The corresponding breeze essays in english romanticism

Basic characteristics[ edit ] The nature of Romanticism may be approached from the primary importance of the free expression of the feelings of the artist. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others believed there were natural laws the imagination—at least of a good creative artist—would unconsciously follow through artistic inspiration if left alone. The concept of the geniusor artist who was able to produce his own original work through this process of creation from nothingness, is key to Romanticism, and to be derivative was the worst sin.

The corresponding breeze essays in english romanticism

Romanticism has always resisted definitive explanations of its core nature, endorsing instead a principle transcendent to reason as the ground of knowledge and existence. Jung, who once drily commented, "Thank God I am Jung, and not a Jungian", displays the same reluctance to subjugate intuitive understanding to analysis and systemisation.

Here, then, is the essence of both Romanticism and Jungian psychology; at the heart of both is the lived dynamic of the human psyche, the transitional and changing self moving towards an ideal goal that inevitably eludes logic.

Jung's constant subjection to the reality of the psyche, his firm refusal to privilege logical straitjacketing over the intuitive, symbolic, mythic, and metaphoric resonates with the Romantics' relentless immersion in the lived moment.

For Jung as well as for them, "nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced" 1 and until it is oriented to the inner reality of the psyche. In what I would describe as this apologetic for a holistic approach to Romanticism, my aim is to show how Jung's basic ideas about the unity of knowledge and existence are in principle synonymous with those of the Platonic tradition, Romanticism, alchemy and Gnosticism.

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The basic premise of a psychodynamic interpretative approach is that certain texts and a poet's works as a whole represent a process of development which aims to reconcile the actual condition with a hypothetical distant ideal - an ideal which expansively incorporates both personal and universal dimensions.

Romantic poetry in general - its sense of moving toward an elusive goal - involves a progressive tension and resolution between opposites which moves toward an individuated state of wholeness.

This movement of becoming, in which the self is an unfolding process rather than a fixed identity, reveals the creative imagination to be synonymous with self-creation, for both artistic and psychic balance are made possible by the imagination; in the words of Keats: It will be worthwhile, then, to explore some relevant premises of Romanticism and Jungian thought, partly in order to counterbalance certain biases which persist as unstated assumptions throughout Romantic criticism in general.

It is Jung's archetypal approach to literature, paralleling Romanticism's expansiveness from the personal toward the universal, that sharply marks off both from reductively personal or structural approaches and reveals certain basic intuitions to be common to both.

A Jungian perspective, in other words, does not superimpose an "external" critique upon literature, but rather reaffirms what is explicit or implicit in Romanticism itself: Jung's psychological equivalent of the universal One, his hypothesis of the collective unconscious, underlies his approach to those forms of literature - of which Romanticism is exemplary - which arise when the poet's imagination connects to the universal psyche.

Selected Criticism

Jung describes the collective unconscious or "objective psyche" as a level of psychic functioning deeper than the personal unconscious, whose contents and patterns of behaviour are not personally acquired in experience but are inborn.

Jung's concept of the archetype, as the psychic basis of myth and as an irrepresentable, formative principle of an instinctual nature, derives from his observation of the world-wide occurrence of the same patterns, images and motifs in mythic, religious, and symbolic literature.

It is from just such an archetypal perspective that Keats perceives how "Every department of knowledge" is "calculated towards a great whole. A few months earlier in a letter to J. Reynolds, following his consideration of the collective wisdom inherent in any particular portion of a literary text, the poet elaborates further on the idea: But the Minds of Mortals are so different and bent on such diverse Journeys that it may at first appear impossible for any common taste and fellowship to exist between two or three under these suppositions - It is however quite the contrary - Minds would leave each other in contrary directions, traverse each other in Numberless points, and all at last greet each other at the Journey's end.

In Keats' colourful delineation of the social function of the creative imagination, although each tree is distinctively individual, the forest is collectively one: It is the interaction between the collective and the individual - the paradoxical discovering nature of artistic inventiveness - which constitutes that "originality" derived from the sharing of the archetypal origin of all works whose mode of articulation is essentially mythic and radically symbolic.

Through a Jungian approach to Romanticism, therefore, there is no question of doing injustice to its works by forcing them into a preconceived framework that privileges theory over detail, or the universal over the characteristically personal.

Full text of "A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century"

Jung does not understate the unique achievement of the artistic individual. Through the interaction of the personal and the collective, the individual is not reduced to collective standards, but rather the collective is partially integrated through the distinctive originality of the individual artist.

Abrams thus misrepresents the paradoxical aim of both archetypal criticism and, by implication, Romantic poetry itself.

The corresponding breeze essays in english romanticism

Far from being, as Abrams claims, reductionist or eliminating the individuality of a work, an archetypal perspective stresses the unique realisation of the archetypal idea.Wordsworth and Coleridge on diction and figures --The correspondent breeze --English romanticism --Structure and style in the greater romantic lyric --Coleridge, Baudelaire, and modernist poetics --Two roads to Wordsworth --Coleridge's "A light in sound" --Coleridge and the romantic vision of the world - .

When Muir arrived at Yosemite he carried with him a tattered copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays. Emerson was the main intellectual force behind American Transcendentalism, a philosophy based on the idea that there is a plane of reality, and a realm of spiritual truth, higher than the physical world.

“With the flowering of Romanticism.

The corresponding breeze essays in english romanticism

The Rime has come to be accepted as a paradigmatically romantic poem, one in which Romanticism and romantic aesthetics lie ready to be discovered by a critical reader. 1 At least since Warren's reading, the Rime has functioned as the legitimatizing vehicle for critical claims about Romanticism and the romantic aesthetic, its value, meaning and.

The essays and reviews substantiate Lewis’ reputation as an eloquent and authoritative critic across a wide range of literature, and as a keen judge of contemporary scholarship, while his reviews of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings will be of additional interest to scholars and students of fantasy.

Julie Larios has written several reviews and essays for Numéro regardbouddhiste.com can find them archived regardbouddhiste.com is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Pushcart Prize for Poetry, and a Washington State Arts Commission/Artist Trust Fellowship.

The correspondent breeze : essays on English romanticism (Book, ) [regardbouddhiste.com]

Neil Perry - Dead Poets' Society. Neil's Searching: Neil seems thrilled at the idea that he may be able to contribute a verse.

He prompts Cameron to tear out J. Evans Pritchard's introduction to poetry. He is the one to call Keating "Captain," and is the first to ask what the Dead Poets Society was.

Project MUSE - "Just apply a weight": Thoreau and the Aesthetics of Ornament