CONTENTS
The Romantic poets
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Author: Hough Graham
Year: n.a.
Coleridge's theory implies that the poet is in possession of a voluntary power, which is in some sense one not only with the power that is active in all human perception, but is even a human analogy to the creative power of God. This is to exalt the power of the poetic imagination very high indeed, and to exalt the poet into a man with some special insight into the nature of things. It is no longer his duty to follow Nature by following the Ancients; he has private access to the secrets of Nature, because he is working by a power analogous to hers. Whether or in what sense this belief is true, we need not discuss. But we must record it as a historical phenomenon; for it forms the ideological foundation of romantic poetry. We can see it in the beginning of a split between the poet and the man of the world that was unknown to the eighteenth century, and that has grown steadily more acute till our own day. The poet assumes the role of the prophet; and a stiff-necked and uncircumcised generation retaliates by reducing him to a social misfit; till at the close of the nineteenth century the poets retort upon the world by trying to cut art off from its social roots altogether.
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