Volume 29, Number 18 · November 18, 1982
An Exagmination of Imagination
By W. Jackson Bate
The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism
by James Engell
Harvard University Press, 416 pp., $16.00
This important book is concerned with an important subject, which it handles with authority, learning, and originality. Perhaps the greatest transition that has taken place in our thinking about literature and the arts is the transition from the classical tradition, which had dominated Western thinking from the Greeks until the early eighteenth century, to the modern movement—of which Romanticism comprises the first chapter. In this transition, the pivotal concept is that of the 'creative imagination,' which replaces the traditional classical ideal of literature and the arts as what the Greeks called mimesis (or 'imitation' of reality). In the process it spawns a score of other premises, values, and aims that have continued to the present day.
Review, 2855 words
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