Romantic Understanding Research Articles

A life dedicated to research and ideal: Johannes Müller between empirical universality and idealistic vitalism mirrored in lecture notes from 1851

Until the mid-nineteenth century, "physiology" was a comprehensive theory of life, expounded and shaped by Johannes P. Müller (1801–1858). Biologists and medical doctors still refer to him today. In the summer term of 1851, Müller gave a lecture on the Comparative Anatomy of animals. This lecture was attended and recorded by Ernst Zeller (1830–1902), a future physician and zoologist, and has recently been published together with a German transcript. In this paper, we situate Johannes Müller within the intellectual history of his time. Through his "empirical idealism," we show how he opposed the speculative tendencies of the romantic understanding of nature, the emerging evolutionism, and the growing splits in the natural sciences. Müller focused on recognizing living nature as a whole and realizing ideal "phenomena" through his empirical research. He considered the notion of the soul of the world. Müller's lecture transcript serves as a poignant testament to German scientific culture in the mid-nineteenth century, a few years before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. It also provides valuable insights into the self-contained epistemological foundations of morphology.

Love, Be a Poem. The Rhetoric of Seduction in the Love Poetry of Vesna Parun

In the broadest sense, the paper is a discussion of Vesna Parun’s love poetry. The basic idea is that, on the one hand, it adheres to the romantic understanding of literature as a representation of the deepest personal feelings, universal truths, and essential values and, on the other hand, that it acts as a confirmation that the experience of love is fundamentally literary, and that literature is a form of unbridled love for linguistic seduction. For this reason, the author’s love poetry is not approached as a representation of her private life, love feelings, or relationships, but as a complex relationship between figurative language and a romanticized idea of love. In other words, it is interpreted as a discourse or rhetorical event that simultaneously constructs and deconstructs concepts such as authentic experience, sincere sensitivity, primordial love, or stable identity, and provides an opportunity to raise important ethical and political questions in the face of its ambivalence.

Emotional Storms, Passion and Melancholy when Symphonic Music is Legitimated as an Emotional Resource

In some contexts, classical music is described as capable of evoking powerful emotional experiences in listeners, while in others it is associated with a restrained response on the part of the audience. Against the backdrop of this observation, the article aims to apply a discourse-analytic approach to investigating how symphonic music is constructed and legitimated as an emotional resource, and how listeners’ reactions are articulated in relation to ideas about the emotional qualities of music. The material comprises texts and a small number of images taken from concert programs of two leading symphony orchestras: the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra (GSO).
 The results demonstrate variation in both the feelings that are highlighted in the concert programs and the conceptions or ideas about musical meaning that are referred to in the descriptions. While some descriptions draw on a formalist artistic ideal, emphasizing the music’s independent esthetic value, others exhibit a romantic understanding of music, emphasizing its metaphysical qualities. Music is furthermore legitimated as an emotional resource by being characterized as a bearer of specific feelings, in other words, in line with a conception of musical meaning as representational. When it comes to audiences’ listening positions, it is shown that two contrasting listening ideals are articulated in the concert descriptions, one introspective and one that involves the manifestation of powerful emotional experiences.
 The variation in listening ideals and conceptual assumptions is found to agree with the individualized understanding of musical meaning that is typical of neo-liberal consumer culture. At the same time, however, because emotional extremes are given space alongside traditional esthetic ideals, historically formed ideals are perpetuated.

Apophasis Approach: Drawing Similarities in Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats and To a Skylark by P.B. Shelley and Challenging the Keats’ Escapism

Apophasis is a rhetoric device aimed at serving different purposes from the relationship between the speaker and the addressee to the mysticism. The understanding of this relationship may be direct and indirect. Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale and Shelley’s To a Skylark have never been explored from apophasis approach. The established notion of negative capability known as escapism from this world to the world of the song of nightingale as a distinctive feature of Keats poetry is challenged and replaced with the pure experience in this paper. This challenge is going to initiate a debate in future research. This paper also discusses the fact that despite similarity of experience in Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale and Shelley’s To a Skylark, the researchers and critics do not associate Shelley’s To a Skylark to escapism. The apophasis approach is useful in drawing this similarity and develop an understanding of romanticism from the two song specific poems of these romantic poets.

