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.
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Notes
Thomas McFarland also alludes to some basic agreements between Coleridge and Husserl. His analysis, however, focuses primarily on Coleridge’s prose and does not offer a reading of Dejection in light of phenomenology. See Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969), pp. 142, 218, 236, 244, 379–380, etc.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), Vol. I, pp. 362–363.
Ibid., p. 363.
Ibid., p. 102.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. H. L. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985), p. 313.
The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, op. cit., p. 364.
Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy I, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982), p. 114.
The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, op. cit., p. 365.
Ibid., pp. 365–366.
See, for example, J. Robert Barth, S.J.’s “oleridge’s Dejection: Imagination, Joy, and the Power of Love,” Coleridge’s Imagination, eds. Richard Gravil, Lucy Newlyn, and Nicholas Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), pp. 179–192; David Jasper’s Coleridge as Poet and Religious Thinker (Allison Park: Pickwick Publications, 1985), pp. 64-72; Raimond Modiano’s Coleridge and the Concept of Nature (Tallahassee: Florida State UP, 1985), pp. 60-63; and Harold Bloom’s The Visionary Company (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1971), p. 225.
For more comprehensive readings of Prometheus Unbound, see Carl Grabo’s Prometheus Unbound: An Interpretation (Chapel Hill: The U of North Carolina P, 1935); Earl Wasserman’s Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1965); and Gerald McNiece’s Shelley and the Revolutionary Idea (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969), pp. 218-245, among others.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977), p. 194.
Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977) Ibid., pp. 191–192.
Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977) Ibid., p. 194.
Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977) Ibid., pp. 192–193.
Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977) Ibid., p. 194.
Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977), p. 194 Ibid.
Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977) Ibid., p. 312.
Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977), p. 194 Ibid.
Husserl, op. cit., p. 113.
Some aspects of the reading I develop in this section were first developed in my doctoral dissertation, “William Blake’s Performative Prophecy” (Ph.D. diss., Auburn University, 1999).
William Blake, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, ed. Morton D. Paley (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1991), pp. 290–291.
Ibid., p. 291.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 292.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 294.
Ibid.
Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), p. 140.
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Jacobs, J. (2002). Phenomenology and Revolutionary Romanticism. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Visible and the Invisible in the Interplay between Philosophy, Literature and Reality. Analecta Husserliana, vol 75. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0485-5_8
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