The Imagination

Much importance was also attached to the role of the imagination in the creative process. In The Romantic Imagination, Sir Maurice Bowra says, "If we wish to distinguish a single characteristic which differentiates the English Romantics from the poets of the 18th century, it is to be found in the importance they attached to the imagination and the special view which they held of it".

Indeed, the English Romantic poets believed the imagination was a faculty of the mind capable of penetrating the surface reality of human life and apprehending a kind of truth which lay beyond the powers of reason and rational intellect. In exercising the imagination, the individual was thought to gain access to an infinite world of spiritual reality, a kind of supernatural order whose essential truth and reality is far removed from the world of simple sensory impressions. The imagination, they claimed, is a source of spiritual energy, and in drawing on its special powers of perception, the poet - for it was above all the poet who understood its workings - shares in an almost divine activity in his re-creation and modification of the external world. Through this faculty poets created and interpreted anew the universe of human experience, confident that their often prophet-like visions revealed or constituted new, yet equally important truths which had little to do with the methods and conclusions of rational, scientific inquiry.

Individual Thought and Feeling

This new, subjective vision of reality went hand in hand with a much stronger emphasis on individual thought and feeling. Indeed, there is a greater freedom and intensity of feeling in the verse of poets like Burns, Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley. Poetry became more introspective and meditative. Increasingly, poets took as their main subject the workings of their own minds, thus introducing an explicitly autobiographical element, which for many years had been considered inappropriate. Predictably unpopular during much of the eighteenth century, the lyric - written in the first person and well suited to the expression of personal feeling - assumed a new-found importance. The thoughts and experiences of the speaker or 'voice' in Romantic lyrics frequently correspond to those of the poets themselves. Some of the Romantics also chose to isolate themselves from society, believing that solitude was necessary to the fulfilment of their vision. In this they anticipated the idea of the artist as a non­conformist and the feelings of alienation shared by many writers of the modernist age.

The Irrational

Together with the new emphasis on self, Romantic writers also dealt with topics and concerns which formerly had been considered inappropriate. In turning their attentions to the more irrational aspects of human life - the subconscious, mystery and the supernatural, magic and superstition - they enlarged the field of human experience in art, and demonstrated (with or without the use of narcotics) the range and effectiveness of poetry as a vehicle of feelings and perceptions which were difficult to define under more rational forms of investigation.