseverance in its own ways sometimes comes in ironical
contrast to what happens on the ship.
 - realistic treatment of the setting
- appeal to our emotions in handling human persons: their agonies are simply and
universally human.
- The way in which C handles physical sensations as we know them in a waking
state creates a powerful emotional effect.
- The same is true of mental states: C shows the authentic anguish of a man
who feels himself abandoned both by God and man and faced with the
emptiness of his guilty and tormented soul. He understood the extremes of
despair and of joy and the poem moves between such extremes, reflecting
through its variations the light and the shadow of human life.
The paradoxical nature of the Mariner’s voyage from England to the Southern Pacific, from
the known to the unknown, from the familiar to the impossible, is conveyed in a verse which
begins with something delightfully friendly and the, without ado, breaks into an uncharted,
spell-bound world.
C’s eye for nature is for its most subtle charms and less obvious appeals. In his choice of
details, in the richer and more luxurious pleasure which he takes in some natural things, we
can see his own style. Nature was no moral teacher for Coleridge; he preferred to enjoy it
without any ulterior satisfaction that it was doing him good. He could describe scenes which
he himself never saw, he was able to see with the mind’s eye, as if objects were literally in
front of him.
Coleridge knew how to use his senses despite his love of metaphysical abstraction. He used
nature to give colour and music, solidity and perspective to his creations.
He said that the moral in this poem is too emphatically expressed and that he intended no
secondary meaning. He seems to rule out any attempt to explain his practice by his theories.
The “willing suspension of disbelief” is hardly a state in which we look for ulterior meanings
and concealed mysteries.
Coleridge believed in the imagination as a vehicle of truth. There are moments in which TAM
breaks beyond illusion and calls to something deep in us. He thought that the “secondary
imagination” with which poetry is concerned, is itself concerned with eternal values. He slips
into this poem his notion of the values which it represents. It is an all-embracing theory of love
between living creatures. It involves grave questions of right and wrong, of crime and
punishment. The reader is at some point disturbed and troubled by it.
In C’s words: a symbol is characterized by a translucence of the special in the individual, or of
the general in the special, or of the universal in the general; above all by the translucence of
the eternal through and in the temporal. By “eternal” he means belonging to the world of
absolute values, a symbol’s task is to present in poetry an instance of a universal truth. The
story is enriched with something vague and remote and yet intimate and important.
TAM is, in other words, a myth, an extension of the use of symbols which can deal with
supernatural issues. It presents in an unusual and lively form certain issues with which we are
all familiar and forces us to look afresh at them. It first dissociates certain ideas and then gives
a new appeal to them by setting them in new associations. In this way, it gives a fresh
emphasis to matters that we know but to which custom has dulled us. By creating an
impossible story in impossible conditions, it draws attention to neglected or undiscovered
truths. The task of poetry is to reveal the secrets of the universe, especially in the sphere of
absolute values. Myths are necessary for this since they enable the poet to rearrange familiar
material in such a way that we see fundamental issues in their true nature because of the vivid
illumination which the imagination gives to them.
Coleridge puts into his myth the essential qualities which make crime and punishment what
they are and shows what they mean to the conscience when it is sharpened and clarified by
imagination.
SECTION 1: the actual crime. Seems like a matter of little moment. It does not explain the
why. What matters is precisely the uncertainty of the Mariner’s motives, for this illustrates the
essential irrationality of crime which is performed in many cases due to a simple perversity of
the will. It is a crime against nature (a creature created by God) and the sanctified relations of
guest and host, that breaks a sacred law of life. In his action we see the essential frivolity of
many crimes against humanity and the ordered system of the world. Based upon neo-platonic
ideas of the brotherhood of all living things.
SECTION 2: C transfers to the physical world the corruption and the helplessness which are
the common atributes of guilt. The immediate results of crime are portrayed in the image of a
universe dying of thirst and haunted by menacing phantoms.
SECTION 3: shows how the guilty soul becomes conscious of what it has done and of its
isolation in the world (robbed of familiar ties).
SECTION 4: the guilty soul is cut off not merely from human relationships but from the
consoling friendship of nature which mocks it with detachment. When the Mariner blesses the
water-snakes, unaware, he begins to re-establish relations with the world of the affection. Love
