Into Silent Seas: Ideas and Images of Intellect in Kant and the English Romantics

Author(s): GRAHAM NICOL FORST

Source: Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Fall, 1981), pp. 31-44
Published by: University of Manitoba
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/24780683
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 Into Silent Seas:
Ideas and Images of Intellect
in Kant and the English Romantics

GRAHAM NICOL FORST

There is a revealing passage in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, just between

his circumscription of empirical knowledge in the "Transcendental Analytic"
and his monumental examination of the absolute claims of pure thought,
which he is about to undertake in the "Transcendental Dialectic." Appre
hensively pondering the awesome task ahead of him, Kant looks longingly
back over the "domain" of empirical awareness he has just successfully
mapped, and he sees it as a lovely island, "enclosed by nature itself within
unalterable limits": "It is the land of truth—enchanting name!—surrounded
by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog
bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of
farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty
hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet
is unable to carry to completion."1
Kant's metaphor is striking. What could be more appropriate than to
compare the prospect of transcending the severe but secure limits of ordinary
experience to a mariner's voyage through icebergs and fog-banks, leaving
behind those familiar poles of reference—the "kirk," "hill" and "lighthouse
top" (to use Coleridge's metaphors)—by which we fix our course in our
everyday lives? After all, he is engaged in a philosophical endeavor very
similar to Coleridge's poetic one in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner":
that is, to consider, or give shape to the human potential for asserting freedom
from the laws which determine natural events.

Mosaic XIV/4
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32 Graham Nicol Forst

Near the end of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, a similar metaphor is

used but with a very dissimilar intent. Having destroyed induction and reduced
the concept of personal identity to "a bundle or collection of different
perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and
are in a perpetual flux and movement," Hume finds himself "reduced almost
to despair," and "resolved to perish on the barren rock, on which I am at
present, rather than venture myself upon that boundless ocean, which runs
out into immensity."2
The difference between the two travelers—one preparing to embark^ and
one to remain—is, one feels, wholly attitudinal. Kant was simply and unalter
ably convinced that the human mind must always "proceed from the condi
tioned to its Conditions" and he was similarly convinced that philosophy
had no less a goal than to discover in this quest for the "Unconditioned"
the definiendum of humanity. Hume, of course, would have had such specu
lations "committed to the flames," and his skepticism floods eighteenth
century thought: one thinks, for example, of Rochester's "Whoever thinks
beyond thinks like an Ass," or Pope's "the bliss of Man (could Pride that
blessing find)/Is not to act or think beyond mankind."
The kind of reaction against this narrow view of human limitations that
we find in Romantic poetry closely parallels Kant's "Revolutionary" attempt
to re-establish metaphysics in his Critical philosophy. In fact, it is in these
two great movements—Kant's Transcendental Idealism and English Roman
ticism—that the tension between Realism and Idealism finds its clearest
expression in western culture, a point which becomes totally clear only
when the two movements are considered together, in an interdisciplinary
context. For like so many other corresponding movements in philosophy and
art, these two complement each other perfectly, the one presenting symboli
cally as achievement and act what is demanded in the other by the necessity
of philosophical thought. Considered theory becomes felt life : it is stated
abstractly in Kant; given living shape in Keats.
All this, of course, is not new: many historians of ideas have commented
on the kinship in thought and spirit shared by Kant and the Romantics, one
that is neatly summed up by Samuel Monk in his classic book on the sublime,
where Kant's philosophy and the art of the Romantics are defined collectively
as "symptoms of a changed point of view": "There is a general similarity
between the point of view of the Critique of Judgement and the Prelude:
and.. .the Prelude differs from the Essay on Man in a manner vaguely analo
gous to the way in which the Critique of Pure Reason differs from An Essay
on Human Understanding,"3 For historians and philosophers, the interest in
these kinds of analogies is clear, but their significance for literary criticism
is not. For, treated strictly as historical or philosophical data, ideas as such
are only discursive, and as such are not the metier of the literary critic, whose
legitimate concern with ideas begins only when they are "actually incor
porated into the very texture of the work of art" and "become constitutive" of
the artistic production, "ceasing to be ideas in the ordinary sense of concepts
and becoming symbols, or even myths."4

