Class 1: Keats & The Romantic Imagination Flashcards
What does Romanticism oppose in neoclassical poetry?
Its formality.
The belief in rationality and control of the passions that characterizes the enlightenment.
They gave a central place to the imagination, believing that people should develop forms of inner-vision.
The Romantics were thus fascinated by mysticism and supernatural life as a quest for knowledge, viewing art as that which is there to explore and actuate creative energy that is latent in mankind and poetry as a place to explore the spirituality of that latent energy
Wordsworth and Coleridge’s poetic agenda
-Should be written in the “language of men” (a more accessible language, ordinary to people, world-shaping, material, breaking with the pedantic/didactic references to the mythology of the Greek world)
-Broke with the trappings of decorum (ex. When trident rewrote King Lear with less violence)
-Exploration of desire, arguing that sensations are more important than rational argument – “Poet must look for meaning in the beautiful and permanent forms of nature”
-Letters in lieu of manifestos and essays; intimate process shared with those closest to him.
Organicism
Poems are just as complex and cohesive as life, living beings, and human people
“If Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.” (Keats, Letter to Taylor, 27 February 1818)
Organicism lent itself to a poetics of
-autonomy (vs. moralization, laying the foundation for art for art’s sake)
-naturalism
-ecstasy and epiphanic revelation (moments of emotional and sensual climax, linked to the pulses of the body and pleasure, gushes, delight):
“Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses.” (Keats, Letter to J. H. Reynolds, 3 May 1818)
The idea that “[a]xioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses” gives a central place to what in Keats’s poetics?
Creation, moving poetry away from mimesis.
Poems are reflexive and not mimetic insofar as rather than imitating life, they are unique, reflexive articulations of it.
Privileging a poetics of creation implied the importance of innovation and originality: before, the poet was a good imitator of the authorities. Now, nature is the authority, and poetry be just an outgrowth of it.
Coleridge’s notion of primary imagination
A power that reveals a higher level of truth that isn’t accessible to consciousness, a power that lies in dreams and visions, has its own language, and feeds our creativity
Coleridge’s notion of secondary imagination
Translates the elusive visions of the primary imagination through language in art and poetry
Fancy
Ability to daydream, bits and pieces of imagery brought together in a whimsical way, or in a way that creates/recomposes monsters and figures through memory–pretty but not necessarily creative
La poésie est visionnaire, mais le poète n’arrive jamais à recréer ses visions
La vision est toujours première. Le mythe fondateur du romanticisme, c’est que l’imagination est le double la raison parce qu’elle rend l’homme divin et lui permet de se rapprocher à Dieu. L’imagination permet aux poètes d’éviter la distinction sujet-objet implicite dans l’industrialisation, qui objective le monde.
Ça traite l’alienation implicite dans ce processus, parce que l’imagination fait partie de la nature. Cf “To Autumn,” un poème au sujet de la tension entre la nature comme créatrice et notre capacité de créer (cf poème..) we do not create but can commune with nature, trouver notre pouvoir créateur à travers notre participation dans cette communauté
La création poétique doit faire partie de l’organicisme, conçu comme force vivante, et la création poétique devrait être un processus de croissance, d’expansion. Les rêves était l’un des manières dont Keats a fait ça, en explorant les interpénétration du bien et du mal, du plaisir et de la douleur, de l’âme et du corps. Chez lui, il n’y a pas de taboo dans la création esthétique
