Romantic Image (Routledge Classics) by Frank Kermode

by Frank Kermode

"In this extremely important book of speculative and scholarly criticism, Mr Kermode is setting out to re-define the notion of the Romantic tradition, especially in relation to English poetry and criticism." -- Times Literary Supplement

Genres: Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Romanticism, Criticism, Literature, Poetry, 20th Century

Paperback Bunko

First published January 1, 1957

About the author

Sir John Frank Kermode was a highly regarded British literary critic best known for his seminal critical work The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, published in 1967 (revised 2003).

Reviews

[Ines · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yeats: "He has made, after the manner of his kind, mere images."

"The artist or the 'aesthete', so elevated above all others, refines the instruments of intuition till his whole nature becomes one complex medium of reception; what he receives is the vision - the beatific vision, if we cared to make it such - of our actual experience in the world, To achieve this, which is 'not the conveyance of an abstract body of truths or principles', but 'the conveyance of art', demands an intense individuality, a cultivation of difference, and indeed the conflict with the world at large."

"When Yeats was young, he used to write in autograph albums the famous words of Axel (later he substituted 'For wisdom is a butterfly, not a gloomy bird of prey'). In 1899 he admiringly credited Johnson with Axel's attitude. 'He has renounced the world and built up a twilight world instead... He might have cried out with Axel, 'As for living, our servants will do that for us.' It was Marius, said Yeats, that had taught Johnson's generation 'to walk upon a rope': for as life demanded extravagant participation, art required isolation."

"...and as early aas The Celtic Twilight he describes a Symbolist vision, of apes eating jewels in hell, which contains the elements of what later became a powerful and immediate impulse, 'I knew that I saw Celtic hell, and my own Hell, the Hell of the artist, and that all who sought after beautiful and wonderful things with too avid a thirst, lost peace and form, and became shapeless and common'."

"Poets and artists, says Yeats in Per Amica Silentia Lunae, 'must go from desire to weariness and so to desire again, and live for the moment when vision comes like terrible lightning, in the humility of the brutes'. Tormented by the necessary failure of his life, appalled in conscience or in vanity, he can say, 'I suffered continual remorse, and only became content when my abstractions had composed themselves into picture and dramatisation."

"He reconciles the opposites of action and contemplation; and this reconciliation of opposites, very properly in a Romantic poet, is the purpose of the Yeatsian symbol, which is the flowering of what I call the Romantic image. (As throughout this essay I here use 'Romantic' in a restricted sense, as applicable to the literature of one epoch, beginning in the late years of 18th century and not yet finished, and as referring to the high valuation placed during this period upon the image-making powers of the mind at the expense of its rational powers, and to the substitution of organicist for mechanistic modes of thinking about works of art.)

"Even in Canaletto, Yeats says, there is that power to move us so that 'our though rushes out to the edges of our flesh'."

"...since for Yeats as for Blake eschatology was a branch of aesthetics" ^^

"Blake anticipates much modern aesthetic with his argument that conception and execution are, in the artist, the same act. 'I have heard many people say 'Give me the Ideas. It is no matter what words you put them into', and others say 'Give me the Design, it is no matter for the Execution.' These people know enough of Artifice, but nothing of Art. Ideas cannot be given but in their minutely appropriate words, nor can a deign be made without its minutely appropriate execution... He who copies does not execute, he only imitates what is already executed. Execution is only the result of Invention."

"The main psychological assumption of Symbolism is essentially that of early Romantic aesthetic: that the human mind is so continued as to be able to recognise images of which it can have no perceived knowledge - the magic assumption, or the assumption that makes so much of dreams."

"i always think that the fundamental process at the back of all the arts might be represented by the following metaphor. You know what I call architect's curves - flat pieces of wood with all different kinds of curvature. By a suitable selection from these you can draw approximately any curve you like. The artist I take to be a man who simply can't bear the idea of that 'approximately'. He will get the exact curve of what he sees whether it be an object or an idea in the mind."

"The human intellect tends to explain (explico, unfold) everything in a manner fitting its limitations; it analyses, because 'that is the only way in which intellect can deal with things'; 'we reduce everything to extensive manifolds'. We unfold everything out in space, and we tend to think that everything that cannot be so unfolded must be unknowable. But of course that is not so, and anybody can think of things which are somehow known but resist this form of knowing them."

"'Vortex is energy', but deadness is the first condition of art: 'Our Vortex does not suck up to life'. What is sought is an image which is 'a sort of death and silence in the middle of life'.

Blast: "Primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE."

[Vishvapani · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I had read this book many years ago. Kermode clarifies 150 years of cultural history