Understanding the the Romantic Imagination with Ramond, Wordsworth and Shelley
Works Cited Not Included
"The way to find the 'real' world is not merely to measure and observe what is
outside us, but to discover our own inner ground…. This 'ground', this 'world'
where I am mysteriously present at once to myself and to the freedoms of other men,
is not a visible, objective and determined structure…It is a living
and self creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to
which I am myself my own unique door."
(Thomas Merton in Finley 45)
We have spent a good deal of this semester concentrating on the sublime. We have asked what (in nature) is sublime, how is the sublime described and how do different writers interpret the sublime. A sublime experience is recognizable by key words such as 'awe', 'astonishment' and 'terror', feelings of insignificance, fractured syntax and the general inability to describe what is being experienced. Perception and interpretation of the sublime are directly linked to personal circumstance and suffering, to spiritual beliefs and even expectation (consider Wordsworth's disappointment at Mont Blanc). It has become evident that there is a transition space between what a traveler experiences and what he writes; a place wherein words often fail but the experience is intensified, even understood by the traveler. This space, as I have understood it, is the imagination. In his quest for spiritual identity Thomas Merton offers the above quotation to illustrate what he calls 'interpenetration' between the self and the world. As travel writers engage nature through their imagination, Merton's description of the 'inner ground' is an appropriate one for the Romantic conception of the imagination. ...
... middle of paper ...
...here are similar aspects to each writer's experience. Engaging the imagination, Ramond, Wordsworth and Shelley have experienced a kind of unity; conscious of the self as the soul they are simultaneously aware of 'freedoms of other men'. I suggested in the introduction that the imagination is a transition place wherein words often fail but the experience is intensified, even understood by the traveler. For all three writers the nature of the imagination has, amazingly, been communicable. Ramond and Wordsworth are able to come to an articulate conclusion about the effects imagination has on their perceptions of nature. Shelley, however, remains skeptical about the power of the imaginative process. Nonetheless, Shelley's experience is as real, as intense as that of Ramond and Wordsworth.
Notes
1. Duncan Wu's foot note, page 403.
2 "Tintern Abbey". Line 97.
Many times throughout history, one person has tried to prove themselves better than God or nature. Nature, however, always prevails in the end. The Romantics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries believed that nature was a glorious and powerful force that was one with God, and emphasized this point in their works. Two such romantics were the couple Percy and Mary Shelley, who through their works Ozymandias and Frankenstein, showed the disastrous consequences defying nature could have. Both authors had experienced loss; the loss of some of their children and later Mary’s loss of Percy in a boating accident. These experiences showed them how powerful nature was, and how pointless it was to defy it. Both Mary and Percy’s belief in this showed through in their writing. So, despite how different Frankenstein and Ozymandias seem at first, both works reveal a common lesson: One should never believe themselves to be above nature, and if one does it will never end well.
self-centered. His life is the mirror of a Greed Tragedy. In his case, the flaw
William Wordsworth’s view on imagination can easily be seen in the two poems Expostulation & Reply and The Tables Turned. In these two short poems Wordsworth gives respect to the sciences; he does not look down on them. However, he does argue that ignoring nature, and by extension, imagination, would be to ignore part of what it means to be human. Another poem, I wandered lonely as a cloud, shows Wordsworth’s appreciation for imagination, as he reflects on the joy of being able to look inward and see the beauty of nature as he sees it, not as science does.
What can be said about the sublime? Class discussion led to the definition of sublime as the element found in travel literature that is unexplainable. It is that part of travel literature where the writer is in awe of his or her surroundings, where nature can be dangerous or where nature reminds a human being of their mortality. The term "sublime" has been applied to travel texts studied in class and it is hard not to compare the sublime from texts earlier in the term to the texts in the later part of the term. Two texts that can be compared in terms of the sublime are A Tour in Switzerland by Helen Williams and History of a Six Weeks' Tour by Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley. There are similarities and differences found in both texts concerning individual perspectives of travel and the sublime. The main focus of this commentary will be comparing and contrasting the perspectives of Williams and Shelley within their respective texts, the language of the sublime and the descriptions of the sublime.
