Uploaded November 2025 | Updated September 2026, 4 days ago
The Romantic movement is a tragic movement. In response to the Enlightenment, poets and painters sought a return of feeling but failed in one crucial aspect: to ground the vision, to make clear how it is a means of truth.
The result is that, alongside the wonderful, powerful presence of reason in the modern world, runs a desire to intensify feeling is if that can bring back the meaning otherwise lost to the technological and abstract.
Only, ungrounded, Romantic feeling doesn't. Instead, too often, it leads to reactionary nationalism, fundamentalism in religion, hedonism and sentimentality, and modes of inner healing that offer exaggerated experience as a proxy for transformation.
William Blake spotted this tendency. He realised that Romanticism must come of age, to borrow the expression of Owen Barfield, by understanding the imagination as a way of knowing of and growing into the fundamentals of existence.
In this talk, delivered to the Centre for the Study of Platonism at the University of Cambridge, I explore how Blake conveyed the crucial awareness that might redeem the tragedy of Romanticism, so damaging alive in the modern world.
The Romantic movement is a tragic movement. In response to the Enlightenment, poets and painters sought a return of feeling but failed in one crucial aspect: to ground the vision, to make clear how it is a means of truth.
The result is that, alongside the wonderful, powerful presence of reason in the modern world, runs a desire to intensify feeling is if that can bring back the meaning otherwise lost to the technological and abstract.
Only, ungrounded, Romantic feeling doesn't. Instead, too often, it leads to reactionary nationalism, fundamentalism in religion, hedonism and sentimentality, and modes of inner healing that offer exaggerated experience as a proxy for transformation.
William Blake spotted this tendency. He realised that Romanticism must come of age, to borrow the expression of Owen Barfield, by understanding the imagination as a way of knowing of and growing into the fundamentals of existence.
In this talk, delivered to the Centre for the Study of Platonism at the University of Cambridge, I explore how Blake conveyed the crucial awareness that might redeem the tragedy of Romanticism, so damaging alive in the modern world.
