Romantic Poets, Creative Imagination, and the Transformation of the Individual and Society

Romantic stalwarts such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth believed that imagination should be regarded as a superior human faculty, the transubstantiator of experience. The towering Percy Bysshe Shelley felt that without moral imagination, man - in an acquisitive society – “having enslaved the elements, remains a slave himself”. Equally important to Shelley was sympathetic imagination, the faculty by which an individual overleaps the limits of his own neural, emotional, and ideological absorptions, and identifies himself with the thoughts and feelings of other men. Shelley avers that the faculty in poetry, which allows us to share the joys and sorrows of imagined characters, is also the basis for all morality, because it compels us to feel for others what we feel for ourselves, to do unto others what we do to ourselves. 

John Keats, the main figure in the second generation of Romantic poets, was certain that he was certain of nothing, “but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination…” He was convinced that what the imagination saw as beauty must be truth and laid great stress on negative capability (or selfless receptivity) – that great poetic capacity wherefore man effaces his own personal identity by immersing it sympathetically and spontaneously with the given subject. 

Romantic poets considered the imagination in poetry, especially nature poetry, as a catalyst for individual meditative reflection – to tool to assist them in tackling and resolving personal crises. Some Romantic poets used the lyric form of poetry to channel their personal feelings. They were able to achieve a sense of kinetic grandeur and infinity, and sometimes even irrationality and fear, through the power of imagination.

Frederich von Schiler - German poet, dramatist, philosopher, and historian extraordinaire – was convinced that imagination, through the use of symbols, enables the reconciliation and transcendence of reality through a heightened state of consciousness. In a distant echo of Keats, Schiller believed that what a person’s imagination saw as beauty could ennoble his nature. Imagination, according to Schiller, harmonized duty and inclination through art, and could make every one of us a beautiful soul (schöne Seele). 

For the Romantics, imagination (as poetry) – through its colour, contour, and character – could humanize a faceless world. It could, at once, provide both an impetus to action as well as a means to escape the harshness that is sometimes reality.