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 Kant and the Romantics 33

This paper is an attempt to explore the question of how a body of literature

is "informed" by the presence of a system of ideas—of how, in other words,
the container is shaped by the contained ; of how form and function become,
ultimately, inseparable. Specifically, I will be looking at what I take to be
the key to the relation between Kant's Transcendental Idealism and English
Romanticism—the compulsion to re-define the bounds of intellect and to
lay this re-definition on "Transcendental" grounds (a priori), thereby per
manently reinstating the validity of metaphysical speculation (Wordsworth's
"Reason in her most exalted mood") as against the censures of enlightened
skepticism.
I will begin by defining the terms by which Kant distinguished between
Verstand (Understanding in Coleridge), the discursive faculty conversant
with "Phenomena" only; and Vernunft (Reason in Coleridge), the source
of noumenal Ideas; and then I will show how this distinction became
hypostatized in Romantic poetry, determining many of its most represen
tative mythic, symbolic and structural forms. Throughout—and this I wish
to stress again—my interest is solely "typological" rather than historical;
indeed, my strategy could hardly be otherwise, since Blake never read
Kant, and Coleridge's best poetry was written before he read Kant and
had the opportunity to "fill Wordsworth's head" with the Transcendental
philosophy. As such, my intention is to make a contribution not so much to
Geistesgeschichte as to literary theory—by suggesting a way to examine
what Wellek and Warren have called "the concrete problem not yet solved
or even adequately discussed ; the question of how ideas actually enter into
literature" (p. 121).5

* * *

In the preface to the Critique

philosophical strategy was to "d
faith" (p. 29). Kant's statement re
reputation as a dire skeptic—H
delssohn called him "der Allesze
is Coleridge's wonderful trans
constructive rather than destruc
que" all but demolished knowl
"a certain element of irony" i
seemed to be bent on limiting
way, at another time he pointed,
limits which he himself had draw
emphasis in Kant's later work
like the Phoenix from the ash
because of the philosopher's co
reason fully but, in answering qu
and leaves us dissatisfied with re

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34 Graham Nicol Forst

This drive toward the absolute Kant attributes to the operation of the
faculty he calls Vernunft, the power which "unifies the manifold" and
supplies that Idea of unity "without [which] we should have no reason
at all" (Critique, pp. 533, 538). By means of the power of Vernunft the
mind is constantly impelled "to the utmost limits of all knowledge...not
to be satisfied save through the completion of its course in a self-subsistent
systematic whole" (p. 630). It is the source of the Idea of Freedom, and so
the origin of moral consciousness; and, similarly, it is the source of the
Ideas of God and Immortality. Verstand, on the other hand, is that function
or "faculty" of consciousness, that defines empirical awareness, that "reduces
phenomena," in Kantian terms, "to the unity of rules." The circumscription
of this faculty is the subject of probably the best-known and certainly most
difficult section of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason—the famous "Trans
cendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding." Here it is
that Kant "determines the rules and limits" of the employment of Under
standing, an enquiry which was, as he knew it to be, the keystone of his whole
Critical arch.
Basically, Kant's strategy was to show that, through Understanding, we
can become aware of experience only as "Phenomenal"—as it "seems," as
determined, that is, by the famous twelve "Concepts." This strategy proves,
of course, that we cannot make empirical assertions about ethics and theology;
but it also proves that these subjects cannot be dogmatically discharged
from philosophical speculation. And it is through this narrow chink, this
"loophole," that Kant sought to reinstate philosophically the notions of Free
Will, God and Immortality—the Ideas of Vernunft.
Vernunft and Verstand, then, are the two principle terms of the Critique
of Pure Reason. And although it is clear that this terminology, coming as it
does from the old faculty psychology, is outdated, it is equally clear that
Kant meant the terms to be regarded as names for states or processes of
mind rather than as static faculties in the truly obsolete Aristotelean sense;
he felt, certainly rightly, that the condition of being human could not fully
or fruitfully be defined or even contemplated unless both the terms whereby
we become aware of empirical reality and the philosophical validity (moral
responsibility) of our desire to transcend them are recognized. This is why
Kant—here resorting once again to the kind of nautical imagery so common
in Romantic writing—says that while Hume was content to "run his ship
ashore, for safety's sake, landing on skepticism, there to let it lie and rot,"
his work would never be complete until he had "give[n] it a pilot, who, by
means of safe principles of navigation...may steer the ship safely whither
he listeth" (Prolegomena, p. 10). Until such a "pilot" can be found, there is
simply no answer to the bitter taunt of Blake's Devil : How do we know "but
ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by
[our] senses five?"

