This book tackles the problematic relationship between Platonic philosophy and Romantic poetry, between the intellect and the emotions. Drawing on contemporary critical theory, especially hermeneutics and deconstruction, the author shows that a dialogue between thinking and poetizing is possible. The volume yields many new insights into both Platonic and Romantic texts and forms an important work for scholars and students of Greek philosophy, Romantic literature and critical theory.
This book tackles the problematic relationship between Platonic philosophy and Romantic poetry, between the intellect and the emotions. Drawing on contemporary critical theory, especially hermeneutics and deconstruction, the author shows that a dialogue between thinking and poetizing is possible. The volume yields many new insights into both Platonic and Romantic texts and forms an important work for scholars and students of Greek philosophy, Romantic literature and critical theory.
This book studies and articulates the emergence from the poetical subtext of six major English romantics of "the androgynous sublime", a mode that conflates the motif of psychic androgyny (traceable as far back as the Book of Genesis and Plato's Symposium) with the mode of sublimity, first discussed by Longinus and much debated from the eighteenth century onward. Frequently echoed by the romantic poets, Milton's description of the Holy Spirit's role in the creation of the world is androgynous. Since humane creativity mirrors divine creativity, it follows that the artist qua artist muct also be androgynous - that is, endowed with what Lyrical Ballads, calls "a more comprehensive soul" than is "supposed to be common among mankind". Characterized by a flexuous, limber style and an association with androgynous subject matter, the androgynous sublime subverts conventional notions of sublimity while offering a more comprehensive model with which to supplement, of non supplant, them. The methodology of this study is to present a "counter-deconstructive" reading of the text and, where applicable, designs of Blake, as well as the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, seen from this somewhat novel but not ignoble perspective.
This is the first comprehensive overview of the influence of Platonism on the English literary tradition, showing how English writers, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Yeats, Pound and Iris Murdoch, used Platonic themes and images within their own imaginative work.
This book tackles the problematic relationship between Platonic philosophy and Romantic poetry, between the intellect and the emotions. Drawing on contemporary critical theory, especially hermeneutics and deconstruction, the author shows that a dialogue between thinking and poetizing is possible.
George Berkeley's mainstream legacy amongst critics and philosophers, from Samuel Johnson to Bertrand Russell, has tended to concern his claim that the objects of perception are in fact nothing more than our ideas. Yet there's more to Berkeley than idealism alone, and the poets now grouped under the label 'Romanticism' took up Berkeley's ideas in especially strange and surprising ways. As this book shows, the poets Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley focused less on Berkeley's arguments for idealism than they did on his larger, empirically-derived claim that nature constitutes a kind of linguistic system. It is through that 'ghostly language' that we might come to know ourselves, each other, and even God. This book is a reappraisal of the role that Berkeley's ideas played in Romanticism, and it pursues his spiritualized philosophy across a range of key Romantic-period poems. But it is also a re-reading of Berkeley himself, as a thinker who was deeply concerned with language and with written—even literary—style. In that sense, it offers an incisive case study into the reception of philosophical ideas into the workings of poetry, and of the role of poetics within the history of ideas more broadly.
Spititual quest is at the very heart of poetry, but in the materialistic climate of the late twentieth century this has been almost forgotten, even by those claiming to be experts in interpreting literature. How does the worldview common to the main esoteric traditions of East and West correspond to the aims of such Romantic poets as Shelley, Keats, Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth? In Romanticism and Esoteric Tradition, Paul Davies maintains that only in the light of the spiritual teachings of these traditions can the poetry and thinking of the Romantics be understood as they intended. This is one of the first books to connect the creative nature of poetry to the core teachings of the esoteric tradition, and thereby to bring out the true meaning of several Romantic writers whose works have been trivialized by a culture that has marginalized the spiritual and tied itself to material, historical, and social issues. The author also shows that the Romantics were the first Western poets to imagine the relationship of the self to the environment as personal encounter. In this sense the Romantics were recalling a long-held secret of the esoteric "human sciences," not inventing a new one. This book brings the deepest interests of the Romantics directly into contact with issues closest to present-day students of the spiritual traditions and holistic perspectives.
In Reforming Liberalism, Robert Devigne challenges prevailing interpretations of the political and moral thought of John Stuart Mill and the theoretical underpinnings of modern liberal philosophy. He explains how Mill drew from ancient and romantic thought as well as past religious practices to reconcile conflicts and antinomies (liberty and virtue, self-interest and morality, equality and human excellence) that were hobbling traditional liberalism. The book shows that Mill, regarded as a seminal writer in the liberal tradition, critiques liberalism’s weaknesses with a forcefulness usually associated with its well-known critics. Devigne explores Mill’s writings to demonstrate how his thought has been misconstrued--as well as oversimplified--to the detriment of our understanding of liberalism itself.