The idea for the novel of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein came to her one night when she was staying in the company of what has been called ‘her male coterie’, including Lord Byron and her husband, Percy Shelley. Mary Shelley’s whole life seems to have been heavily influenced by men. She idolised her father, William Godwyn, and appears to have spent a good part of her life trying very hard to impress both him and her husband. There seems to have been a distinct lack of female influence, her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, having died weeks after her birth, being replaced by a neglectful step-mother. These aspects of her life are perhaps evident in her novel. The characters and plot of Frankenstein were perhaps influenced by Shelley’s conflicting feelings about the predominately masculine circle which surrounded her, and perhaps the many masculine traits that we see in novel were based upon those of the male figures in Shelley’s own life. In this essay I will attempt to show some of these traits.
Mary Shelley, with her brilliant tale of mankind's obsession with two opposing forces: creation and science, continues to draw readers with Frankenstein's many meanings and effect on society. Frankenstein has had a major influence across literature and pop culture and was one of the major contributors to a completely new genre of horror. Frankenstein is most famous for being arguably considered the first fully-realized science fiction novel. In Frankenstein, some of the main concepts behind the literary movement of Romanticism can be found. Mary Shelley was a colleague of many Romantic poets such as her husband Percy Shelley, and their friends William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge, even though the themes within Frankenstein are darker than their brighter subjects and poems. Still, she was very influenced by Romantics and the Romantic Period, and readers can find many examples of Romanticism in this book. Some people actually argue that Frankenstein “initiates a rethinking of romantic rhetoric”1, or is a more cultured novel than the writings of other Romantics. Shelley questions and interacts with the classic Romantic tropes, causing this rethink of a novel that goes deeper into societal history than it appears. For example, the introduction of Gothic ideas to Frankenstein challenges the typical stereotyped assumptions of Romanticism, giving new meaning and context to the novel. Mary Shelley challenges Romanticism by highlighting certain aspects of the movement while questioning and interacting with the Romantic movement through her writing.
The quest for the ideal is a phenomenon that many people attempt to achieve. As we all know, the quest for the ideal is difficult and complicated by personal experience. The poems, “The Story” by Karen Connelly and the “The Love Song of J.Aflred Prufrock”, by T.S Elliot, as well as the essay “Kant’s Beauty and the Sublime” by Maureen Rousseau explore the peril inherent in the quest for the ideal, which is that in our search for beauty we risk encountering the sublime. The danger of the sublime is that we cannot comprehend the magnitude of the realms of things that are sublime. We ask ourselves why someone would want to risk encountering the sublime. Well, with great risk comes great reward and that is the beauty we seek.
Analysis of Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, The Prelude, The World is Too Much with Us, and London, 1802
The role of the imagination in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein is a vital when defining the work as Romantic. Though Shelley incorporates aspects that resemble the Enlightenment period, she relies on the imagination. The power of the imagination is exemplified in the novel through both Victor and the Creature as each embarks to accomplish their separate goals of scientific fame and accomplishing human relationships. The origin of the tale also emphasizes the role of the imagination as Shelley describes it in her “Introduction to Frankenstein, Third Edition (1831)”. Imagination in the text is also relatable to other iconic works of the Romantic Period such as S. T. Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria in which he defines Primary and Secondary imagination. The story as a whole is completely Romantic in that it is filled with impossibilities that seem to have come from a fairy tale. The imaginative quality of the plot itself is a far cry from the stiff subject matter of the Enlightenment period. Frankenstein is wholly a work of Romanticism both from the outside of the tale and within the plot. Shelley created the story in a moment of Primary imagination filling it with impossibilities that can only be called fantastical. Imagining notoriety leads Victor to forge the creature; the creature imagines the joy of having human relationships. The driving factor of the tale is the imagination: imagining fame, imagining relationships and imagining the satisfaction of revenge. Shelley’s use of the imagination is a direct contradiction to the themes of logic and reason that ruled the Enlightenment Period.
