More on Hazlitt and the Functions of the Imagination

Abstract

William Hazlitt's ideas about the imagination have received widespread critical attention, but that attention has been confined almost entirely to his comments on the “sympathetic imagination.” In his opening sentence J. D. O'Hara (“Hazlitt and the Functions of the Imagination,” PMLA, LXXXI, December 1966, 552–562) intends, I think, to use the term “sympathetic imagination” in a broad sense—broader than in his second paragraph, where, in order to disclose “the limitations of sympathy in the creation of art,” Mr. O'Hara seems to confine “sympathy” to the poet's identification with character. He proceeds, then, to designate “associational theory” rather than “sympathy” as grounds for Hazlitt's objection to egotistical poetry—like Wordsworth's—and to describe this objection as “basically not aesthetic but moral” (p. 553). Mr. O'Hara has written a closely reasoned and useful article; but when, later in the article, he describes the “formative imagination” (p. 561), he again separates elements in Hazlitt's aesthetic which, I think, are not as readily separable as he implies.