MİLLİ MÜCADELE VE BÜYÜK TAARRUZ’A ANADOLULU BİR RUM’UN GÖZÜNDEN BAKMAK

The non-Muslims who led a peaceful life in ‘the system of nationality’ applied in the Ottoman Empire without any interference in their language, culture and religion for centuries have become one of the important reasons for the unrest lived because of the separatist movement they made since especially 19th century. This period has reasoned to the Geek’s, who were the most important non-Muslim class in Anatolia, going in action to take advantage of the helplessness of the state after the Ottoman Empire’s reaching its final stage with its defeat in the First World War. Regarding this aim, local Greeks both supported the occupation wholeheartedly and exposed many inhumane treatments to Muslim Türkish Folk by voluntarily joining into the Greek army. Even though the narratives about the atrocities committed are ignored by some in the context of the Turkish-Greek friendship that emerged as a result of a romantic understanding, they maintain their freshness in memories as a case. In our study here, through the memories of Manoli Aksiyotis, an Anatolian Greek who personally took place in the Greek Army during the Greek occupation which started in Anatolia, we will try to present what he did and felt during the Greek Army’s occupations’ period that ended with the Great Offensive with his memories.

ОТРАЖЕНИЕ ТЕМЫ ПЕРВОЙ ЛЮБВИ В ТВОРЧЕСТВЕ И.С. ТУРГЕНЕВА И С. БЕККЕТА

Русская литература получила широкое признание в мировом культурном пространстве только в конце XIX в. В этом вопросе примечательна роль И.С. Тургенева, который, в отличие от других русских писателей, был известен в Европе с 50-х гг. XIX в. и рассматривался иностранными авторами как близкий им литературный деятель, который русскую оригинальность изложения сочетал с доступным для понимания иноязычным читателям содержанием. В настоящем исследовании речь пойдет о реминисценциях из Тургенева в творчестве С. Беккета и, в частности, в его рассказе «Первая любовь», который во многом, полагаем, создавался в контексте одноименной тургеневской повести. Тема взаимоотношений Тургенева и ирландского писателя ранее не поднималась в исследовательской литературе, однако литературные связи двух авторов, которые удается проследить по письмам и библиотеке Беккета, позволяют нам говорить о знакомстве последнего с текстами русского писателя. Russian literature acquires wide-spread acknowledgement in the world cultural environment only in the late years of the 19th century. After that the creative works of such Russian writers as F.M. Dostoevsky, L.N. Tolstoy or A.P. Chekhov become the source of allusions and reminiscentia for the foreign authors. E.M. de Vogue even claimed that in terms of the crisis of the national literature writers must address the Russian texts which offer new and original strategies for literature development. First and foremost, he spoke about I.S. Turgenev’s figure. He was one of the few Russian writers known in Europe from the middle of the 19th century and sometimes appeared as an author uniting both the Russian original way of thinking and depicting world with understandable for foreign public plots and ideas. Turgenev’s creative talent was known outside Russia and some foreign writers even considered themselves as his apprentices (like H. James). Our current research deals with the Turgenev’s figure in S. Beckett’s creative works who was quite familiar with Russian literature in general. By studying Beckett’s letters and library it was discovered that he indeed had different Turgenev’s works in his collection. There stand out two works — “The First Love” and “A Month in the Country” — where the first one was as we believe the plot forcing Beckett to address this topic in his eponymously-named short story. The both stories have a lot in common in the plot and character sections. First of all, the father figure appears in both books in relation to the first love thus creating love triangle: main character — father — lover. Moreover, both fathers appear distant to characters and at the same time close to their hearts. Female lover is also expressing some similarities namely in their scandalous behavior for their time. As for the main heroes, they both have romantic understanding of life which is largely travestied in Beckett’s work. But the most significant part is connected to the definition of love in both books. Turgenev underlines the poisonous and destructive nature of love that just has tragic meaning and destroys people without hesitation or regret. Beckett, in his turn, focuses on abstract, senseless and plainly uncontrollable side of love which makes the whole process chaotic. His characters also pass the love trial which Русская и зарубежная литературы: сопоставительные планы 57 is common for most of Turgenev’s works demonstrating their vanity and loneliness in the universe

Finding the Image of God: Searching the ‘Sublime’ through works of Rene Descartes and H.P Lovecraft