holds everything together.
SECTION 5: continues the process of the soul’s revival. Before he can be fully healed, he
must establish relations not merely with men but with God, which he begins to do.
SECTION 6: the process of healing seems to be impeded. Symbol of remorse: the Mariner
haunted by memories. Because remorse brings repentance and humility, God forgives him
(God forgives even the most hard-hearted sinners if they will only be ready to receive it).
SECTION 7: the guilty man has been restored to a place among living men. Most of the visible
traces of his crime have been obliterated, but he will never be the man that he once was. Need
for confession. C leaves us to suppose that the Mariner’s sense of guilt will end only with his
death.
CRIME → PUNISHMENT → REDEMPTION (as possible)
For C life had both its dark and its bright sides, its haunting responsibilities and its moments
of light. He saw that the two were closely interwoven and that he must introduce both into his
poem if he were to speak with the full force of his genius. He knew that any work of creation
must itself be an extension and an enhancement of life. He must preserve the mystery and
the enchantment which for him came from the beauty of the visible world and the uncharted
corners of the human soul.
To allow his creative gifts to work unhindered, Coleridge needed subjects remote from his
ordinary existence. Only when he was free from the topics which engaged his philosophic
curiosity was he able to release all his imaginative powers. He keeps at distance from his
habits of abstract thought to convey in a vivid form some fundamental truths which may be
fogged or lost in a more literal treatment. He had a sense of mystery at unknown forces at
work in life. Like Blake, he saw strange powers behind the visible world, and he believed hat
men were moved and directed by them. To show what he really saw in them he needed
characters and circumstances in themselves strange and arresting. The supernatural clarified
his ideas for him and enabled him to present in concrete shapes many feelings and
apprehensions which were no less haunting because they were undefined. Coleridge offers
an alternative to familiar existence which is at the same time an illuminating commentary on
it, and which cames from his prophetic insight into himself. He was to suffer from the discordant
contrast between reality and dream, between blissful confidence and bitter, broken hopes,
between the warmth of human ties and the cold solitude of the haunted soul. His poem creates
not a negative but a positive condition of faith which is complete and satisfying because it is
founded on realities in the living world and in the human heart.
POETRY ARCHIVE - FELICIA HEMANS & CASABIANCA
Liverpool 1793- Dublin 1835
This ship was engaged in the battle of the Nile fought between Napoleon and the English on
August 1, 1798. Nelson was in command of the English fleet, and won one of his greatest
victories. During the battle the French Admiral Brueys was mortally wounded, and was left on
the deck of his ship. As night came on the ship was seen to be on fire, and Nelson ordered
his men to board her and rescue the officers and crew. All the Frenchmen left except the boy
Casabianca, who refused to go, saying that his father had told him not to leave the ship, and
that he could not disobey that order.
The man-of-war was in danger of blowing up at any minute, and the English sailors had to put
off in their boats. They had barely time to pull away before the flames reached the powder and
the ship exploded.
There is no historical proof that such a boy took part in any of the battles to which this history
is ascribed.
[MELLOR]
The best known poem written by a woman in Romanticism, published in 1826 but based on a
true event during the Battle of the Nile in 1798, FH focuses entirely on the fate of the ten-year-
old son of the Admiral of the French fleet. Ordered by his father to remain at his post, the
young Giacomo Casabianca calls again and again to his unconscious, dying father as the
flames of the burning ship circle round him. With the violet breaking apart of the boy’s heart,
Hemans also breaks apart any code of military obedience that needlessly sacrifices its young
to a futile gesture, to the false belief that war is a method of social preservation and
regeneration.
ANNE K. MELLOR - ROMANTICISM, DIFFERENCE AND THE AESTHETIC
Until the early 1980s, scholars tended to define Romanticism as
- a celebration of the capacities of the overflow of powerful feeling and the unique
creations of the liberated imagination, (and a condemnation of the restraints of
Enlightenment rationality)
- an exploration of the limitations of finite human language in the face of this divinity,
- a search for transcendence or a heavenly “unity of being,”
- a concern with the development of an autonomous self or subject,
- an affirmation of the role of the poet as a political or religious leader who could initiate
a redemptive political revolution that would realise the goals of “liberty, equality and
fraternity” of the French Revolution.
Abrams. Poems → a quest that begins with the child’s unconscious conviction of a primal

