Romantic Consciousness

In the first of two studies, now in paperback, with a new Preface by the author and a new Foreword by the author AS Byatt, John Beer traces the Romantic perception that rational consciousness could not adequately represent all that was implicit in the human psyche, and the consequent invocation of a human sense of 'Being' - related either to the Divine Being or to a universal spirit - as supplement. Although an intuition of the kind can be traced in Blake, the writer most responsible for articulating and developing it was Coleridge, whose interest in psychology and earlier, more pantheistic, speculations provided a powerful stimulus to Wordsworth's ideas concerning Nature. The impact of Blake's, Coleridge's and Wordsworth's ideas passed to their successors, Keats and De Quincey, each strongly drawn by their encounters with Coleridge's psychological discourse into speculations of their own concerning the existential significance of their own mental experiences; and to Byron and the Shelleys who each developed their own emphases, and less religious sense of 'Being'. Relevance to later figures such as the Cambridge Apostles, who included the word as part of their private, semi-mystical vocabulary, and to Tennyson is also discussed.