* * *

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 Kant and the Romantics 35

The tremendous kinetic force of the Romantic-Kantian dialectic between

Reason and Understanding, which had in fact been building throughout the
eighteenth century, infuses the whole soul of Romanticism, where it nourishes
the renewed demand for a mythos based on the antagonism of forces equivalent
to that which pulses through Milton in the persons of God and Satan,
through Dante in the states called "LInferno" and "II Paradiso," or through
Sophocles in the play between Will and Moira. It is this dialectic of eternity
and time, spirit and clay, cistern and fountain that gives Romantic poetry its
characteristic energy, as vis-à-vis the more static themes and forms (especially
the closed couplet) preferred by the Neo-classicists.
The difference, of course, is that in Kantianism and Romanticism this
dynamic becomes played out not on a cosmological but psychological level,
where it takes the form of a kind of mental class conflict between expan
sive and repressive forces: Los vs. Urizen, Prometheus vs. Jupiter, Alph vs.
the Chasm, etc. In this form, the Kantian concepts of Vernunft and Verstand
are literally antagonistic, as in fact they are in Kant, but with the major
difference, that the Verstand, or Understanding, is frequently depicted by
the Romantics in a pejorative sense, as an "inferior" faculty, a development
which totally reverses the eighteenth-century tendency toward the deification
of discursive reason.
Coleridge referred to "enlightened" good sense as a "whore" whose worship
reduced love, imagination and religion to purely analytic modes. From here,
it is only a short step back across time to Milton and Genesis: what is
"Understanding" but fallen consciousness?—now seen as a split-off ego func
tion which, when unaided by imagination or love, becomes at once the agent
and product of the loss of Eden, of innocence, vision, or the "primal
sympathy." It is, of course, in Blake that this myth finds its most compre
hensive and eloquent spokesman. Like Kant's, his system is energized by an
abhorrence of skepticism and dogmatism ; so, like Kant's, his system stresses
the necessity of fixing the limits of discursive reason. For when and only
when the discursive faculty is proven finite in its compass, or conversant (in
Kantian terms) only with "Phenomena"—things as they appear—only then
can the very possibility of "making room for faith" be considered.
This determination to foige parameters for Understanding is symbolized
in Blake's visionary poetry by the dynamic activity of his most important
mythic hero, Los, the blacksmith archetype, whose whole task (as it is defined
time and again throughout the prophetic books) is precisely Kant's in the
"Transcendental Deduction": to give "a body to Falsehood that it may be
cast off for ever"8 Time and again we encounter Los at the foige, making a
form for Urizen (Understanding) that he may have no dominion over Urthona
(Imagination) or Luvah (Love), creating (c.f. Kant's Transcendental esthetic)
space and time, so that the errors of the fallen world should be finite. In
this way, in other words, Los's energies insure that analytic reason cannot
become eternal, thereby destroying faith, and destroying itself in the bargain
as it does in Hume where, undefined and untrammeled, it ultimately turns

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36 Graham Nicol Forst

against itself in a ineluctable drive toward a vacant and sterile solipsism,

the "one-fold vision" that defines Hell in Blake.
The main difference between Kant and Blake here is reflective of the
difference between a philosopher and a poet-prophet. For Blake, the domina
tion of Urizen cannot be seen simply as an isolated philosophical problem;
where the philosopher regarded these pretensions of our finite understand
ing as simply leading to philosophically untenable positions, the poet saw
them as socially and psychologically repressive, leading to spiritual isolation
and to the devitalization of inspiration and true creativity. Thus, in Blake's
mythos, under Urizen's dominion, pleasure (Ahania) becomes isolated and
the generative instincts (Enion) driven underground. Atlantis sinks into the
ocean and nations appear, contending for dominion. The passions (Luvah)
are cast into the "furnaces of affliction," and, everywhere, nets and gins and
traps are set up to capture and destroy inspiration. Men are made to "turn
the wheel for water" and to "carry the heavy basket on [their] scorched
shoulders." The poet (Los) is divided from the inspiration (Enitharmon),
and false sexual religion springs up under the tree of mystery, while Urizen
grinds out his books of repression, of war and of false charity (Four Zoas,
V & VI ;CW pp. 305-20).
In both Blake and Kant, then, the struggle of our intellect to "transcend
those limits of sensibility within which alone objects can be given us" is
both inevitable and, at least on one level, futile. In Kant, these pretensions
dissolve into the hectic and crazy illogic of the "Antinomies of Pure Reason."
In Blake, the same pretensions are colorfully and somewhat comically
symbolized by Urizen's ludicrous attempts to escape the "world of Cumbrous
wheels" which he himself had created in hope of being able to "view all
things beneath [his] feet":

