Kubla Khan, Romanticism and the Creative Discourse Dr. Abin Chakraborty W.B.E.S. Assistant Professor in English Chandernagore College
Romantic Imagination William Blake : To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour. One power alone makes a poet: Imagination, the Divine Vision. This world of Imagination is the world of eternity; it is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the Vegetated body. This world of Imagination is Infinite and Eternal, whereas the world of Generation or Vegetation is Finite and Temporal. There exist in that Eternal World the Permanent Realities of Every Thing which we see reflected in the Vegetable Glass of Nature.
Romantic Imagination P.B. Shelley: He will watch from dawn to gloom The lake-reflected sun illume The yellow-bees in ivy bloom, Nor heed nor see, what things they be; But from these create he can Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of Immortality! He not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered but beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of the latest time…A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one.
Romantic Imagination John Keats: I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of imagination. What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not…The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream – he awoke and found it truth.
Romantic Imagination S.T. Coleridge: Ah! From the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the Earth – And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth Of all sweet sounds the life and element.
Coleridge’s Definition of Imagination The IMAGINATION then, I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.
Coleridge continued... The Poet, “diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. This power...reveals itself in the balance and reconciliation of opposites”. ( Biographia Literaria , Vol, II, Ch. 16)
The Fountain and the Chasm The upward thrust of River Alps The downward The Symbol of Unity and slope of the Harmony – Masculine and chasm Feminine –The Chalice and the Spear
Unity of Opposites: Philosophical Perspectives Plato: Beauty as “coincidentia oppositorum” Nietzsche: “…the further development of art is bound up with the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian...their continuing strife and only periodically occurring reconciliation”. Coleridge’s marginalia to Bohme’s Aurora : “...in the deity is an absolute synthesis of opposites”
Rabindranath and Romanticism দুই হােত — কােলর মি�রা �য সদাই বােজ ডাইেন বাঁেয় দুই হােত, সুি� ছুেট নৃত� উেঠ িনত� নূতন সংঘােত ॥ বােজ ফ ু েল, বােজ কাঁটায়, আেলাছায়ার �জায়ার-ভাঁটায়, �ােণর মােঝ ওই-�য বােজ দুঃেখ সুেখ শ�ােত ॥ তােল তােল সাঁঝ-সকােল �প-সাগের �ঢউ লােগ । সাদা-কােলার �ে� �য ওই ছে� নানান রঙ জােগ । এই তােল �তার গান �বঁেধ �ন — কা�াহািসর তান �সেধ �ন, ডাক িদল �শা� মরণ বাঁচন নাচন-সভার ড�ােত ॥
Divinity for Kabir He Himself is the tree, the seed, and the germ. He Himself is the flower, the fruit, and the shade. He Himself is the sun, the light, and the lighted... He Himself is the manifold form, the infinite space; He is the breath, the word, and the meaning. He Himself is the limit and the limitless: and beyond both the limited and the limitless is He, the Pure Being.
Rumi on the Unity of Opposites “Life of this world is nothing but the harmony of opposites” You are the Master Alchemist… Through your love Existence and non-existence merge. All opposites unite. All that is profane becomes sacred again.
Bardic Madness: Some Sources Socrates in Phaedrus : The third kind is the madness of those who are possessed by the Muses; which taking hold of a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyrical and all other numbers; with these adorning the myriad actions of the ancient heroes for the instruction of posterity. Socrates in Ion : The composers of lyrical poetry create these admired songs in a state of divine insanity like the corybantes who lose control over their reason in their enthusiasm of the sacred dance, like the bacchantes who, when possessed by the gods draw honey and milk from the rivers in which when they come to their senses they find nothing but simple water.
Bardic Madness: Continued... Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact... The Poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling Doth glance from heaven to earth and earth to heaven And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy noting A local habitation and a name.
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