Abstract
Romanticism has been under continuous review ever since its emergence, and nowhere more insistently than in the field of subjectivity, the realm of the ‘I’. The Romantic upvaluing of the self and its potentialities is of course both complex and wide-ranging, but it can be conveniently exemplified, in one of its more comprehensive sweeps, by reference to Georges Poulet’s account (written in the 1950s and 1960s) of the French, English and German Romantics as discoverers of ‘the essentially religious character of human centrality’, who ‘took hold of the idea of eternity … [and] removed it from its empyrean world into their own’, affirming that ‘between the divine source and the individual sources there is identity of origin and identity of growth’ (‘Timelessness’ 7; Metamorphoses 95)1. As Shelley put it, in one of Poulet’s privileged quotations, ‘Each is at once the centre and the circumference’ (‘On Life’, Works VI: 260) — centre by virtue of the active principle of thought, circumference because of the mind’s infinite content. But it is Shelley to whom we may then immediately go for a sharp reminder of the well-documented shadow-side of this same vatic embrace of inwardness: that is, for instance, to the figure of the maniac in ‘Julian and Maddalo’, cautionary spectacle and the poet’s dark double, where imagination falls back into itself and moves endlessly onwards, becomes solipsistic and seeming mad.2
And in Melodious Accents I
Will sit me down & Cry I, I.
William Blake
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© 1992 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Newey, V. (1992). Romantic Subjects: Shaping the Self from 1789 to 1989. In: Martin, P.W., Jarvis, R. (eds) Reviewing Romanticism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21952-0_10
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