“야생화 속의 천국”

Traditionally, Romanticism has been defined as a longing for the past, be it Gothic Ages or Homeric Greece, or even the mythic time when man and mature were unified as a harmonious whole. The term `Romanticism` preserved its literary reference to the medieval romances and to the verse epics of Ariosto and Tasso. In a deeper sense, however, most Romantics were moved by a vision of the future, of what man might become instead of what he had been in the past. Thus the nineteenth century Romantics, while revolting against, the apparently universal laws of N대-Classicism, reason, and industrialism, advocated the wholeness of Being that the contemporary life seriously lacked. William Blake, the forefather of English Romanticism, called his later works `prophetic`; and as a genuine prophet, he prophesized the existential anxiety of the coming age. Among others, his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell anticipates Nietzche and, to some degree, the twentieth century Existentialists and depth psychologists like Jung. It is due to Blake`s insights into the human psyche and to his emphasis on the liberation of all human powers which are in bondage to the rationalized institutions of church and state, and also to his profound exploration of perceptual possibilities of human being.