Imagination

Abstract

All Romantic artists were fascinated by the function and workings of the imagination, and throughout the eighteenth century emphasis on its creative powers grew, in line with the increased attention paid to the creative subject. Three essential assertions recur in most writings of the period: the centrality of the subject; the communicative power of imagination; and man’s ability to turn imagination into an autonomous order of existence, thus making utopia the prime motive for human progress, and ‘symbol’ a specific mode of reading the world. But such praise for the imaginative power can also be viewed as the concealment of a sense of loss in a universe felt as overwhelmingly complex.