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For Kant, “pure aesthetic” experience—that is, aesthetic experience that was separate from intention, universal, and independent of the self—was an opportunity for a free play of the imagination and understanding, a high form of pleasure and cognitive functioning. Although Kant is usually better known for his epistemological and moral ideas, this may be one of his most influential perceptions. Kant disconnects the idea of freedom from the empirical world and posits a world of pure imagination in the context of aesthetic experience. This exercise of the “play drive,” as Schiller termed it, is also separate from the self, if the self is associated with will and intention. In this lie the roots of Coleridge’s notion of the potential of the aesthetic imagination and Emerson’s impersonal idea of the self. Olson’s ideas in “Projective Verse” of a free play of the verbal-associative faculty, of a flowing, intention-free use of language, harkens directly back to Kant’s third critique. Kant connected the striving for freedom, the hallmark of liberal political thought, with the work of the artist.
Emerson’s connection to Kant is much more direct than that of the English Romantics, whose philosophies were tied up with social and cultural associations. The Transcendentalist, by contrast, tends to deal in free-floating, often-contradictory concepts. I shall discuss the distinction between the earlier British and late American Romantics at length below. For now, it is enough to note that Romanticism placed an enormous emphasis on inspiration. While Virgil’s pastoral poems and Milton’s Lycidas merely began with a rhetorical invocation to the muses, inspiration became the subject of poems like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” or “Ode to the West Wind.” And the subject matter of poetry itself became dissociated from traditional forms, although it continued to refer to mythology, pastoral themes, and perennial philosophical topics such as death and transience. A great deal of poetry in English before the eighteenth century could be divided into devotional verse and love poetry; in a figure like John Donne, the two modes intertwined. The Romantics, themselves figures of the poet-saint, drew from pagan and mythic themes and wrote poems about aesthetic experiences—daffodils and Swiss mountains; in essence they were exploring the nature of poetry and inspiration itself.