The Romantic Imagination

During the eighteenth century a new way of thinking appeared, this was the time of romanticism. Nowadays, a lot of people assimilate Romanticism with love and “romantic” behaviour. But, Romanticism has rarely love as a subject. It is more an international artistic and philosophical movement, which redefines the fundamental ways in which people in the Western cultures thought about themselves and about their world. The two main countries in which Romantic Movement rose are England and Germany, and not the country of romance language themselves. It affected all the art. This movement really started in 1770’s and it continued in the second part of the nineteenth century. This movement appeared later in American literature than in Europe, and also later in some of the arts, like music and painting than in literature. This age of Romantic ideas took place at the same period than the “age of revolution”. Revolutions occurred in America in 1776 and in France in 1789. It was a period of upheaval in political, economic, and social traditions. It was at this period that witnessed the initial transformation of the industrial revolution. The core of the Romantic movement was a revolutionary energy. Romanticism also consciously

For Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the imagination is the only way to reconcile oppositions. In his poem, The lamb, he expressed the innocent"tms view of the world as a creation of God and not a creation of the human imagination. Not satisfied with the world as given, the artist meddles with reality and creates another reality. The Urban setting is fill of sadness and misery and lacking imagination and energy. But, for Romantics, the scientists"tm worldview was really restrictive. He saw mentality as a "mental construction". In his poem entitled London, he describes a world of life in death. As reconciling the opposites in a central idea is the main plot of the Romantics, imagination is reconciling both reason and feeling. In doing so, he not only portrayed his view of the imagination, but his fear that he will lose his creative powers just as this man has lost his youth and strength. For him, the innocent can be truly happy because he does not know the wonders of the imagination and so does not really know nature. This means that these two things are really different but cannot be without the other. Imagination allows all things in people"tms mind. Before the romantic period arose, they were the only one to impose their way of thinking to the people. The second aspect of imagination, according to the Romantic conception of the mind, is the Gothic. For him reason and imagination constitute the two categories of "mental action".