The Romantic Imagination in Literature and Culture by Alpana Choudhary

Description

side from Byron all the Romantic poets attempted serious, complex definitions of imagination. Shelley tended to use the term ‘poetry’ instead, but it made little difference. It is as though they felt their creativity so strongly that they were urged to define it as something more, something above and beyond. Even Keats, who is normally so down-to-earth, can’t seem to be simple on this particular subject. After making his famous, and attractive, statement —‘Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream — he awoke and found it truth’— he finds it necessary to start talking about the afterlife: ‘Adam’s dream … seems to be a conviction that Imagination and its empyreal reflection is the same as human Life and its spiritual repetition’ (to Bailey, 22 November 1817; Rollins, I, 185). The dream is described in Paradise Lost, Book VIII. With closed eyes, Adam watches as God (painlessly) extracts a rib from his side and forms it into Eve. He then wakes, and finds Eve does exist, and is just as beautiful as she was when he was dreaming.

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