For readers and thinkers on whom nothing is lost
For readers and thinkers on whom nothing is lost
I must admit, I find myself somewhat uninspired this time of year. In search of a remedy, I turn to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’, to see if an answer lies within the icy wastes of his South Pole.
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‘La Belle Dame’ is one of Keats’ most enigmatic of poems, detailing the love and loss of a certain ‘Knight at arms’ the nature of which we are never properly told. But beyond the individual pining of a man over his lost ‘Lady in the Meads’, is there a wider truth that Keats is trying to tell, concerning the direction of literature and the fate of his fellow Romantics as a whole?
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If there was an era in which it could be argued that the mind of the modern man was born, it would be the Enlightenment period. As Pagden writes, the era ‘[stood] for the claim that all individuals have the right to shape their own end for themselves rather than let others do it for them’,[1] and as philosophers like Voltaire denounced monoliths like Christianity as a ‘long-standing infection’ whose doctrine […]
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