Lamia Notes from Monday’s Lesson:

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:

We know her woof, her texture; she is given

In the dull catalogue of common things.

-For Romantic poets, the rainbow was a symbol of the mystery and primitive beauty inherent in nature.

It was something to be celebrated and explored through subjectivity (thought and feeling)

-However, science or ‘cold philosophy’ by the process of analysis destroys the object under the magnifying glass.

Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,

Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,

Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine-

Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made

The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.

- The ‘rule and line’ of rational philosophy (realism) runs counter to the mystery and subjective intensity of a life lived on the pulse, which is the version of Romanticism represented by Lamia and Lycius. 

19^th Century thinking:(A04 Contexts of Production)

- Such hard-nosed realism was prominent in the 19^th Century and was called Positivism.

- Positivism held that if something could not be proven or observed, then strictly speaking it does not exist.

-Keats’s view = that rationalism not only undermines our emotional life but also impoverishes the literary life as well.