Exploring the imaginative realms of Romantic poets: visions and creativity

The role of imagination in Romantic Poet.

-Blake:

What is Blake's divine vision?

Blake considered the imagination as the means through which man could know the world. With imagination you could see the essence of the things, it’s a sort of divine vision. The poet has a creative power, he is a prophet who can see the reality of things.

-Wordsworth:
For him imagination is a supreme gift, and he used imagination as synonym of “intuition”, it is the power to see into reality. All poetry takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity and through the power of memory the emotion is reproduced in poetic form. The process of composition of a poetry is the following: The poet through sensory experience proves emotion with an object and this emotion remain in poet’s memory. Poet ,when he was in tranquility, in a state of pensive mood, remember the emotion, contemplated it by a kindred one produced by the first. Only now he can write the emotion in a poem so that even the reader can feels the same emotion.

So Wordsworth believes that nature is the means through which man could arrive to the perfection of God: men can elevated themselves to the dive contemplating the nature. He has a Pantheistic view of world ( he says that “man and nature are inseparable and man exist not outside the natural world but an active participant in it”).

Poet is a teacher who shows man how to understand their feelings.

-Coleridge:

Coleridge's dual imagination

He considers two kind of imagination: the primary imagination : connected with human perception and individual power to produce images, everybody have this imagination but use it unconsciously.

Secondary imagination doesn’t belong to everybody but only to poets who use it consciously, was voluntary. “it dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to re-create.” The poet with this imagination see the world around him can perceive the world and was able to change and create a new world. In fact “consciously will” and “re-create” are the two keywords for the artists who resolve the reality to create a new world and could create something personal and original (es “rime of ancient mariner” in which poet resolve the reality and create a new world, production of his secondary imagination)

-Shelley:

Shelley's revolutionary creativity

His “defence of poetry” is an exalted defense of poetry as the expression of imagination and understood as revolutionary creativity. It’s used to change the reality of material world. He want to change the cosmos to create a world where freedom, I love and beauty win on their enemies such as tyranny, destruction and alienation. To Shelley , nature describes not the real world of Wordsworth’s poem, but it’s a sort of refuge from the disappointment and injustice of ordinary world.

Poetry is indeed something divine, is the center and the circumference of knowledge, comprends all science and to which all science must be referred. Poetry is like a gift.

“Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. Poetry makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man. Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it transmutes all that it touches, its' secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life; Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehend inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Keats:

Keats and the aesthetic movement

The imagination to Keats has two forms: in the first place the world of his poetry is predominantly artificial and he imagines it rather than reflect from direct experiences. In the second place keat’s poetry are a vision of what he would like human life to be like, stimulated by his own experience of pain and misery.

The central theme of his poetry is Beauty that is the ideal of all art. In fact he is the forerunner of the aesthetic movement and this aspect move him away to the romantic movement.

The classical Greek world inspires Keats in his works. In fact in his verse he beliefs that the greek world lives again in its and it is re-interpreted with the eyes of a romantic movement.

Poet need to negative capability: in fact poet must deny his rational filter to identify himself with the object which is the source of his inspiration and the place where Truth resides.

In fact Keats when he see an Greek form of art , he goes into ecstasies because , for him, the better form of beauty was reached by Greek Word. And beauty is the most important form of perfection which whom man could arrive to God.

Poet is everything and nothing ,has no character.. is a Cameliom. Poet is the most unpoetical, the sun, the moon, the man are poetical have unchagble attribute but poet has none ,no identity, the certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s Creature.