Abstract
This thesis examines the Romantic poetics of the unconscious with psychoanalysis theories. For the English Romantics, the unconscious mind plays a crucial role in poetic creativity. Although Romanticism and psychoanalysis differ in their jargon, purposes and ethics, they both emphasize the irrational side of the mind, dreams, and childhood. Many ideas later theorized by Freud and Jung find their poetic expressions in Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats. Romantic poets anticipate psychoanalysis in their ceaseless efforts to transcend rational bound and to probe into the unconscious experience such as visions and dreams. And psychoanalytical accounts of the unconscious provide a key to the understanding of Romantic poetics. The Romantics holds that poetical creating should be spontaneous and intuitive and thus has great to with the unconscious. Wordsworth demands that good poetry is the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Coleridge, Shelley and Keats hold that the development of imagination is as unconscious and automatic as organic growth. The idea of spontaneity is more fully formulated by psychoanalysts. Although his concern is therapeutic, Freud’s theory of free association recapitulates Romantic spontaneity. Jung is even more aligned with the Romantics in his account of poetic creation: in composing poetry, a poet is compelled to listen to the dictates of the “autonomous complex” from the unconscious. Trying to go beyond rational thinking, the Romantics turn to dreams or dreamlike states to seek inspirations unavailable when awake. Wordsworth claims that poetry originates in a “tranquil recollection,” a dreamlike state. Psychoanalysts affirm that dreams help poetical creation. Freud believes that poetical creation involves a process similar to “self-observation”—a state that resembles to Wordsworth’s “tranquil recollection.” Other Romantic poets, especially Coleridge in preface to “Kubla Khan,” affirm dreams’ visionary character. Jung and Fromm follow the Romantic thinking that dreams contain visions and insights. Psychoanalysts throw light on the mental character of the Romantic poets as dreamers, visionaries, and even prophets. Moreover, the unconscious is also important in the theory of Romantic Imagination. There exists a close parallel between Freud’s unconscious theory and Coleridge’s Secondary Imagination. Secondary Imagination which dissolves, diffuses, dissipates and unifies works in a way similar to Freud’s “displacement and condensation” of the unconscious activities. And its reconciliation of opposites also betrays the thinking trait of the unconscious which does not distinguish between opposite elements and tend to combine them. Such an imaginative theory results in the Romantics’ belief in the “negative faith” and children’s visionary capacity; both reflect the importance of the unconscious in Romantic poetics. Therefore, the unconscious as defined by psychoanalysts is indeed a subject much explored by Romantic poets whether with or without being so named and psychoanalytic accounts of the unconscious illuminate Romantic poetics.