In the Critique of Judgement Kant defines the sublime as "that, the mere ability to think which shows a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of sense." (1) Such striving for absolute comprehension beyond what the imagination is capable of representing in a simple perception or image may be occasioned by the "rawness" of scenes like the Great Pyramid of Cheops, the magnitude or immensity of which alludes to the Idea of absolute greatness. (2) Imagination's failure to contain this Idea understandably results in pain. (3) But pain is not the end-point; characteristic of sublime feeling is a "movement" of pain to pleasure: "the feeling of a momentary checking of the vital powers and a consequent stronger outflow of them." (4) In other words one is awestruck: nature appears as a "mere nothing in comparison with the Ideas of Reason." (5) From this we realize our superiority to nature "within and without us" and our supersensible destination beyond nature. (6) In this paper I wish to explicate J-F. Lyotard's reading of the Kantian sublime. There are lessons to be learned here, as the title of his recent work (1994), Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, suggests.
Nature and the sublime are two prominent characteristics in eighteenth century Romantic literature and it is this relationship that has attracted considerable attention in literary criticism ( Hagman , 124) . Aidan Day (1985) and Nicola Trott (1999) have aptly documented that the serenity of nature and the spiritual awe of the sublime is an aesthetically attractive feature in Romantic literature. In spite of this consensus , their interpretation on what constitutes as the sublime differs but not significantly. While, Day takes on an epistemological approach when defining the sublime 'as an ...
Percy Bysshe Shelley had a strong, disapproving voice. The prominent English Romantic poet’s works were based on his beliefs. Born on August 4, 1792 to Timothy and Elizabeth Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley was the eldest among five. Many see Shelley as an exceptional English poet. It is believed that “one of the branches of his family is a representative of the house of the illustrious Sir Philip Sidney of Penshurst” (London Metropolitan Conservative Journal 6). Percy Shelley delightfully accepted the fact that he had this connection with one of his relatives. Ever since his days of youth, Shelley showed a sign of interest in writing. Shelley wrote many well-known conspicuous works, such as The Necessity of Atheism. He created works that contradicted a majority of people.
Texts through time are influenced by one’s context and the ways of thinking inherent in differing social milieus. Hence, when composers voice the concerns of their time, while engaging audiences through universal concerns, texts can ensure an enduring relevance. While Coleridge celebrates the natural world and the elusive sublime, as well as the imagination as a unique instrument in enabling transcendence, Shelley explores the potential of the individual’s human mind, and the fleeting nature of the imagination. By examining the corruption in man-made institutions and the binary between good and evil, Blake communicates to the individual despite contextual shifts. In contrast, Austen critiques the excessive imagination and its creation of a fictitious world in proposing a balance between reason and imagination.
"The Poetry of William Wordsworth." SIRS Renaissance 20 May 2004: n.p. SIRS Renaissance. Web. 06 February 2010.
In William Wordsworth’s poems, the role of nature plays a more reassuring and pivotal r ole within them. To Wordsworth’s poetry, interacting with nature represents the forces of the natural world. Throughout the three poems, Resolution and Independence, Tintern Abbey, and Michael, which will be discussed in this essay, nature is seen prominently as an everlasting- individual figure, which gives his audience as well as Wordsworth, himself, a sense of console. In all three poems, Wordsworth views nature and human beings as complementary elements of a sum of a whole, recognizing that humans are a sum of nature. Therefore, looking at the world as a soothing being of which he is a part of, Wordsworth looks at nature and sees the benevolence of the divinity aspects behind them. For Wordsworth, the world itself, in all its glory, can be a place of suffering, which surely occurs within the world; Wordsworth is still comforted with the belief that all things happen by the hands of the divinity and the just and divine order of nature, itself.