please help me

[messk1990]

this is my first participation in this forum and i wish u could help me:wave::wave::angel:
im making research paper about imagination in romantic poetry . could anyone give me any information ? i will be glad so .
also im facing difficulties in finding examples about this topic from the romantic poetry ......... pleaaaaaaaaaaase helpppppppp:bawling::bawling::brickwall:brickwall

[blank|verse]

Imagination was vital to the Romantics. They were reacting against the onset of the Industrial Revolution and developments in science in Britain, which valued rationalism and logic above day-dreaming. So the day-dreaming poets fought back.

Wordsworth is central to any debate about the Romantics, and believed in the imaginative force of the individual poet as central to creativity. He wrote a lot of poems in the first-person (using 'I...') - which you may know are called lyric poems, hence the famous 'Lyrical Ballads' of 1798. He concentrated on individual genius, which he believed he had, of course - Keats was to mock this as the 'egotistical sublime'. There's a fine line between a genius and a show-off, but fortunately for Wordsworth, he wrote some of the best poems in the English language, so he's forgiven.

(The importance of the individual also ties in with contemporary events - particularly the revolutions in America and France, which replaced monarchies with self-governing democracies.)

Read W's 'Tintern Abbey' - there's bound to be something in there to quote. And the first stanza of his 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality' (called simply 'Ode' ('There was a time...') in some editions) where he mourns the passing of his childhood, because he feels he was more naturally imaginative then. Childhood is also something rated by the Romantics because the imagination plays a superior role in a child's life, before they become rational, logical adults.

Also, his famous 'I wandered lonely as a cloud', sometimes (erroneously) called 'Daffodils', particularly the lines: 'For oft, when on my couch I lie | In vacant or in pensive mood | They flash upon that inward eye | Which is the bliss of solitude'. You could argue his 'inward eye' is memory, not imagination; but what he does with the memory of the daffodils is important - he writes one of the most famous poems in English.

See also 'I am not One who much or oft delight' in which he states: 'Whose mind is but the mind of his own eyes | He is a Slave; the meanest we can meet!' In other words, if you have no imagination to see beyond the superficial, you're not exercising your full faculties as a human.

In the Preface to LB (1802 edition) Wordsworth states the purpose of writing his poems 'is to follow the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by the great and simple affections of our nature' - that's about 4 pages in, in my edition!

Coleridge discusses the Imagination (and how it differs to the then similar term 'Fancy') in his Biographia Literaria (1817). Keats also talked about the importance of the imagination, see his letters. He also wrote a poem called 'Fancy' which is worth checking out, but it could be different from 'Imagination' as with Coleridge.

If you're after a more advanced interpretation, see if you can read MH Abrams's 'The Mirror and the Lamp' (esp. chapter 7) which discusses more philosophical aspects of the imagination. The title of the book itself draws a distinction between the artist as a mirror - merely reflecting what he/she sees - and as a lamp - shining forth their own creativity into the world, because of their imaginative abilities.

Otherwise, Duncan Wu's 'Romanticism: An Anthology' must have something in there about imagination - it's certainly big enough!

And I've not mentioned Blake, who claimed he saw angels in the trees in a London park during his childhood....

Hope that's of some help - if you're still writing your paper!

[Jeremydav]

I wandered Lonely as a Cloud by Wordsworth.