Student: You mentioned that the psychoanalytic movement looked back on Romanticism. Could you expand on that?
Teacher: They are both very concerned with the process by which experience becomes memory and how the lives we live seem different to us than they actually are. They are both interested in the internal psychic economy. I'm not sure if the link here is causal; in other words, Freud didn't necessarily pick this idea up from Blake (though Freud did say that the poets got there first and he was merely repeating what they said). It may have just been that they were dealing with similar problems and so came up with similar answers.
Student: Wordsworth talks about how we should go to nature to re-orient our moral compass. You hear this idea a lot in the classical authors too. Is the idea the same do you think, or has it changed? Do they mean the same thing?
Teacher: The difference is how they conceive of nature. Virgil writes about an aristocrat's nature, nature idealized away from its connection to peasant labor. In re-writing Virgil, Wordsworth really focuses on the "lower class" elements, how connected it is with the vernacular and a certain form of life.
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