Neoplatonism

 

Neoplatonism

 

 

Harmon and Holman in A Handbook to English Literature (Prentice Hall, 1996) begin their definition of Platonism by noting how Plato's idealism, with its "concern with the aspirations of the human spirit and tendency to exalt mind over matter," has appealed to a number of English writers, particularly those of the Renaissance and romantic periods (391). Later followers of Plato, the Neoplatonists, modified Plato's ideas.

Three important doctrines derived from this tradition are important to our study of the Romantics. These are:

 

The doctrine of ideas (or "forms")
True reality is found not in the mutable realm of sense but in the higher, spiritual realm of the ideal and universal.

 

 

The doctrine of recollection
[This] implies the preexistence and immortality of the soul. . . . Most of what the soul has seen and learned in "heaven" it forgets when imprisoned in the body, but it has some power of "recalling" ideas and images; hence, human knowledge.

 

 

The doctrine of love
There are two kinds of love and beauty, a lower and a higher. The soul or lover of beauty in its quest for perfect beauty ascends gradually from the sensual . . . to the spiritual and thereby develops all the virtues both of thought and action. Beauty and virtue become identified.

(Note: the above text is from Harmon and Holman, 392. The formatting is mine.)

 

If you read the headnote to Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," you will recognize the "doctrine of recollection." And we have already discussed some of the Neoplatonic elements in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan."

 

 

The "doctrine of ideas" and the "doctrine of love" are especially useful in understanding the poetry of Shelley and Keats. Let's take a very simplistic look at just what is meant by these:

 

 

We live in the everyday world, the world of phenomena where everything is mutable or subject to change. What we see in this phenomenal world is nothing more than an imperfect copy of true reality which exists in the realm of the ideal. This is the universal, unchanging, noumenal world where all is perfect, all is true. (A term associated with this is the Empyrean, which we might consider somewhat like Heaven in Christian terms.)

 

 

We see in the poetry of Keats and Shelley what David Perkins calls the "quest for permanence." As you read the various selections, note how the poets try to accommodate themselves to the imperfections of this world in an attempt to ascend from the sensual (the known, the phenomenal) to the spiritual (the unknown, the noumenal). They are looking for some sort of permanence in a world where, as Keats notes in "Ode to a Nightingale,"

 

                 . . . men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
   Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
      Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
          And leaden-eyed despairs,
   Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
     Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. (24-30)

 

 

 

 

 

 

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