Mary Shelley & Romantic Imagination
For the last several days I’ve felt like I was back in school, preparing a talk on Mary Shelley and the Romantic Imagination that I’m going to deliver on Tuesday evening at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. It’s been challenging and fun, actually. I’m pleased with what emerged. In the course of preparing the paper, I went back and read my A+ paper from Oxford, the one I wrote on Percy Bysshe Shelley in 2004 when I studied at Oxford as part of a summer program. I liked that paper too. So, I decided to make both available to anyone who might want to read them.
(I’m putting them up as pdf files, so you’ll have to view them in that format. They’re papers, each around 10-15 pages. If you do download, please remember they’re copyrighted, and attribute accordingly if you quote from them in your own work. Thanks)
MARY SHELLEY AND THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION
THAT POWERFUL ATTRACTION:
SHELLEY AND THE POWER FLOWING THROUGH THE NATURAL WORLD
Here’s just a bit from my talk. I opened with an epigraph from my book, which toward the end I repeat. It sums up what I’m after:
“What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven, and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?” Samuel Taylor Coleridge looked up at his audience; there was a collective murmur. It was difficult to say if it was one of approval.
He found the eager gaze of Godwin’s daughter. Fourteen year-old Mary was enthralled. Well did she remember Coleridge reciting the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner in her father’s house. What happened that night had changed her life, precisely because she had plucked a strange and beautiful flower and awakened to find it in her hand.
Coleridge winked at her. “Imagination owes no allegiance to time or space,” he said.
(The flower was photographed by Diana Redwing, (check out her website) a friend who also took the pictures of me that are on my site and in my publicity. She’s an incredible photographer.)
This excerpt is from the middle, it details the way the Romantics tended to think about the imagination, influenced by Coleridge who lectured on the subject in London—which is what the excerpt from my book is tracking.
ACCORDING TO THE ROMANTICS, EXPRESSIONS OF CREATIVE GENIUS not only reflect our ability to create new unity out of existing things, but to become one with the source of all, that which brings nonexistence into existence. Romanticism tell us that neither the human, nor human imagination stands apart from Nature, that imagination has been present as the power in Nature from the beginning of creation. Imagination is a force, a capacity, not simply to produce imagery, but to manifest, to visualize or speak into being. And God said, let there be light: and there was light. John Keats is credited with some of the most famous—and analyzed—lines about the Romantic Imagination: “I am certain,” he wrote, “of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of the 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.” Keats is referring to Milton’s, Paradise Lost, (VIII, 460-490) where Adam dreams of the creation of Eve, and awakes to find her there.
The Romantic Imagination is not a human capacity, so much as is the human aptitude for experiencing mystical union, or in more secular terminology, aligning oneself with the creativity of the universe. For the Romantic, imagination is the generating force of the universe. William Blake explained it thus: imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow. Romantic Imagination emerges from the nexus of human consciousness and the fertile void that birthed the Big Bang—what religion calls the Divine.
If you live in the Bay Area and are interested, I’m speaking Tuesday night at California Institute of Integral Studies, at 7 pm in Namaste Hall. Address is: 1453 Mission, San Francisco.