The Romantic Imagination

This book contains the lectures which I gave at Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the happy months of 1948-1949, when I was Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. I have thought it right to publish them as they were delivered and not to transform them. The book will probably suffer from the circumstances of its origin and show certain traits which are undesirable in the printed page but inevitable to lecturing, especially when the audience does not always consist of the same people and each lecture has to be complete in itself. I must also apologize for speaking on a subject in which I am in no sense an expert or even a scholar. But the subject seemed to me to have been unjustly treated in recent years, and the welcome given to my handling of it has comforted me in my choice. Since the material presented is essentially "popular," I have given hardly anv references other than what is necessary for identifying important texts. A noted English scholar presents an appreciative and stimulating revaluation of the importance of the imagination to the great English Romantic poets. Cecil Bowra strikes a refreshing new balance between the old, uncritical attitude toward Romantic poetry and modern “realistic” attempts to discredit it.Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley, as well as Byron, Foe, and the Pre-Raphaelites, serve as examples in this analysis of the imagination as a prime motive in Romantic creative activity. Discussing such familiar masterpieces as “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “The Ancient Mariner,” and “Prometheus Unbound,” Bowra shows how the Romantic poets actually worked, what material they used and how they transformed it to their special needs, and what their ideas of poetry were. This is a book for anyone who cares for poetry or criticism. PREFACE CONTENTS I. The Romantic Imagination II. Songs of Innocence and Experience III. The Ancient Mariner IV. Ode on Intimations of Immortality V. Prometheus Unbound VI. Ode on a Grecian Urn VII. Don Juan VIII. Edgar Allan Poe IX. The House of Life X. Atalanta in Calydon XI. Christina Rossetti XII. The Romantic Achievement Notes INDEX