This study explores the “Sublime” and aims at clarifying the very ‘understood’ as well as ‘misunderstood’ figure or image of God(s) and showing how the established and vivid definitions of the Almighty can be discarded with the help of certain ‘Infinist’ concepts and the ‘De-Humanization’ of God. It also aims at presenting a new perspective towards the understanding of the ‘humanization’ that happened and shows the loop-holes in its definition i.e. given to date all around the world. This paper focuses upon searching the acceptability and validity of Rene Descartes’ Ontological Argument, through which I examine the image of God as I find the image of God being repeated and, therefore, I would also raise the understandings from the Ontological Argument which is later debated through the concept of “theodicy” by Leibniz and which is altered and given an altered definition by H.P Lovecraft in the era of modernization. There has been a repeatation in the understanding of God and it’s Image. Infinism supports my statement, as it speaks of this Literature loop which is present and misunderstood very commonly as something new. A comparative methodology has been used in order to study the various theories upon God or Sublime from different ages, in order to study the changing images of God and the reasons behind it. The article presents my unique understanding of God that is different from the romantic understanding and the concept propogated in Monotheism.

Romanticism’s Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability by John Savarese (review)

Reviewed by: Romanticism’s Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability by John Savarese Sasha Tamar Strelitz John Savarese. Romanticism’s Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability. Ohio State UP, 2020. 192p. Part of our inherited understanding of Romanticism is that poetry exists as ruminations on and exercises of the inner workings of the mind. The movement’s fixation on the interior landscape—on thoughts and feelings—took form in the late eighteenth century, drawing influence from earlier movements such as the German Sturm und Drang (storm and stress). For both the German predecessor and its more broadly European successor, the shift towards emotion was a purposeful resistance to the Enlightenment’s staunch adherence to reason. Romantics preferred Maine de Biran’s turn of René Descartes’ rationalist statement Cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”)—Volo, egro sum (“I will/desire, therefore I am”). But, what if our inherited knowledge of Romanticism divorces its fidelity to the sciences? What if Romantic poetry functioned as a sort of response to the early cognitive sciences? John Savarese’s Romanticism’s Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability strives to reinscribe the relationship between Romanticism and science. His book-length recovery of Romanticism’s interrelation with the sciences takes an interdisciplinary approach to reading Romantic poetry with keen awareness of its ties specifically to the [End Page 134] early cognitive approaches produced contemporarily with the artistic movement. Savarese shows that Romanticism’s interrelation with science “reinforce[s] the Romantic idea that poetry was most at home in the inward domain of thought and feeling” (2). After all, cognitive functions include but are not limited to emotions. With his focuses on James Macphereson, Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Wordsworth, and Walter Scott, Savarese reinforces the notion that early cognitive approaches to poetry are more diverse than remembered by post-Romantic inheritors. By reading these poets’ work through a cognitivist lens, which he claims recovers Romanticism’s own “cross-disciplinary ‘turn to phenomenality’,” Savarese spotlights the close relationship between the science of sensation and Romantic poetry (Richard Sha qtd. in Savarese 2). His resuscitation diverges from our inherited understanding of Romanticism, as the book traces and investigates the movement’s “exploration of interiority [as] thoroughly enmeshed in the emerging language of physiological psychology and the embodied mind,” which was not faithfully transmitted through time by the post-Romantic memory (2). As featured in the title, “other’s minds” and “science of sociability” are central to Savarese’s inquiry. In the introduction, he points to the post-1980s “cognitive turn” in literary studies, or what Lisa Zunshine previously termed as “cognitive cultural studies” as central to his methodology (7). Using cognitive cultural studies as a theoretical gateway, Savarese reimagines Romantic literature as scientifically-informed accounts focused on the mind’s social powers—social powers that are understood as in-built or natural. Therefore, the poetry not only elicits from private consciousness, but also the mind’s social powers as related to the social contexts the person involves herself in. In other words, Savarese troubles the notion that Romantic poetry elicits solely from introspection or affective intensity, but instead he posits that it relied on “social intelligence[…]social recognition, agent tracking, and perspective-taking” (4). For instance, the chapter on Wordsworth applies the previously established cognitivist methodology to poetic moments in order to better understand the poet’s own assertion that Nature, or larger yet, his external environment played an active role on his mental life (106). By understanding the mental structures Wordsworth built to process the world around him—“These chiefly are such structures as the mind / Builds for itself ”—through the cognitivist lens Savarese offers, the reader rethinks the external location of the poet’s creative [End Page 135] agency in Nature (Wordsworth qtd. in Savarese 131). The central purpose of Romanticism’s Other Minds is to offer a prehistory of cognitive approaches to literature in order to reinscribe the fact that Romanticism was born alongside a fledgling cognitive science. Therefore, the book is a recovery project whose methodology is borrowed from Alan Richardson, who applies neuroscience in British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind, which is...

