The Voice That in Madness Is Wanting

Abstract

Ross Woodman's Sanity, Madness, Transformation: The Psyche in Romanticism (2005), is a comparison of Romantic poetry and Jungian psychology. It offers new connections and insights into the relationship of both these fields with areas of study as diverse as deconstructionist literary theory and quantum mechanics. The book's primary concern is with an examination of “the creative role of the imagination in the advancement of consciousness... in terms of its intimate association with madness” (Woodman 2005, 198). Woodman examines the way in which the Romantics both identified with the archetypal products of the unconscious in states of madness and also creatively processed those states through the imagination as poetry. He compares this to Jung's encounter with the unconscious. In this review I compare my own dreams with the imagery found in Woodman's book in order to open up the question of the contemporary relevance and meaning of the Romantic imagination. The psychological and social relevance of the Romantics is found not only in the way in which their work anticipated Jung's, but also in their sense of “poetic faith” toward what we might today call the archetypal dimension of the unconscious, as opposed to religious faith or materialistic reductionism.

Key Words:

• alchemy
• assumption of Mary
• William Blake
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Henri Corbin
• deconstructionism
• depth psychology
• Jacques Derrida
• dreams
• Northrop Frye
• Wolfgang Giegerich
• C. G. Jung
• John Keats
• madness
• materialism
• mythopoetics
• Wolfgang Pauli
• primary imagination
• psychoanalytic
• quantum physics
• Romantic poetry
• Romanticism
• Percy Shelley
• Ross Woodman
• William Wordsworth