oneness between himself and Mother Nature. The poet then falls away from that communion

into an experience of alienated sef-consciousness and isolation. This fall enables the poet to

learn the powers inherent in consciousness itself, he is in a higher state of consciousness that

transcends the material world and he understands the ultimate harmony between the workings

of nature and his own mind. Rewriting of paradise lost and regained.
Late 1970s and early 1980s → the Yale Schools generates a deconstructive concern with

Romantic irony and the instabilities of poetic forms and figures

1938 → challenge to both paradigms. Argues that critics and teachers of English Romantic

poems had themselves imbibed the values and ideological commitments of the poets they

studied. The working assumption that this literary movement consisted primarily of only six -

male- poets effectively erased from our academic and cultural consciousness the fact that

numerous women had written and published in England between 1780 and 1840 and that the

best-selling poet was a woman (Felicia Hemans)

Mellor defines feminine romanticism in contrast with canonical romanticism.
Genres employed by feminine romanticism:
- Poetry: those which celebrate the quotidian, the domestic and social involvements of
everyday life
- Sonnet
- Occasional verse
- The lyrical tale
- The verse epistle
- Domestic drama
- comedy
- tragedy
- Novel: enables the author to represent in the vernacular a human community whose
multiple relationships exist over time

Canonical romanticism Feminine Romanticism

Ground of social an autonomous self a self that derived its identity from a
and political family or social community, a self
organizations that was fluid, absorptive, responsive,
with permeable ego boundaries
(subjectivity constructed primarily in
relation to other subjectivities)

Method violent military revolutions gradual social reform

Committed to ethic of justice based on the ethic of care based on the concept of
abstract rights of the “family”
individual

Nature a source of divine creative a female friend or sister with needs and
inspiration capacities, one who both provides
support and requires cultivations, with
whose life-giving powers one willingly
cooperates

Moral reform is utopian imaginative vision communal exercise of reason,

achieved by moderation, tolerance and the domestic
affections

Female Lacking intellectual Rational capacities, moral superiority

capacity, inferior physical
and moral abilities
 1.French Focus on the heroic Focus on the innocent victims of the
Revolution victories war
-CASABIANCA-

2.Slave trade Tended to ignore it Condemned it because it violated

domestic affections

3.Class conflict Celebrate the advent of a Promote a gradual, ameliorationist

classless society, a approach to social reform. They
communist democracy in accepted the existence of class
which all individuals would stratification, but they envisioned a
hold exactly the same rights steady evolution of the bourgeois
and properties. middle class to a position of social and
political dominance.

4. Religion Rejected the established Identified strongly with established

church as an instrument of religious churches. Tradition of female
social oppression. Christian preachers and prophets who
Promoted an allegiance of based their right to speak in public on
the divine creative the authority of the Bible itself. Because
imagination as the agent of they openly defined themselves as
both spiritual wisdom and Christians, they could claim a dominant
personal salvation. political role as the arbiters of morality
Imagination: the presence and justice.
of God within man

Inspiration divine authority /poetic divine authority grounded in a

genius revisionist reading of the Holy Scripture

1993 → another category of difference (racial) has been added to the analyses: the multiple

ways in which English Romantic texts were caught up in the greatest social and religious

movements of the time:

- the expansion of the East India Company’s economic and political control over India
- the campaign to end the British slave trade and to abolish slavery in the West Indian
colonies
II
Major social and political issues of the day:
- the French Revolution
- the rights of women
- the slave trade and abolitionist campaigns
- the new science and technology
- the growth of England’s colonial empire
1. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. The first generation of the canonical Romantic poets,
Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge, initially hailed the FR as the harbinger of a new era of
human freedom, in which the universal rights of the common man would at least be politically
institutionalized and the tyrannies of the ancient regime would disappear. As the FR spiralled
out of control, all reconsidered their commitment to political revolution as a method for social
reform; nonetheless, they continued to see radical social change as both desirable and
achievable, ideally under the guidance of that “unacknowledged legislator of the world,” the
poet.
2. SLAVE TRADE. For women writers the issue of enslavement resonated at a very personal
level. Many argued that the legal construction of the British wife as under the “cover” of her
husband meant that she lived in a legal bondage to her husband that differed very little from
West Indian slavery.
3. CLASS CONFLICT. Wordsworth dreamt of a liberal democracy, the reign of the common
man, under the tutelage of the poet-prophet. Austen → ideal of an empowered middle class
that combines the good breeding of the aristocracy with he energy and intelligence of the
educated professional; a middle class that promoted a new nationalist definition of the true
Briton as educated, industrious, thrifty, sober and above all moral and Christian.
III
Rejection of the traditional definitions of Romanticism as primarily an aesthetic category.
Romanticism cannot be understood as a reaction against Enlightement Neoclassicism, nor
can Victorianism be seen as a reaction against Romanticism. Canonical Romantic poets are
rather marginal, the novel dominated the literary stage and the real hallmarks are the
commitment to
- rationality
- the virtues of domesticity and the familial affections
- the preservation of social cohesion and community
Cultural dialogue between competing public discourses:
- commitment to a visionary ideology of radical social change and personal
transcendence,
- commitment the liberation and triumph of working-class consciousness,
- commitment to aristocratic and French-inflected libertinism,
- commitment to the growth and political control of a bourgeois domestic ideology and
Christian morality
Behind the enduring questions of how to protect the rights of men and of women, of how to
ameliorate class conflict, how to maintain both prosperity and peace and how to sustain
meaningful community lies an implicit engagement with romance, specifically with the
romance of progress or at the very least of process, the belief that the lives of men and women
will change and can be improved. Also, there is a shared conviction that it is the unique
responsibility of the writer to educate his or her readers to see that whatever is, is not yet good
enough.
IV
We must recuperate a concept of the aesthetic as an aspect of the ethical, as the fusion of
content and form.