Methodological Aspects of Romanticism's Consideration in the European Musical Art of the 19th – the beginning of 20th Century

The aim of the article is to reveal the methodological aspects of the European Romanticism's investigation in the musical art and culture studies works. The methodology of the research presupposes such methods: historical – in the analysis of the processes of formation and evolution of Romanticism in the European art of the 19th – the beginning of the 20th century; historical-cultural – in the consideration of the conceptual foundations of the universal cultural and socio-historical context of the Romantic epoch; descriptive – in the analysis of the terminology and its interpretation of the Romanticism notion; historical-comparative – in the comparison of different manifestations of Romanticism in the 19th – the beginning of the 20th century; method of modeling – in the construction of a stylistic model of Romanticism of the particular period; typological – in the definition of the most peculiar features of the Romantic style. The scientific novelty of the research is a systematization of the scientific experience of the examination of Romanticism and the definition of the modern tendencies of the research of these ranges of problems. Conclusions. The reasons for the difference in the definitions and interpretations of Romanticism by the musicologists and theorists of literature are defined. The common positions of the researchers of Romanticism are considered: the understanding of Romanticism as a multilevel category; consideration of national versions of Romanticism in different European cultures; recognition of Romanticism as a dynamic system of multidirectional tendencies.

Logodaedalus: Word Histories of Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe

Logodaedalus: Word Histories of Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe

The Romance of Business: Ayn Rand Romanticism

The origins of a romantic worldview in the work of Russian-born American writer and philosopher Ayn Rand (Alisa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, 1905-1982) is studied in the article. The analysis is based on the Russian and American versions of the romantic trend in literature, which differ in the interpretation of the romantic hero. Ayn Rand formulates his own understanding of romanticism, in which the determining factor for a romantic hero is the presence of will in relation to his own character and being. Comparing the texts of Rand and the representatives of business romance S. Mervin and G.K. Webster, Calumet K (1901), it can be noted that their characters are outwardly similar (they are responsible, principled, they can inspire others), but they differ on a deeper level. It is shown that the fate of humanity lies at the center of the story of Rand’s novels, and not just the comprehension of ways to solve another production problem. It is noted that her characters overcome contradictions, try to understand themselves. It is stated that Ayn Rand makes the task of his work precisely the overcoming of dualism, following the traditions of Russian literature on American ground: taking the efficacious man as a basis, she embodies in her heroes what the Russian romantics aspired to: create the ideal of a whole person who changes himself and the world around him.

James Rovira, ed., <i>Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2</i>

At the first ever World of Bob Dylan symposium in May-June 2019 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Betsy Bowden, one of the founders of Dylan criticism, called for the development of a critical language that not only recognizes the similarities between songs and poems, but also respects their differences. Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2, edited by James Rovira, participates in this development by connecting Romantic-period poetry to rock-’n’-roll songs, although that is not its primary agenda. Instead, Rovira says that the book “seeks not only to demonstrate the influence of Romantic literature on rock, which is already the subject of much attention, but to argue that rock itself is a late-twentieth-century expression of Romanticism” (xi-xii). He grounds this argument in the work of Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy, and most of the contributors acknowledge a debt to them as well. Sayre and Löwy defined Romanticism as “‘opposition to capitalism in the name of pre-capitalist values’” (quoted in Rovira xiii), and Rovira uses this definition to describe Romanticism “not as an era but as a response to historical conditions in a condition/​response model” (xv). Liberated from the limits of a Romantic period, the essays in the collection “assume that Romanticism continues into the present as an essential feature of modern culture and takes on a specific, musical transformation in the period following World War II” (xiv). The persuasiveness of the collection depends largely on how one views the persuasiveness of that understanding of Romanticism.

