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Genius and Imagination: The Romantic Vision of the Artist

“The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.” — Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1817

Few concepts are more central to the Romantic vision of the world than the two connected ideas of genius and imagination. For the Romantics, the true artist was not a craftsman following rules, but a person possessed of a unique, original, and ultimately mysterious inner power. The imagination, the highest power of the human mind, was the vehicle through which the artist received and transmitted the deeper truths of nature, history, and the divine. The genius, in turn, was the rare individual in whom this imaginative power worked at full strength. Together, these two ideas created the modern conception of the artist as visionary seer, a conception that has shaped the way Western culture thinks about the artist from the early nineteenth century down to the present day.

The Philosophical Background

The modern concept of genius emerged in the eighteenth century, especially in the writings of British and German thinkers. The British empiricist tradition — Addison, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and others — developed the idea of “genius” as a special mental power that went beyond the mere application of rules. Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) became especially influential in arguing that true genius is original and that its creations cannot be reduced to a set of formal principles.

In Germany, the concept of Genie became central to the new aesthetics of the Sturm und Drang movement. The young Goethe, in works like The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and the unfinished Faust (published in full only in 1832), gave the new concept of the artist-genius some of its most powerful expressions. Kant, in the Critique of Judgment (1790), gave the concept a more rigorous philosophical treatment, distinguishing the genius from the mere imitator and analyzing the way in which the works of genius seem to “give the rule” rather than follow one.

The Jena Romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel, developed the concept still further. For Schlegel, genius was the central concept of a new, Romantic literature that would unite all the arts and all the human faculties in a single creative act. The Schlegel brothers and their circle developed the related concept of Romantic irony, a self-conscious awareness of the unbridgeable gap between the finite work of art and the infinite ideal it seeks to express.

Coleridge and the English Romantic Theory

In England, the great theorist of the Romantic imagination was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge distinguished between the lower faculty of “fancy” and the higher faculty of “imagination.” Fancy, for Coleridge, was a matter of association and combination; imagination, by contrast, was “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception,” a power that fuses the perceiver with the perceived, that dissolves the ordinary boundaries between subject and object, and that, in the truly great artist, becomes a kind of participation in the creative energy of the universe.

Coleridge’s theory drew on, and helped to make available to the English-speaking world, the German Romantic philosophy of Schelling and the Schlegel brothers. His influence on the English Romantic tradition — and through the English tradition on the later Victorian poets, on the Pre-Raphaelites, on the American Transcendentalists, and on many later thinkers — has been immense.

The Imagination in Romantic Poetry

The Romantic poets gave the new theory of the imagination a rich body of poetic expression. The most powerful of these poetic statements include:

William Wordsworth, in the great passages of The Prelude (1850), in which he traces the growth of his own poetic mind through a series of visionary experiences and argues for the “creative sensibility” of the imagination.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in the great conversation poems (“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” “Frost at Midnight,” “Dejection: An Ode”) and in the supernatural poems (“Kubla Khan,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”), which embody the new conception of the poetic imagination at work.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, in A Defence of Poetry (1840), which argues that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” and that the imagination is the highest power of the human mind.
John Keats, in the great odes and in the letters, with their insistence on the “chameleon’d Poet” and the “negative capability” of the artist who can remain “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
William Blake, whose prophetic books, with their extraordinary marriage of text and image, embody a uniquely intense vision of the poetic imagination as a kind of prophetic power.

Genius in Music and Art

The Romantic conception of genius was not limited to literature. In music, the figure of Beethoven became the model of the composer as visionary genius — struggling, solitary, sacrificing, possessed of a creative power that could barely be contained within the inherited forms. The great Romantic composers — Schubert, Chopin, Berlioz, Liszt, Schumann, Wagner, Brahms, Verdi, Tchaikovsky — were all in their different ways, presented to the public as inspired geniuses, often in their own self-presentation as well.

In painting, the cult of the artist-genius transformed the way painters thought about their work. The new emphasis on color, brushwork, and the personal vision of the artist — visible in the late works of Turner, the landscapes of Friedrich, the great portraits and historical paintings of Delacroix — were all part of the new cult of artistic genius.

The Long Influence of the Romantic Genius

The Romantic conception of genius and imagination has shaped the way Western culture has thought about the artist from the early nineteenth century to the present. The bohemian artists of mid-nineteenth-century Paris, the great Symbolists, the early modernists, the Expressionists, the Surrealists, the Abstract Expressionists, the pop artists, the contemporary avant-gardes — all have inherited, in different ways, the Romantic conception of the artist as a kind of visionary seer. The contemporary cult of the genius, the celebrity artist, the inspired creator — these are all descendants of the Romantic vision.

The Romantic concept of imagination, similarly, has shaped modern philosophy, literary criticism, depth psychology, and the contemporary discussion of consciousness, creativity, and the human mind. To study the Romantic concept of genius and imagination is to study the modern idea of the artist and of the imaginative life of the human mind.