labouring up against futurity,

Creating many a Vortex, fixing many a Science in the deep,
And thence throwing his venturous limbs into the vast unknown,
Swift, swift from Chaos to chaos, from void to void, a road immense.
For when he came to where a Vortex ceas'd to operate,
Nor down nor up remain'd, then if he turn'd & look'd back
From whence he came, 'twas upward all ; & if he turn'd and view'd
The unpass'd void, upward was still his mighty wand'ring,
The midst between, an Equilibrium grey of air serene,
Where he might live in peace & where his life might meet repose.
(Four Zoas, VI, 11.186-96; CW p. 316)

What a strong passage this is and what a perfect example of an idea

"becoming constitutive" of art. The "idea" here is the perplexity, even the
agony of pure skepticism, of the system of thought where reason is allowed
to destroy reason, and all mental flight is frozen in space and time—all
because the system does not allow the scales to be weighed. As Urizen says,
upon finally realizing his "error":

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 Kant and the Romantics 37

"I have Erred, & my Error remains with me.

What Chain encompasses? in what Lock is the river of light confin'd
That issues forth in the morning by measure & in the evening by carefulness?
Where shall we take our stand to view the infinite & unbounded?

Or where are human feet? for Lo, our eyes are in the heavens."
(.FourZoas, IX, 11.225-29; CW, p. 363)

Ultimately then, and precisely as in Kant's "Transcendental Dialectic,"

Understanding finds it must retreat and give up its imperial excursion into
the realm of Urthona, or the Unconscious, simply for lack of a point of
reference, recalling Archimede's immortal plaint: "But give me where to
stand, and I will move the earth!"

» * *

Most of Coleridge's best poetry

study of Kant,9 but his early refut
parallels Kant's repudiation (under
and empirical dogmatism : in both
against gods that were too small, e
fact, beauty with custom, creativi
great Critical system and the ar
share this intent: to demonstrate
can be shown to have no empirical
made "homeless," since their ba
laws of our very consciousness.
Coleridge and Wordsworth were n
and, consequently, their concern w
develop in their poetry into anyth
Blake. Rather, the severe limitatio
guide are implied, especially in t
suggests a conscious attempt to e
of "musical" poetic forms, as oppo
istic of Neo-classical poetry. In oth
almost hypnotic rhythm and sub
seen in itself as an expression of t
tions of prose satire and the heroi
ately pleasing" in Kant's sense; a
hypnotic without being soporific.
poems their "disinterestedness," th
gesting any purpose, which Kant sa
Further, the form of the balla
function, which is primarily to ex
by means of an unfavorable con
ciated with childhood or with sp
Are Seven," the Matthew poems an

