Imagination in the Contemporary World and the Legacy of Romantic Literary Thought

Kubla Khan!

So worrying about the “definition” of imagination/Imagination just might be a waste of time for the poet, the writer, the artist.  I have sometimes wondered if James Joyce’s outpourings in Ulysses was a response elicited not only by his knowledge of so many languages —as if they struck a freight train crashing against his skull—but also as the result of mercury treatments he is theorized to have taken in an attempt to cure the syphilis that claimed his eye and the sanity of his daughter (not, you won’t find more than a few papers on that subject— it’s research I’ve done, myself, from medical evidence I discovered in the 1970’s about Joyce, his wife and children, so far as I am aware).

In fact, if  “Romanticism” indeed appropriated “Imagination” as a living definition –though that’s surely a simplified viewpoint–a definition that rested on a full understanding of the past, and which was being stressed and challenged by the skeptical attitudes of those whose reliance on science alone would render blossoms, imagination, and baby monkeys alike as only topics to analyze—then it was possibly the last stand attempt of creative human minds to secure a place of respect for what the mind could produce, for which the world might not have a place, nor understand, nor be ready.

It is the very liveliness of Imagination as the Romantics attempted to define it– aware of its past meanings–of how Milton and Blake and the ancient philosophers gave Imagination a place of respect in the dynamics of human thought— along with vibrant arguments over past and present agreements about what Imagination really stood for (and which it might no longer, for similar reasons today, stand for), that tends to attract me. It behooves

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