Imagination in Shelley’s Alastor
November 7, 2011
Imagination in Shelley’s Alastor Romanticism is often a literary movement often associated with the concept of imagination. The concept of imagination was looked upon in several different lights but all seeming to come back to the main idea that the imagination was regarded as a powerful and effective creative force. According to Romantics, the imagination was viewed as the highest, most supreme state of mind where one is able to grasp concepts that are unattainable without the use of imagination. Although today we often associate imagination with something far from reality, something unrealistic, the Romantics believed that it was this distance from reality that allowed humans to be able to constitute the actual realities in life. William Wordsworth states, “that it is because we not only perceive the world around us, but also in part create it.” It is imagination that allows us to unite reason with feeling and also “reconcile opposites in a world of appearance.” Many times, as we know, imagination comes to us through dreams, which is what we see in many poems produced in the Romantic Era. The author uses imagination in the form of the dream to be able to utilize imagination in an understandable and relatable sense for the reader to hopefully reach this ultimate state of mind. It is using imagination as a synthesizer between reason and feelings that brings humans to achieve what many refer to as the “ah-ha” moment; a moment in which something seems to suddenly make sense in a way that it never has before. Imagination in the Romantic era was also something that Romantics believed was what allowed us to view nature in terms of symbols; that things in nature had deeper meaning that what we give it credit for. Many believed that imagination was present in nature and even classified nature into two different categories; natura naturata and natura naturans where natura naturata represents something as product of the human mind, the “created,
Imagination in Shelley’s Alastor Romanticism is often a literary movement often associated with the concept of imagination. The concept of imagination was looked upon in several different lights but all seeming to come back to the main idea that the imagination was regarded as a powerful and effective creative force. According to Romantics, the imagination was viewed as the highest, most supreme state of mind where one is able to grasp concepts that are unattainable without the use of imagination. Although today we often associate imagination with something far from reality, something unrealistic, the Romantics believed that it was this distance from reality that allowed humans to be able to constitute the actual realities in life. William Wordsworth states, “that it is because we not only perceive the world around us, but also in part create it.” It is imagination that allows us to unite reason with feeling and also “reconcile opposites in a world of appearance.” Many times, as we know, imagination comes to us through dreams, which is what we see in many poems produced in the Romantic Era. The author uses imagination in the form of the dream to be able to utilize imagination in an understandable and relatable sense for the reader to hopefully reach this ultimate state of mind. It is using imagination as a synthesizer between reason and feelings that brings humans to achieve what many refer to as the “ah-ha” moment; a moment in which something seems to suddenly make sense in a way that it never has before. Imagination in the Romantic era was also something that Romantics believed was what allowed us to view nature in terms of symbols; that things in nature had deeper meaning that what we give it credit for. Many believed that imagination was present in nature and even classified nature into two different categories; natura naturata and natura naturans where natura naturata represents something as product of the human mind, the “created,