Cleansing the Doors of Perception. William Blake, Romanticism and the Meaning Crisis

About this episode

The episode discusses the Romantic movement's response to the Enlightenment and its implications for meaning and feeling in the modern world.

The Romantic movement is a tragic movement. In response to the Enlightenment, poets and painters sought a return of feeling but failed in one crucial aspect: to ground the vision, to make clear how it is a means of truth. The result is that, alongside the wonderful, powerful presence of reason in the modern world, runs a desire to intensify feeling is if that can bring back the meaning otherwise lost to the technological and abstract. Only, ungrounded, Romantic feeling doesn't. Instead, too o...

People in this episode

Host: Mark Vernon

Topics covered

• Romanticism
• meaning crisis
• Enlightenment
• feeling
• truth
• technology

Keywords

• Romantic movement
• William Blake
• Enlightenment
• meaning crisis
• feeling
• truth
• technology

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Romanticism, Enlightenment

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