The Presentation of the Power of Imagination in The Question by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Julian M. and A.G. Rochelle by Emily Bronte Anonymous College

For poets writing in the Romantic Era, their work appeared to be a response against the Enlightenment movement which valued logic and reason and rejected emotional and subconscious appeals that the Romantics found to be more favorable. Through the presentation of the imagination within both poems, it becomes clear that within Romanticism, the sanctity of the imagination is valued due to how it can be used as a route for escapism against the reality of corruption within humanity and society and can allow for individual feeling and vision. This is made particularly evident within Shelley’s ‘The Question’, in which as a second generation Romantic, he describes a visionary moment that demonstrates how one can have the ability to be liberated from the constraints of society through the metaphors of the mind. Following a similar Romantic viewpoint, Bronte’s ‘Julian M. and A.G. Rochelle’ attempts to stress the importance of the imagination through demonstrating how metaphorical escapism can allow one to experience sensations that cannot be felt in a society dominated by degradation, alluding to the Romantic emphasis on emotions and feelings where the lyric form of poetry was developed. Thus, both poems present the power of the...