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DesLauriers, Lindsay

English

2014

M.A.

If the anxiety of 18th century epistemology could be summarized in a single question, it might be: Where is the origin of knowledge and what does it mean that knowing is enacted by the subject? The question of the origin of knowledge is also a question that concerns the possibility and possible limits of knowledge. As many critics of romantic lyric have pointed out, nature often functions as a mirror of the poet's mind. It is through the observation of the natural scene or the events that take place there that the poet himself often, comes to know or alter his own state of mind.
While the project of Hume and Kant was to provide an account of the limits of human knowledge in order to clarify the bounds in which knowledge might be considered secure, their method and premises nevertheless unseated the certainty of our most immediate perceptions. For much of romantic poetry, the uncertain creative participation of the mind in constructing our world functions as a mode in which poetry can engage with its ostensible object, the natural world. The romantic poem adopts epistemology's premise that the human mind creatively participates in its own observations of nature, as a kind of springboard for its own motion. And yet, all this speculation takes place in subtle partnership with lyric poetry's deceptively simple subject matter: the observation of nature.
The romantic lyric engages in the epistemological discussion about the creative impact of the subject on the outside world by using the poem's subject matter and form to explore or even experiment with the interplay between the observing/creating subject and the external world in such a way that the truth value of the poem's relationship between subject and object can be "felt" or experienced in the poem's overall coherence.