Happened on a copy of this Viking Portable Library book at Talking Leaves Books in Buffalo yesterday (drove my guest to Niagara Falls and then tried to hit the Albright-Knox on the way back but it’s closed Mondays and Tuesdays, booooo A.K.).

The collection is edited by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson and their introduction alone made the purchase worthwhile for me. They argue that the romantic poets marked the redefinition of mankind’s conception of self as self-consciousness:

Like God and unlike the rest of nature, man can say “I”: his ego stands over against his self, which to the ego is a part of nature. In this self he can see possibilities; he can imagine it and all things as being other than they are; he runs ahead of himself; he foresees his own death.

This romantic self is driven primarily to experience; that is its highest end. For instance, unlike Marlowe’s Faust who wanted to “do great deeds and win glory,” Goethe’s Faust wants to “know what it feels like to be a seducer and a benefactor.” Further,

. . . if the enemies of reason are passion and stupidity, which cause disorder, the enemies of consciousness are abstract intellectualizing and conventional codes of morality, which neglect and suppress the capacity of the consciousness to experience. Reason has to distinguish between true and false; the will, between right and wrong: consciousness can make no such distinction; it can only ask “What is there?”

Therefore the redemption of the Ancient Mariner is “no act of penance” and “is not even directly concerned with his sinful act” but is “the acceptance of the water snakes by his consciousness which previously wished to reject them.”

The collection itself begins with Blake’s Song (Memory, hither come):

Memory, hither come
And tune your merry notes;
And while upon the wind
Your music floats,
I’ll pore upon the stream,
Where sighing lovers dream,
And fish for fancies as they pass
Within the watery glass.

I’ll drink of the clear stream,
And hear the linnet’s song,
And there I’ll lie and dream
The day along;
And when night comes I’ll go
To places fit for woe,
Walking along the darkened valley,
With silent melancholy.

and ends with Poe, From childhood’s hour:

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then — in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life — was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent or the fountain,
From the red cliff or the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed my flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.

The book was first published in 1950 too, btw . . . in print 56 years later.