Romantic Daemons in the Poetry of Blake, Shelley and Keats: Beyond the Human
This book offers detailed readings of relevant works by Blake, Shelley and Keats, to bring together what is loosely termed as Hermetic tradition, British Romantic poetry and responses to the present crises regarding our life on the planet, including those linked to the notion of posthumanism. This conjunction of forces, so to speak, points beyond the boundaries erected by general sociological complacency and the acceptance of humankind as the centre of existence on Earth, to affirm the value of the non-human world and the possibilities inherent in an awareness of its subtler manifestations. Although the idea of spiritual agency might stretch the bounds of credulity, for centuries the inspired imagination has been considered daemonic; that is, it brings to artists and poets (and certain scientists, indeed) a sense of heightened consciousness, seemingly from beyond the self. Whatever causality may be at play here, it is clear that instances of an exalted outlook on life exist in abundance in the poetry of Blake, Shelley and Keats. The present book explores them and their implications.
Nicholas Meihuizen is Extraordinary Professor of English at North-West University, South Africa. He has published articles and reviews on South African poetry, Yeats, Heaney, Camões, and the Romantics. He is author of Yeats and the Drama of Sacred Space (1998), Ordering Empire: The Poetry of Camões, Pringle, and Campbell (2007), Achieving Autobiographical Form (2016), and Yeats, Otherness and the Orient (2018). As editorial advisor for the online Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, he coordinated the South African entries and provided some contributions, as well as an essay on modernism in Sub-Saharan Africa for The Modernist World (2015).
Hardback
ISBN: 1-5275-7752-X
ISBN13: 978-1-5275-7752-7
Release Date: 14th February 2024
Pages: 467
Price: £78.99
Buy this book: Romantic Daemons in the Poetry of Blake, Shelley and Keats: Beyond the Human