Stretching across nearly all realms of Romanticism is the idea that individual freedom and experiences incite the imagination. Samuel Taylor Coleridge explicitly expresses this query of thought in his poem “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.” In addition to Coleridge, many other members of the Romantic movement also engaged in imagination-centered writing. Conversely, the Enlightenment movement opposed this emphasis on imagination, and instead, the Enlightenment movement valued scientific conclusions brought about using rational and empirical thinking. Therefore, Romanticism challenged the preexisting Enlightenment beliefs in England during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Additionally, Jeffrey Nealon and Susan Searls Giroux discuss the
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In “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” the use of imagination allows the speaker to reach a different level of realization at the end of the poem than he had possessed at the beginning of his mental journey; this transformation creates a newfound sense of self for the speaker in relation to his friend, Charles, and to nature as a whole. As Jeffrey Nealon and Susan Searls Giroux discuss in The Theory Toolbox, actively examining a topic in search of meaning permits other additional meaning to coexist whereas merely accepting a presented meaning as fact, as the Enlightenment movement prefers, limits the overall meaning of a work to a single interpretation. As Romantic poetry proves, a person’s imagination has the capacity to transcend mentally and—in the case of “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”— physically limiting circumstances and offers its user a new perspective which in turn creates a more replete personal understanding of self and of
In “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” the use of imagination allows the speaker to reach a different level of realization at the end of the poem than he had possessed at the beginning of his mental journey; this transformation creates a newfound sense of self for the speaker in relation to his friend, Charles, and to nature as a whole. As Jeffrey Nealon and Susan Searls Giroux discuss in The Theory Toolbox, actively examining a topic in search of meaning permits other additional meaning to coexist whereas merely accepting a presented meaning as fact, as the Enlightenment movement prefers, limits the overall meaning of a work to a single interpretation. As Romantic poetry proves, a person’s imagination has the capacity to transcend mentally and—in the case of “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”— physically limiting circumstances and offers its user a new perspective which in turn creates a more replete personal understanding of self and of