The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling—a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents A notion of centrality: there is a core to all things that even a child knows, yet it is one of those ancient thoughts that can never become a cliché. Roethke, “Notebooks” (July 1945) As noted earlier, the life cycle of an organism—birth, growth, maturity, decay, and death—offered the Romantics a paradigm for the human life cycle, and the organic process was seen to parallel the act of literary invention.1 Kant, Herder, and Schelling stress the plant metaphor, and Coleridge—adapting the concept of dynamic opposition between the subjective artist and the object contemplated from Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism (1800)—explains creative genius in the same biological terms. “The poet,” says Coleridge, “… brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity.