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38 Graham Nicol Forst

In many of the ballads, this discursive perspective is provided by the point of

view Blake called "the Idiot Questioner" who, in such characteristic poems
as "The Tables Turned" and "Anecdote for Fathers," discovers (or allows the
reader to discover) his total alienation from the "real," living questions of
morality, teleology and theology—a limitation of discursive thought amply
demonstrated by Kant in the "Antinomy of Pure Reason" where the struggle
of mere Understanding to yield a concept of the Unconditioned gives way
to total contradiction. It is the gradual revelation of these parameters of
"thought" that provides the movement of these poems, that gives them their
characteristic "dynamic."
Traditional image patterns of the Romantic poets closely reflect Kant's
notion of Verstand as a basically restricted (i.e. to the "Phenomenal" realm)
power: those who live merely in the empirical world are "enslaved" to their
narrow perceptions; they are "blind," in "chains" or "fetters"—imprisoned
by their "mind-forg'd manacles." Wordsworth's Prelude is full of such imagery :
empirical intelligences are "thralls" to the merely phenomenal, as he says
in Book XIV—an image that pervades Blake's Songs of Experience (especially
"Earth's Answer," "The Tyger," "The Garden of Love" and "London").
On a deeper level, phenomenal consciousness becomes directly associated
in Romantic thought with Thanatos and connected images of sleep, dreaming,
drunkenness, sickness and poison. Wordsworth's "Strange Fits of Passion"
is a perfect example; also "We Are Seven," where the point of view of
the "Idiot Questioner" is directly linked with Thanatos ("But they are dead;
those two are dead!") as it is with the uninitiate speaker of "Resolution
and Independence" who is obsessed with

the fear that kills;

And hope that is unwilling to be fed;
Cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills;
And mighty Poets in their misery dead."

Consequently, the poetic movement in these poems is from death to

rebirth, or more simply—as in "Tintern Abbey" or Coleridge's Conversation
Poems, or later in the great Odes of Keats—from a state of "lower gnosis,"
where the more selfish demands of the split-off ego functions are most
keenly felt (one recalls, for example, the "vexed meditation" at the beginning
of "Frost at Midnight," the self-pitying "here must I remain," "I have lost..."
and "I may never more meet again" at the beginning of "This Lime-Tree
Bower My Prison," etc.) to a "higher gnosis": knowledge of the "one Life
within us and abroad," the exalted vision of the Abyssinian main in which
all opposites meet, the holy light that sheds beauty on slimy things and
brings blessedness to their perceiver.
Such a vision, in Coleridge as in Kant, is a direct product of the human
yearning for the "Condition of conditions," that "knowledge of necessary
and universal conclusion—of that which is because it must be, and not
because it had been seen."12 And in both Coleridge and Kant this yearning

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 Kant and the Romantics 39

is attributed to the faculty of Vernunft— Reason, the "Source of Ideas" as

Coleridge called it.
* * ♦

Materialism, naturalism, fatalism

she-wolf that prohibit ascent of
theological knowledge. His refutat
as inimical to the human spirit—
the faculty of Vernunft, which g
and theological "Ideas" of Freedom
transcendental Ideas, says Kant, c
faction" which we "can never hop
(.Prolegomena, p. 103).
It is, as Faust put it,

innate in our race

That our feelings surge in us and long
When over us, lost in the azure space
The lark trills out her glorious song.13

It is eingeboren—inborn, this restlessness, this demand for the "Condition

of conditions," to "see as a God sees," this demand for the "fellowship
with essence." And it is the task of finding the necessary forms for this
struggle in myth, structure, image and rhythm that constitutes the essential
problem of the Romantic artist.
This notion, that "man can no more give up metaphysical speculation
than breathing" as Kant put it, finds its symbolic correlative in Romantic
poetry in those all-pervasive figures of speech relating to flight: envy for
a bird, climbing, gazing upward at stars, moon, mountain peaks, hilltops,
clouds, standing tiptoe, etc. These figures are the medium of exchange,
the symbolic display of this demand, one which Kant pegs to the very
possibility of being conscious, this demand for a "Transcendent" overview,
for "Wings to find out an Immortality." It is also this same restless and
dynamic outward and upward reaching that finds its structural concomitant
in Romantic poetry in the Irregular Ode, revived now to clothe, or better,
to wed with this theme of growth, as the only form at once loose and
controllable enough to provide a context sufficiently dramatic and organic
both to display and generate growth: to allow the reader to grow with a
growing thing.
The great Odes of Keats are the best examples here: the remarkable
dynamic of each of these wonderful poems is based on one main concept:
the confrontation of the "centripetal" phenomenal consciousness on one
hand (associated, as in Wordsworth and Coleridge, with Thanatos-figures—
poison, sleep, dreams, opiates, etc.) and, on the other, the erotic, "centri
fugal" demand to enter the priesthood of Psyche, to become godlike through