Dating and romantic relationships of adolescents with intellectual and developmental disabilities

IntroductionAdolescents with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities (IDD) are at high risk for sexual exploitation, yet there is a paucity of research on their romantic relationships. The objectives of this study were to examine the romantic understanding and experiences of youth with IDD. MethodsThirty-one adolescents (16–19 years; 21 males and 10 females) with IDD (12 participants with additional diagnosis of ASD) were recruited from a community health clinic. Individual interviews and questionnaires assessed cross-sectionally these youths’: (1) romantic conceptualizations; (2) romantic awareness (knowledge of: romantic relationships, sexual behaviours, initiating relationships); (3) involvement; (4) social competence; and (5) expectations for autonomy. Parent perspectives on these topics were also captured through questionnaires. ResultsWhile 85% reported an immediate desire for a romantic relationship, only 35% were currently in a relationship. Qualitative findings indicated that 14% of youth were unable to differentiate between a romantic relationship and a friendship. Among those who could make this distinction, romantic relationships were conceptualized as serious, commitment for life, and primarily for companionship. Adolescents with ASD, compared to those without ASD, showed weaker social competence and lower romantic awareness. Parents were adolescents’ primary source of information about relationships. Finally, parents and adolescents differed in their perception of the age at which they were ready to date. ConclusionsThis study contributes to our understanding of the romantic experiences of youth with IDD. Prevention efforts focused on education may be important to help ensure these youth develop safe and healthy relationships.

ОТ СИМВОЛА К СИМУЛЯКРУ (НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ «МОСКОВСКОГО ТЕКСТА» АНДРЕЯ БЕЛОГО)

The article examines the transformation of Andrei Bely’s “Moscow text”, a recurrent theme in his creative work, in the context of the modern philosophical and aesthetical paradigm. This transformation was the result of radical renewal of the poet’s artistic consciousness determined by the crucial historical epoch. It is shown that in his final works, Bely abandons a symbol - the basic means of romantic understanding and artistic implementation of reality in his early creative work - and begins to depict simulative reality and personages-simulacra. The analysis of “Moscow text” indicates that the writer, running ahead of his time, approached global problems of the modernity, the “era of simulation” (J. Baudrillard): deontologization and virtualization of reality and, as a result, total dehumanization of life.

Nature and the Language of the Sense: Berkeley's Thought in Coleridge and Wordsworth

Though George Berkeley's name appears in a number of studies of British Romantic poetry, sustained readings of his influence on poets of the period are scarce. This is in large part because our modern understanding of Berkeley as an idealist philosopher often precludes us from seeing the role that his theory of nature as a divine language played in poetic conceptions of the relations between mind, world, and God. In this essay I explore the writings of Coleridge and Wordsworth from the 1790s, sketching as complete a picture as possible of their knowledge of Berkeley, and offering readings of Berkeleian moments in their poetry. These moments, which draw Berkeley's ideas into a complex dialogue with philosophical materialism, centre around a rhetoric of semblance – in which the world can ‘seem’ less gross than bodily. I offer this reading as a step towards a fuller understanding of the Romantic understanding of Berkeley.

Engaging Students in Science: The Potential Role of “Narrative Thinking” and “Romantic Understanding”

Engaging students in science and helping them develop an understanding of its ideas has been a consistent challenge for both science teachers and science researchers alike. Such a challenge is even greater in the context of the “Science for All” curriculum initiative. However, Bruner’s notion of “narrative thinking” and Egan’s “romantic understanding” offer an alternative approach to teaching and learning science, in a way that engagement and understanding become a possibility. This chapter focuses on students’ “narrative mode of thought”, as a bridge to understanding science—which has traditionally been based more upon the use of logico-mathematical thinking in the upper grades—and on a distinctive form of understanding the world, characteristic of students of the age range from eight to fifteen years. This latter form of understanding, that the educational theorist Kieran Egan calls “romantic understanding”, has features that can be readily associated with the natural world and its phenomena. Therefore its development could be fostered in the context of school science learning, and in a way that the narrative mode would also be taken into consideration.

¿Qué estudiamos cuando estudiamos literatura? El tratamiento curricular de Rosalía de Castro

Este artículo examina el tratamiento dado a la figura de Rosalía de Castro en la enseñanza de la literatura desde el inicio del siglo XX, teniendo en cuenta las distintas reformas de la Educación Secundaria. Así, se estudia su presencia en los currículos derivados de las siguientes legislaciones: Plan de 1901, Plan de 1926, Decreto de 1931, Ley de 1938, Plan de 1953, Plan de 1975, LOGSE de 1990, LOE de 2006 y LOMCE de 2013, con apoyo en algunos ejemplos de manuales. Se extraen conclusiones sobre las disfunciones causadas por el criterio lingüístico-nacional, que relega a Castro a representante de una literatura ‹‹regional››, pero también por las nuevas tendencias posnacionales, que permiten su exclusión de la enseñanza reglada. Se reflexiona, finalmente, sobre las consecuencias de la marginación de esta autora para la comprensión integral del romanticismo y sobre la importancia de un adecuado abordaje educativo de Rosalía para la transmisión efectiva de la memoria y el patrimonio cultural.

