Emerson and Evolution
| Autor: | Joseph Warren Beach |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 1934 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | University of Toronto Quarterly. 3:474-497 |
| ISSN: | 1712-5278 0042-0247 |
| DOI: | 10.3138/utq.3.4.474 |
| Popis: | Poets, in forming their general views, are not always most influenced by the first-rate thinkers. What they rely on for their own effects is the imagination, and they are likely to receive the greatest stimulus from writers who appeal to that faculty in them. A poet like Shelley read everything, and somewhere behind his poetry lies the discipline of Locke and Berkeley, of Plato and Spinoza. But when we undertake to trace in it the obvious influence of individuals, what we can put our fingers on are concepts derived from D'Holbach and Volney and Godwin. This for his early poems, before Platonism took strong hold upon him. And when his materialism gave way to a large extent before the charms of Platonism, it was quite as much Plotinus as the great original from whom he derived his notion of that mystical system. Thomas Taylor in his translations and interpretations of the Neo-Platonists was, in Shelley's day, the popular exponent of the doctrine of Eternal Ideas; just as D'Holbach and Godwin were the popular exponents of eighteenth-century empirical philosophy. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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