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40 Graham Nicol Forst

the attainment of "knowledge enormous." In the course of the Odes, these

poles oscillate in a tense dialectic of wave and particle : affirmation confronts
rejection; the Ideal,the "real"; Eros, Thanatos—a vital dance which presents,
in achievement and act, that which is demanded in Kant by the necessity
of philosophical thought.
The "Ode to a Nightingale" best illustrates this dialectical movement.
The systole of the poem's heartbeat is the speaker's sense of the limitations
of mortality; the diastole, the light-winged freedom of the nightingale,
singing of summer in full-throated ease. Throughout, the poem pulses
between these two poles, holding in the opening abab quatrains, full-stopped
in each stanza, and releasing in the cde cde sestets.
In the first stanza, the speaker's heart "aches" and his senses "pain"
at the sudden and stinging reminder of his "thralldom" to the merely
phenomenal revealed by the nightingale's song. He describes himself in
images of Death—drowsy numbness, hemlock, opiate, Lethe, etc.—while
the bird's song—the call of the Ideal, is described in purely erotic images
of music and flight. This tension builds nervously through the second and
third stanzas, as the speaker, wrestling again with the bounds of his con
sciousness, cries out for that music, that sunburnt mirth, that "beaker full
of the blushful Hippocrene" that will cure the aching for transcendence,
transcendence from the mind-forged manacles of space and time. Throughout
the third stanza and into the fourth, fifth and sixth, Thanatos and Eros
continue their struggle, but the images of death predominate, indicating
the futility of the quest: weariness, fever, fret, groaning; youth growing
specter-thin and dying; leaden-eyed despair, verdurous glooms and embalmed
darkness; the love for "easeful death"—"now more than ever seems it rich
to die!"14 All these are the poet's leitmotifs, the dark symbols of the fruit
lessness of the struggle against the bounds of intellect and mortality that
give this poem its gloomy color, its brooding quality.
The bird on the other hand—like the Kantian Ideal—was not "born for
death." Music is its metier, eternal music, enchanted music that "oft-times
hath/Charm'd magic casements" but which, in this case at least, can do no
more than remind the speaker of his own imprisonment in space and time,
a condition he accepts with finality but without rancor. For in the intensity
of this experience he has gained growth and initiation into that "profoundest
knowledge" (as Wordsworth called it) of "to what point, and how,/The mind
is lord and master—outward sense/The obedient servant of her will."15
In the case of many of the longer Romantic poems, such as "The Fall
of Hyperion," "Endymion," "Alastor," The Prelude, etc., this demand of
Vernunft for a "fellowship with essence" emerges as a revitalization of the
ancient quest-motif, which now unfolds on a strictly psychological level.
Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is the classic example: here,
throughout, our yearning to escape the bounds of sense and determined
action are symbolized, as in Kant, by a sea-voyage, which is fraught with
the kind of danger and temptation, with the "hard and bitter agony" which

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 Kant and the Romantics 41

must accompany the prospective loss of empirical selfhood, but which is at

the same time necessary (as the motto attached to the poem indicates) to
the stimulation and growth of our Ideals.
Here again, as in Keats, the anguish of the protagonist's unregenerate
soul is painted in the colors of death and blood, silence, helpless stasis, heat
and thirst, blindness and choking aphasia. Then, when becalmed in the sea
of guilt, the mariner "looks to heaven" and "yearneth towards the journeying
moon"—here, as so often in Romantic poetry, the symbol of the Noumenal.
Suddenly, erotic imagery begins to predominate: baptismal waters flow,
as life bursts and love gushes; music echoes in the seabreezes and upon
the mariner descends a vision of the one Life, of the "Unconditioned."
For as Coleridge said elsewhere—and this might be said to serve as a summary
of his great themes (as it does for so much of Kant)—"We can neither
rest in an infinite that is not at the same time a whole, nor in a whole
that is not infinite."16
This conviction of Coleridge and Kant is especially strong in Wordsworth,
who was fully aware both that we possess "Dumb yearnings" and "hidden
appetites" which "must have their food" (Prelude, V, 506-07) and that without
these "yearnings," we would never, for lack of a pole of reference, become
aware just how "stinted" our "false secondary power" was; that, in other
words, if we were capable of being satisfied with purely rational accounts
of experience, all the impetus for growth would disappear, and we would find
ourselves succumbing to the death-wish of materialism, like the speaker in
Book XI of The Prelude, or in "We Are Seven," or the Matthew poems.
In Wordsworth's longer poems, these metaphysical demands for Unity,
Perfection and awareness of Immortality or Freedom or Final Cause emerge
as a demand for a reconciliation of the divorced sensibility, to be celebrated
in Dionysian Epithalamia, or "spousal verse" which would commemorate
the re-union of the human mind and natural powers, verse which would
"arouse the sensual from their sleep/Of Death."17 And as in the other
Romantics, the theater for this reconciliation is the self, and its vehicle
an internalization of the quest-motif, suggested by the image of a pensive,
solitary "mental traveller," struggling to escape the limitations of phenomenal
existence and to understand the terms by which our "Dumb yearnings"
can be satisfied:

