Romantic Creation

Abstract

This chapter considers a selection of texts, many written in the 1790s, which describe literary creation using metaphors of organic and biological creation. Some of these texts have been considered as themselves involved in the creation of what we now call Romanticism, and in some cases this claim has been challenged. The chapter concerns the act or process of literary creation and the product of this process, the text that is created. Its general argument is that the metaphors used by writers about writing are determined by contemporary understandings of how the world was thought to have been created, how living beings were created, and the role of the creator within this process.