Phenomenology and Revolutionary Romanticism

Abstract

The premise of this discussion is that there are great benefits to be gained for both sides by establishing a dialogue between phenomenology and Romantic poetry. To illustrate this, I will analyze Romantic poems that dramatize what we might call a “revolution of the mind” that aims to discover a currently “invisible” but more authentic experience of the role conscious perception plays in the constitution of our world. In considering Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Dejection: An Ode, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, and William Blake’s Jerusalem, we shall see that these poems depict such a revolution in terms that bear a close relationship to Edmund Husserl’s critique of the “natural attitude” and his turn to the phenomenological reduction so as to move past the errors that, he argues, this attitude involves. However, in considering both Jerusalem and Shelley’s Lift Not the Painted Veil, we shall also see the way in which these accounts of radical perceptual revolution often raise fears which may continue to haunt phenomenology as well. The conclusion then will pursue implications that the noticeably more active role these poems implicitly or explicitly assign to authentic perception has for both Romanticism and phenomenology.