Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Semester of Degree Completion
1993
Thesis Director
Michael Loudon
Abstract
The present study focuses on the controversial issue concerning the differentiation of Fancy and Imagination in the context of S. T. Coleridge's and W. Wordsworth's Romantic aesthetics. Wordsworth's theoretical and poetic discourses lead to an indeterminacy in the attempts to distinguish between the "lower" poetic faculty of Fancy and the "higher" poetic faculty of the Imagination. The present investigation proceeds from the assumption that the two poetic modes can only be defined accurately as complementary rather than distinct. They engender an unstable perspective upon the external world which allows for transmutations of the visible into the visionary, of the act of seeing into the process of envisioning reality and of states of being into processes of becoming.
The analysis of Wordsworth's poetic discourse relates the theory of Imagination to his Poems of the Fancy and the theory of Fancy to his Poems of the Imagination. The poems "The Danish Boy," "To a Skylark" and "With How Sad Steps, O Moon" reveal a symbolic mode of vision and re-figurings of the Imagination which represent a transformation of reality. "A Night-Piece," "The Reverie of Poor Susan" and "View from the Top of Black Comb" show an allegorical dichotomy which substitutes for the symbolic synthesis that Wordsworth's poetic discourse engenders on the basis of the Imagination.
The inference of a symbolic mode of representation in Wordsworth's Poems of the Fancy and of an allegorical mode in his Poems of the Imagination is a method applicable to the larger context of his poetry in an attempt at reaffirming the complementarity of Fancy and Imagination in its relation to a Romantic process of becoming.
Recommended Citation
Nikolova, Irena Nikolova, "The Allegorical and Symbolic Modes of Representation in W. Wordsworth's Poems of the Fancy and Poems of the Imagination" (1993). Masters Theses. 2106.
https://thekeep.eiu.edu/theses/2106
