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

us to see if we agree that ‘imagination” as we think it is today resembles at all the Romantic’s notion about it, or not.

To be able to give a name to that factor that affects your creative thought as does the concept of “imagination’ should not slay it or render it lifeless: imagination remains with the human race, recognized or not, so long as people dare to think for themselves. I like what Wordsworth calls “the imaginative will” because of the empowerment this term gives to the will that is adorned, amidst its potential for reasonableness, by the focused intellect.  Margaret Sherwood says that Wordsworth, “searching for the single intellectual formula that would solve the complex problem of existence…(was) reduced by….dogmatic fatalism to depression that was well-night despair:

“The crisis of that strong disease, the soul’s last and lowest ebb….was a                              questioning as to the reality of the existence of the human will, of the power of                        choice, and of the adequacy of the reason to give grounds for choice….the story of              Wordsworth’s recovery, as recorded in prelude, is one of the great chapters in                human biography.  In reaction from temporary submission to (the) doctrine…that                man (is) the driven victim of external forces…the young poet (became)                                …conscious…of creative power within…(and) (h)is faith in “the imaginative will,”  as a creative power, capable of vivifying the human soul at the pure sources of being, he ever after expressed in his poetry and…life” (182-183).

The

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