Dreams and Visions
Perhaps the most notable example of the emphasis on dreams and visions in romantic literature is Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan” (1816), which he claimed to have “written” during a dream while deeply asleep. While transcribing the lines from his dream, he was interrupted by a visitor, and later claimed that if this interruption had not occurred, the poem would have been much longer. The idea that a person could compose poetry while asleep was commonplace among romantics. Although critics at the time were not particularly enthusiastic about “Kubla Khan,” no one thought to question whether it was possible for someone to dream such a long poem.
Coleridge was not the only poetic dreamer in his time. John Milton also claimed to have received inspired verses while sleeping, and Keats, like others, believed that poets were endowed with a special gift to translate dreams into words. In addition, opium was cheap and widely available, and its use was not yet considered harmful, so some writers— notably Thomas De Quincey, who wrote Confessions of an Opium Eater—used it to gain access to what they considered to be a higher, more visionary faculty of the mind.
Pantheism, which is the belief that there is no difference between the creator and creation, holds that God is not separate from the world, but manifested in it. This idea was popular among romantics. For example, Wordsworth writes in his poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798”:
And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is...
(The entire section is 729 words.)