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

in order to see how the ideas of the eighteenth century concerning Imagination were refined, and then redefined, perhaps to help buttress those philosophical arguments which they created to substantiate and legitimize their rebellion, which was, broadly speaking, arrayed against eighteenth century sentimentalism and superficiality.  The general result of this rebellion was a “Romantic” idealism which fascinated not only their generation, but those to come.  I think we have inherited from the Romantics our present notions of Imagination, which continue to have an impact upon the definition of imagination with which the layman and the psychologist must deal today.

I have been reading a little of Coleridge and Hazlitt, and was struck by some of Hazlitt’s love letters, which for me epitomize the ‘romantic’ in “Romanticism” while alerting me to the elements of both imagination and satire which he employed so well in Liber Amoris.   Marilyn Butler, who analyzes the way the Romantics often presented thinly-masked, biting and satiric autobiographic self-images in her essay “Satire and the Images of Self in the Romantic Period: the Long Tradition of Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris,” commented that

“..an age’s self-image may not be as distinct as posterity’s view of it.  The so-called Romanticists did not know at the time that they were supposed to do without satire…it is easy to exaggerate the break with the recent literary past, or with that portion of it we now designate Augustinian.  Byron’s well-known tribute to Pope may have been controversial; Scott’s even better-advertised tribute to Dryden was less so…(210).”

In the matter of Coleridge, his well-known revisions chart the changes and fluidity in Romantic evolution of ideas,

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