On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature

     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. This joining is a creative act. Man's creativity is analogous to the unconscious creativity of nature.

     In this essay, he says that although epistemologists consider that the natural world is illusory and dead, they still think of art as copying it, holding to a theory of native realism. Schelling claims that there is no lifeless nature; it strives for shape, just a man tries to shape nature in art. In artistic activity, the mind seeks to join subject and object, finite and infinite, soul and nature. For Schelling, a work of art must be considered as very closely related to its author. The real work of art is not what we have before us but the activity of its making.

     Schelling also talks of universally and particularity. In on the Relation of the Plastic Art of Nature he holds that the particular gains universally through its self- identity and the resistance of its form to the universe. An artistic makes the individual a world in itself, a class, and an eternal prototype. Schelling tends to see the world in a grain of sand. This view of Schelling on the relationship between the particular and the universal invites further elaboration.

     Schelling says that if the particular gain self- identity it can jump in to the domain of universality. Moreover the particular must strive to defend its form from the universal form. Then only it can move in to the dimension of universality. Hence, it is correct to sum up Schelling in the following way- through self- identity and resistance the particular moves in to the universal.

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...

Charles Baudelaire      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.... 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...

Friederich Schelegel     Schelegel 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 Schelegel's critical essays, we find a sense of Romantic ideas. These ideas are the initial expression of Romanticism. Read More...

John Locke     John Locke is one of the influential English philosophers and is best known for his epistemological and political views.He observes knowledge to have begun with simple sense perceptions and combining these in to complex abstract ideas. Read More...

Edmund Burke     Edmund Burke assumes that all our knowledge comes via sense experience and that we combine the simple ideas of sense into more... Read More..

Immanuel Kant     Kant is a German philosopher whose systematic and comprehensive work in the theory of ethics, knowledge and aesthetics influenced various schools of Kantianism and Idealism. Read More...