WICKES
08-22-2013, 05:14 PM
I have been working my way through an anthology of Romantic poetry and reading the notes as I go. In these notes, and in the preface to the work, the editors frequently refer to the importance of imagination in Romantic literature. Now this is nothing new to me: I'd read Blake's songs and his Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and was aware that the Romantic poets prized imagination highly. But I've never felt I understand what someone like Blake or Coleridge really mean by the word imagination. To most of us it means pretty much the same as fantasy. If you asked the average person in the street to define it they'd probably say "well, the ability to think up things that aren't there...like Narnia". But I'm pretty sure that's not what Blake meant. Coleridge writes somewhere that 'nature' is 'the language of god' and imagination is the tool with which we read or translate that language. In other words, imagination is the opposite of the man in the street's definition- imagination involves not 'thinking up things that aren't there' but 'seeing what IS there but is missed or overlooked'. For Blake, so far as I can understand him, imagination creates the world (in other words we're talking philosophical Idealism), or rather, imagination IS the world.
What do the Romantics really mean by imagination? Do they mean something similar to what we'd call consciousness?
What do the Romantics really mean by imagination? Do they mean something similar to what we'd call consciousness?