Title: What is the significance of imagination to the Romantics? Why is imagination important to the Romantics? - eNotes.com
Headings: What is the significance of imagination to the Romantics? Why is imagination important to the Romantics?
Literature
What is the significance of imagination to the Romantics? Why is imagination important to the Romantics?
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Content: shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags...
How wonderful for us to hear a father's words as he imagines his child's experience with nature so close, personal and free, as a breeze moves freely about, intimately knowing every surface it touches: mountains or sandy shores. The imagination of the Romantics not only allowed them to envision a better world, but provided them with the tools to make their poetry come alive to the reader, even so many years later. Approved by eNotes Editorial Team
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Part of the reaction was to the position (s) of philosophers like John Locke. Locke argued that all knowledge comes through the senses; this clearly limits our ability to know things that are perceived, but not known through the senses (God, the spiritual life, etc). The Romantics found the sensory/rationalistic/scientific approach to knowledge insufficient for explaining human experiences. Their position is similar to Kant's who notes that we are not just a "tabula rases," that we must act on the sensory information we receive to order it, to make "sense" of it. In Emerson's language, it is the difference between the things that we "learn" (tuition) and the truths that we perceive (intuition). Thus, the Romantics shared their personal perceptions of truth, their intuitions, as valid and interesting to all of us ... as valid as "the facts."