Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Date

2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

English

Committee Chair

Jeffrey Scraba

Committee Member

Carey James Mickalites

Committee Member

Donal Frederick Harris

Abstract

There is a general consensus among literary critics that the Romantic Era stands for a celebration of Imagination and an elevation of the latter to a status of a superior mental faculty. This generalization, however, fails to acknowledge that the project of the Romantics was not so much to extol Imagination over Reason, as to unify the two faculties. In fact, the work of major Romantic poets in Britain reveals that what the Romantics mean by “Imagination” is actually Imagination unified with Reason (that is, “Primary Imagination” unified with “Primary Reason,” the merging of which forms the “One Mind”), and that, when they refer to “Reason” as an inferior faculty, what they really mean is “Secondary Reason” – Reason that separates from the One Mind in order to know itself, or Reason that is separate from Imagination – is inferior to the unity of Reason and Imagination, or the One Mind. The work of the Romantic poets, likewise, reveals that the Romantics, are continually striving, both consciously and unconsciously, to marry the two faculties, and they do so by unifying all opposites: Thought/Human and Nature, Spirit and Body, Energy and Matter, Activity and Passivity, Sublime and Beautiful, Universal and Particular, General and Concrete, Desire and Apathy, Heaven and Hell, Life and Death, Moon and Sun, Male and Female, etc. In this dissertation, I examine the work of four major British Romantic poets – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Blake. I look into each author’s conception of Imagination, their similarities and differences, and, finally, illuminate the peculiar ways in which the marriage of Reason and Imagination transpires in the work of each of these poets.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to ProQuest.

Notes

Open Access

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