The Salon of 1859

     Baudelaire is a French Romanticist and the precursor of symbolic movement in European literature. He considers imagination as the “queen of faculties”, truly creative power. The imagination must shape what nature makes available to it.

     When nature is thought of as a dictionary a mere source of the basic elements of work of art- copying nature is at best trivial undertaking; man must breathe his own life in to his experience and his art. He feels that art imposes certain pattern in to the moral order. Art tries to observe order in the disorder of the society. It also imposes moral order in human irregularity.

     In the essay “The Salon of 1859”, he has talked about symbol and imagination. Since art creates certain pattern in human irregularities, artist should but imitate nature because nature is forest of symbols, which is dull and cruel. Baudalaire thinks that the source of art should be human beings chaotic situation, disorder and irregularities. He opines that poet can see correspondence between nature and supernatural world. Baudalaire major principle is the “Principle of Correspondence”- our ideas are communicated with the external world with the help of symbols- symbol being the vehicle to correspond the ideas of human mind and outer world or of external world and spiritual world. Correspondence is the inherent quality possessed by both human mind and external world. Correspondence also refers to the communication between human mind and external world. The poet has power of understanding this communication who then turns ideas in to symbols and presents them before the readers. The symbol has the capacity to correspond between art and world.

     Baudelaire glorifies universal imagination the means of expression that can master human experience. Art creates a new world and produces newer sensation. It is the governing principle, so it governs the whole world. He claims that imagination is the queen of the truth and beauty. It maintains the definite relationship with infinite things none of faculties can do without it.

     In the absences of imagination, there is no virtue and morality. It has the power of synthesis, so it is the constitutive faculty that must digest and transform daily experiences and changes them in to symbols and images and the purpose of art should be both moral and aesthetic. Though nature in its crude form is barbaric, art creates aesthetic and moral meaning out of it. By knowing nature only we can't have universal imagination; instead it urges the mastery over the medium of human experience.

William Wordsworth      William Wordsworth's preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads" is a major expression of the spirit of English Romanticism. This present essay simply shifts emphasis from the relationship between poem and reader to that between poet and poem. But it does not mean that Wordsworth gives up the concern for his reader. He is deep interested in speaking to the reader by the moral effect of his work. Nevertheless, he defines the poem primarily in term of its author's creative activity. He approaches the idea of poem after discussing the idea of poet. In this sense, a poet is a man who speaks to men; he has great knowledge of human nature, and a mass comprehensive soul.It is true that a poet is endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness. Read More...

Samuel T. Coleridge     The essay is a tribute to Shakespeare who possesses all the qualities and conditions of a true poet. Coleridge tries to unveil some misconceptions popular about Shakespeare by formulating some romantic conceptions. He is a genius who well expressed himself in his dramas and poems. The ideas that he was immoral are totally groundless.The organic form he exposes is true to his genius for it is innate that shapes, as it develops, itself from within, and the fullness of its devolvement is one and the some with the perfection of its outward form.Shakespeare himself is nature... Read More...

P.B. Shelley      P. B. Shelley, a great Romantic poet and critic, defends poetry by claiming that the poet creates human values and imagines the forms that shape the social and cultural order. Read More...

John Keats      Last Poet of a Romantic period, John Keats' critical speculation is found in his letters, which he wrote to different persons in different walks of life. He believes in sensation rather than thought. Later he is also known as sensuous poet. He is sensuous poet because he makes use of that poetic image, which directly affects... Read More...

Edward Young      Conjectures on Original Composition primarily attack the subject. Young distinguishes' originals' from 'imitations' the former far better than the latter despite the former is fewer in number. Read More...

Friedrich Schlegel     Schlegel is the leading German Romantic theorist. He was the editor of the periodical Anthenaeum(1798-1800). They published a variety of thoughts literary, morals philosophical, political and other critical fragments. In Schlegel's critical essays, we find a sense of Romantic ideas. These ideas are the initial expression of Romanticism. Read More...

Friedrich Von Schelling     Schelling is a German-Idealist, in the post Kantian development in German philosophy. He rejects Kant’s idea that' things in themselves' are unknown. Instead he posited a subject and object that are joined in aesthetic activity. Read More...