In our discussion of Romanticism and its reaction to the Age of Reason, the Classical age of The Enlightenment, we noticed that the world of the rational, while it explained the Nature of the Universe, the Nature of God, and Human Nature, it appeared to deny the essential qualities summed up by the phrase, "the importance of feeling and the emotions. In reading William Blake's "All Religions are One" and "There is No Natural Religion, Parts A and B," we notice that the poet is struggling with the central issue developed in the first and perhaps second definitions of Romanticism, below.

Write an essay of four pages in which you demonstrate Blake's argument in both of these selection in terms of the definitions below. The structure of your paper is definition and illustration--definitions supplied below--and you need to consider a cogent thesis statement, one which is in a way the summary (abstract) of YOUR entire paper.

For more about the essentials of writing from a thesis, please study this general review.

For a compelling introductory essay on Romanticism, read McGinn and Howerton's this essay for further understanding. "The Triumph of Romanticism"

You may read the Blake selections in Norton, pp. 41-42 or click on the links below:

The ideas contained in the following definitions are drawn from The Triumph of Romanticism, Collected Essays by Morse Peckham. The essays are gathered in a book of the same title, published by the University of South carolina Press, 1970.

"WHAT THEN IS ROMANTICISM? Whether philsophic, theologic, or aesthetic, it is the revolution in the European mind against thinking in terms of static mechanism and the redirection of the mind to thinking in terms of dynamic organicism. Its values are change, imperfection, growth, diversity, the creative imagination, the unconscious."

THE ROMANTIC JOURNEY is about spiritual death and rebirth, or secular conversion. In its baldest form, such an experience amounts to this: A man or a woman moves from trust in the universe (a reaction against the static mechanism) to a period of doubt and despair of any meaning in the universe, and then to a reaffirmation of faith in cosmic meaning and goodness, or at least meaning. The transition from the first stage to the second we may call spiritual death; that from the second to the third we may call rebirth."