The Romantic Imagination

I picked this book up used and I like it. It's a collection of lectures given at Harvard in 1948-1949 by CM Bowra. The first and last chapters are about the English Romantics in general, and each of the middle chapters is devoted to one of the major Romantic poets. For each poet, Bowra looks at a representative poem in detail (for example, for Keats he takes Ode to a Grecian Urn) and he uses this as a departure point to discuss the poet's work, career and his place in Romantic thought.

I've found this book to be extremely helpful and a pretty good read too. I keep returning to it- it's the perfect companion to my project of reading through the Romantic poets. Here's a quote I love- Bowra is discussing how important the real, everyday world was to the Romantics:

"There are perhaps poets who live entirely in dreams and hardly notice the familiar scene, but the Romantics are not of their number. Indeed, their strength comes largely from the way in which they throw a new and magic light on the common face of nature and lure us to look for some explanation for the irresistible attraction which it exerts. In nature all the Romantic poets found their initial inspiration. It was not everything to them, but they would have been nothing without it; for through it they found those exalting moments when they passed from sight to vision and pierced, as they thought, to the secrets of the universe."

I can definitely see the truth of this in the Keats I read, and the importance of nature to Wordsworth is made very clear right from the beginning of The Prelude as well. But, say for us today, can this kind of inspiration only come from nature? Or is it possible to see whatever the 'familiar scene' is, even if it's a city scene, in a 'new and magic light'? Do you have to be in nature to pierce the secrets of the universe?

Comments

[Opentop]

Wordsworth certainly had plenty to say about London - Blake too - and that was a big city even then. It hadn't occurred to me before reading this but it will be interesting now to go away and think about the links between the Romantics in England and, just a little later, the transcendentalists in America - I remember writing an undergraduate paper about transcendentalism as 'making a religion out of aesthetics' which isn't a bad starting point for the romantics too.

[Greer]

hey you :). I thought I'd read something along those lines, about the links between the two, in one of my books but I can't put my finger on it just now... maybe it was in a library book I don't have anymore. I hope you will report back if you have the time, I'd be very interested.