What dwelling shall receive me? in what vale

Shall be my harbour? underneath what grove
Shall I take up my home? and what clear stream
Shall with its murmur lull me into rest?

Trances of thought and mountings of the mind

Come fast upon me : it is shaken off,
That burthen of my own unnatural self,
The heavy weight of many a weary day
Not mine, and such as were not made for me.
(Prelude, 1,10-14,19-23)

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42 Graham Nicol Forst

Typically, traveling, flight, climbing, mountain peaks, sublime heights

stimulate and symbolize the quest and its culmination: it is from the top
of Mount Snowden, in Book XIV of The Prelude, that the poet receives
the vision which "consummates" his mind :

There I beheld the emblem of a mind

That feeds upon infinity, that broods

Over the dark abyss, intent to hear
Its voices issuing forth to silent light
In one continuous stream; a mind sustained
By recognitions of transcendent power,
In sense conducting to ideal form,
In soul of more than mortal privilege. (11.70-77)

Like Coleridge and Kant, Wordsworth's strong inclination is to regard

the urgings of "Reason in her most exalted mood" as a condition rather
than an effect of experience, and it is precisely this Kantian Critical con
cern with discovering and defining the principles which actuate con
sciousness and creativity which accounts for the pervasiveness in
Wordsworth and, in fact, in Romantic poetry generally, of the Theseus-motif,
and imagery involving caves, remote grottoes and vales, wild romantic
chasms, rivers faintly heard, seeking their sources. Consider, for one
obvious example, the important passage at the end of The Prelude, where
the ultimate vision of "Faith in life endless, the sustaining thought/Of
human Being, Eternity, and God" is spoken of as having been achieved
by "tracing" a "stream" from the "blind cavern whence is faintly heard/Its
natal murmur" (XIV, 194-96); that is, faith is deduced, precisely as in
Kant, from the basic principles of our very existence.
This image of the river, the primeval, procréant Alph-source conjured
up so often in The Prelude—as it is in Coleridge's "Kubla Kahn," and
"Hymn Before Sunrise" and Shelley's "Mont Blanc" —is central in
Romantic poetry, both because it is a perfect visual reflection of fertility
and of the interplay of opposites, and because it offers an ideal correlative
to the Romantic notion of the productive flow of life from its conditions
to its Final Cause. '"O stream!"' says Shelley's Alastor,

Whose source is inaccessibly profound,

Whither do thy mysterious waters tend?
Thou imagest my life. Thy darksome stillness,
Thy dazzling waves, thy loud and hollow gulphs
Thy searchless fountain, and invisible course
Have each their type in me....'"18

His apostrophe recalls these lines from Book III of Wordsworth's Excursion :

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 Kant and the Romantics 43

as the Hindoos draw

Their holy Ganges from a skyey fount,
Even so deduce the stream of human life
From seats of power divine; and hope, or trust,
That our existence winds her stately course
Beneath the sun, like Ganges, to make part
Of a living ocean; or, to sink engulfed,
Like Niger, in impenetrable sands
And utter darkness....
(Poetical Works, 11.254-62; emphasis mine)