“The Fury and the Mire of Human Veins”: On Bloom's “Endlessly Elaborating Poem”

"The Fury and the Mire of Human Veins":On Bloom's "Endlessly Elaborating Poem" Chris Winkler (bio) In the closing pages of his latest, and surely most personal, work, Harold Bloom poses a question that may serve as the book's theme. He asks: Is there a relation between a writer's immortality and a reader's search for consolation in regard to the death of friends or family and intimations of the reader's own impending mortality? (2019, 505) This question comes at the end of a prolonged discussion of Proust, whose very appearance as the subject of the book's coda is hardly this work's least curious aspect. Bloom takes up the novelist's famous epiphanies, a corollary of the romantic sublime. For Bloom, these Wordsworthian "spots of time" are, however brief, intimations of immortality, and, as such, death-defying; they also contain "Proust's truth," which is "compounded of perception, involuntary memory, impressionism, a search for spiritual meaning, and a kind of atheistic mysticism" (497). These are more than just aspects of Proust's work; the near five hundred pages that precede this observation portray a critic who, too, is in search of lost time and achieves a similar effect. But Bloom's reverie on Proust finally gives way to the explicit statement of the book's theme cited above—which, in its remaining few pages, solely becomes, with reference to Samuel Johnson, "intimations of the reader's [Bloom's] own impending mortality." In his use of poetry as consolation in the face of death, late Bloom is all too human. This preoccupation, though, has simultaneously and strikingly led the criticism to literalize the poetic imagination. Bloom's critical memoir, perhaps inevitably, literalizes tropes such as time and death, which are so central to the earlier work. Whereas Bloom's well-known theory of poetic relations emerges from his consideration of a poet's sense of "lateness" and the necessity of "lying against time," Possessed by Memory is haunted by the physical actuality of these concepts. If the exigencies of a critic's life can so easily transform the function of his central tropes, such a phenomenon [End Page 345] raises the question: how do these tropes understood in the context of Bloom's theory of poetry formulate a theory of life?1 This question has alternate origins in the ending to Wallace Stevens' 1950 poem "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven": This endlessly elaborating poemDisplays the theory of poetry,As the life of poetry. A more severe, More harassing master would extemporizeSubtler, more urgent proof that the theoryOf poetry is the theory of life, As it is, in the intricate evasions of as,In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness,The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands. (2015, xx) Stevens' romantic understanding of a poem as ars poetica and as "the life of poetry" is no longer especially romantic, for we as readers and writers have unconsciously internalized such assumptions, owing in no small part to Bloom's work over the last half century. Our poems are both statements about, and demonstrations of, our conceptions of poetry. "A more severe, more harassing master," Stevens goes further, allying the theory of poetry with the theory of life. The poem's final tercet ends with rich ambiguity: is poetry or lived experience the referent? Put differently, are the poem's final figurations tropes of writing or of living? Are "the intricate evasions of as" metaphor itself or artful human action? I find it nearly impossible to read Stevens' magnificent ending without thinking of the theory of creative misprision Bloom develops over the course of two decades, beginning in 1970 with his book on Yeats. For instance, what are intricate evasions if not a poet's swerves, his defense mechanism vis a vis the past? And what are such worlds (importantly, encompassing both heavens and hells) that a poet creates if not demiurgic? Recall Bloom's exchanges with de Man in the late seventies, which more than anything forces him to clarify his theory of poetic influence against those of his fellow intertextualists.2 The telling difference between Bloom's work...

Nature in Robert Browning’s Poems

Different from Romantic understanding of nature, in Browning’s poems, when nature is mentioned, there are two kinds of depictions. One type is to describe nature itself only, and there is nothing symbolic one can infer from the descriptions of nature or the descriptions have little relationship with its subject, that is, nature for nature’s sake. Though some depictions are related to the subject, they present the negative aspects of nature. As illustrated in “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”, the natural settings are forlorn and bleak, like in a wasteland.

Romantic understanding: The development of rationality and imagination, ages 8-15

Romantic understanding: The development of rationality and imagination, ages 8-15