De Blake a Keats: a imaginação na tradição romântica inglesa

Abstract

In this book chapter, the author traces the origin of the concept of Imagination and related terms in the English Romantic tradition (1785-1830), firstly introducing the most influential pre-Romantic notions of this mental faculty in the Anglophone context and moving on to the unique idea of the ‘creative’ or ‘divine imagination’ as conceived by the artist William Blake in his fragmentary and cryptic notes. The author then proceeds with a detailed explanation of the concept as it was originally developed, in manifesto-like prose works, by the first generation of Romantic poets, namely William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in conjunction or opposition with the twin concept of ‘fancy’ or fantasy, both thought of as involving highly complex perceptive, associative and (re)creative processes and as being displayed mostly in the synthetic and (esem)plastic features of poetry. The second or later generation of Romantic poets, embodied by the youthful and iconoclastic figures of P. B. Shelley and John Keats, in its turn, is particularly mentioned in the chapter not only as reinforcing the importance of the imaginative faculty, as both an instrument of ‘moral good’ or political change and as a synonym for ‘beauty’ and ‘truth’ in the Arts, but also as paving the way for more modern philosophical and aesthetic assumptions.