Abstract
The relationship between emotional seeing and the actuality of the thing seen, in ‘trans-objective’ experience, has already been referred to in Chapter 2. This relationship — as found in Hudson — corresponds to the unity of imagination, or human spirit, and nature, as revealed in moments of epiphany, that was postulated by the Romantic poets and the Transcendentalists.91 Speaking specifically of the Transcendentalists, Roger Ebbatson writes:
In this Transcendental vision Nature is to be construed as a set of symbols to be understood by aid of the sovereign imagination. As Emerson says, ‘The world of the senses is a world of shows; it does not exist for itself, but has a symbolic character’…. Nature has furnished man with language and a system of symbols: ‘man is an analogist, and studies relations in all things’ [Emerson].92
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Notes
Roger Ebbatson, Lawrence and the Nature Tradition: A Theme in English Fiction 1859–1914; Hassocks, 1980, p. 17.
Elémire Zolla, The Uses of Imagination and the Decline of the West; Ipswich, 1978, p. 32.
See William Vaughan, German Romanticism and English Art; New Haven, 1979 Chapter 2, ‘The Mind of Art’.
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© 1990 David Miller
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Miller, D. (1990). Imagination. In: W. H. Hudson and the Elusive Paradise. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20550-9_6
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