If the river symbolizes the quest for the Unconditioned, the Ideal, then
the source itself, the ultimate Telos, certainly finds its image, as in this
passage of Wordsworth, in the sea, Byron's "Deep and dark blue ocean,"
immeasurably wide, constantly surging and rolling—always "becoming."
And the sea is so perfect a symbol for the Kantian principle that the
measure of our humanity extends beyond the phenomenal and is expressible
in principles eternally true because they are not the product, but the cause;
not the flower, but the root of our consciousness.
The sea is the Romantic a priori, the Final Cause which receives the
waters of the turbulent Alph and over which broods (in Wordsworth's
"Beauteous Evening" sonnet) the "gentleness of heaven"; its waves "Yield
homage only to eternal laws," as Coleridge says in the "Ode to France,"
reminding us of his early grandiose plan to write a poem called "The Brook,"
which would, by tracing the brook from its mountain source to its oceanic
destination, "supply...a natural connection to the parts, and unity to the
whole" (Biographia, I, p. 129).
The image is perfect, not only because the ocean is constantly being fed
by the living rivers, and not only because of its immeasurability, but also
because of its universality. As N. O. Brown has said, borrowing a line from
Wordsworth's "Ode : Intimations of Immortality" : "The unconscious is...
that immortal sea which brought us hither; intimations of which are given
in moments of 'oceanic feeling'; one sea of energy or instinct; embracing
all mankind, without distinction of race, language, or culture; and embracing
all the generations of Adam, past, present or future, in one phylogenetic
heritage; in one mystical or symbolic body."19
So it is that the Romantics, through these figures and forms, which symbol
ize and give shape to the metaphysical urge and ground it permanently in
the immutable, a priori forms of consciousness themselves, sought to build
the foundations for a truly lasting Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, under
the banner of the true Revolution, the "Copernican Revolution in Thought."

NOTES

1/ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York,
1929), p. 257.
2/ David Hume, The Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (London, 1888), p. 264.

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44 Graham Nicol Forst

3/ Samuel Monk, The Sublime (Ann Arbor, 1960), p. 5.

4/ René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York, 1949), p. 121.
5/ For a historical discussion of the influence of Kant on the Romantics, see G. N. G. Orsini,
Coleridge and German Idealism (Carbondale, 1965); F. Stokoe, German Influence in the
English Romantic Period, 1788-1818 (New York, 1963), and René Wellek, Immanuel Kant
in England (Princeton, 1931). Further historical references may be found in Frank Jordan,
ed., The English Romantic Poets: A Review of Research and Criticism, 3rd ed. rev. (New
York, 1972), pp. 20-23. M. H. Abrams' seminal The Mirror and the Lamp (New York, 1953)
identifies many of the symbol patterns I note in this paper, but his concern is chiefly with
Romantic critical theory, rather than with the structure of Romantic poetry.
6/ Cited by J. H. Bernard in the Introduction to his translation of Kant's Critique of Judgement
(New York, 1951), p. xxxiii.
7/ Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics [trans. Carus], ed. with Introduction by
Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis, 1950), p. 100.
8/ Blake, Jerusalem, plate 12, line 13, in Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London,
1957), p. 631. Hereafter referred to in text as CW.
9/ Orsini, pp. 43ff.
10/ Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans, with an Introduction by J. H. Bernard (New York,
1951), pp. 54-73.
11/ Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutcheson, rev. E. de Selincourt (New York,
1965), 11.113-16, p. 156.
12/ Coleridge, Inquiring Spirit, ed. Kathleen Coburn (New York, 1951), p. 126. In the Biographia
Literaria, Coleridge specifically stated that the greatest "boon" for him of his reading in
metaphysical philosophy was to "keep alive the heart in the head" by leaving him with "a
stirring and working presentiment, that all the products of the mere reflective faculty par
took of DEATH" (John Shawcross, ed. [London, 1965], I, p. 98).
13/ Goethe's Faust, trans, with Introduction by Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1963), p. 143.
14/ The Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. W. Garrod (London, 1956), pp. 207-09.
15/ Wordsworth, The Prelude, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 1959), XII, 221-23.
16/ Coleridge, Statesman's Manual, in Complete Works, ed. W. G. T. Shedd (New York, 1853),
I,456.
17/ Wordsworth, preface to the 1814 ed. of The Excursion, 11. 51, 60-61; in Poetical Works,
p. 590.
18/ Shelley, Complete Works, ed. R. Ingpen and W. E. Peck (London, 1926-30), I, p. 191,
II. 502-08.

19/ N. O. Brown, Love's Body (New York, 1966), pp. 88-89.

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