Journal of The History of Ideas

Timelessness and Romanticism
Author(s): Georges Poulet

Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Jan., 1954), pp. 3-22
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
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VOLUME XV NUMBER 1 JANUARY, 1954

TIMELESSNESS AND ROMANTICISM
BY GEORGES POULET
I
Romanticism is first of all a rediscovery of the mysteries of the

world, a more vivid sentiment of the wonders of nature, a more acute
consciousness of the enigmas of the self. Now there is nothing so

mysterious, so enigmatic, so wonderful as Time. It is not only that
it is the most difficult of all problems; it is also the most urgent, the
one which most frequently confronts us and reminds us of its actual
importance, the one which is perpetually experienced not only as a
thought, but as the very essence of our being. We are not only living
in time; we are living time; we are time.
In their efforts to express themselves it was therefore natural that
the Romantic Poets should be especially attracted by the immense

variety of distinct temporal experiences which they could feel and
observe in themselves, and particularly by those which were more
exceptional, which stood out more vividly in their consciousness.
The first of these curious temporal experiences which we may con-
sider is paramnesia. It is well defined by Coleridge in a letter to

Thelwall (1796): " Ofttimes, for a second or two, it flashed upon my
mind that the then company, conversation and everything had occurred before with all the precise circumstances; so as to make reality
appear as a semblance and the present like a dream in a sleep." Coleridge described it also in the first lines of a sonnet:
Oft o'er my brain does that strange rapture roll
Which makes the present (while its brief fit last)
Seem a mere semblance of some unknown past ... 1
One of the most impressive examples of paramnesia may be found

in Shelley. In one of his prose writings, he relates that once walking
with a friend in the neighbourhood of Oxford, he turned the corner
of a lane. "The scene was," Shelley said, "a tame uninteresting

assemblage of objects .... The effect which it produced on me was
not such as could have been expected. I suddenly remembered to have
seen that exact scene in some dream of long .... " And there he stops
suddenly, adding in a footnote some time afterwards: "Here I was
obliged to leave off, overcome by thrilling horror." "I remember

well," adds Mary Shelley, " his coming to me from writing it, pale and
agitated, to seek refuge in conversation from the fearful emotions it
excited." 2 Paramnesia, therefore, is a very potent emotion which

combines the conviction of having already seen some spectacle or
event, with the certainty that we have never seen it before. Its origin
1 To John Thelwall, Dec. 17, 1796. 2 Shelley, Speculations on Metaphysics,
Prose Works II, 193.
3
GEORGES
is
not
what
have
POULET
clear
to
our
seen
and
has
point
in
of
been
view
Shelley,
it
wid
is
sig
pro
sometimes unpleasant in the e

ing of sudden change in the
if both, which are normally s
without losing anything of th
lesced: "To find no contradi

to contemplate the Ancient o
then sprang forth at His own
feel the riddle of the world,"

also the riddle of time." Ord
petually pushed into unrealit
for us the only reality. Param
eyes a past which is still real,
projected into a timeless wor
flow but stands still. The incr
we had left for ever, continue
but
intact,
and
in
all
its
forgot
The time, indeed, is out of jo

of Hoffmann, who-like all the Germans of the Romantic Schoolexperienced and described frequently this sort of feeling-we perceive
" a long removed self, which lay far back in time."
Of course, paramnesia is merely an illusion. It does not bring back
the past. It just makes a perception look like a recollection. Now
as regards proper memory, we may find also in the Romantic poets
numerous examples of a break in the dividing line between past and
present. Generally our memory grows gradually fainter; it tends to
disappear. But sometimes some association may revivify the past
sufficiently to make it flash after a long oblivion into our consciousness; and if those associations are very potent, the flashing may be so
intense that it has the vividness of the present. It occurs especially
when we come back to a place we have left for a long time, whose
aspect is bound in our mind with long-forgotten but at the time very
familiar emotions. It is then not only as if the images of the past
were suddenly brought to our inner eye with a singular force, but as
if our own feelings, habits, ideas of long ago were instantaneously
repossessing themselves of our soul, and substituting our past self for
our present one. An earlier example of this phenomenon is in the
Nouvelle Heloise: "En les revoyant moi-meme apres si longtemps,

j'eprouvai combien la presence des objets peut ranimer puissamment
les sentiments violents dont on fut agite pres d'eux." 4
3 The Friend, XV. 4 Nouvelle Heloise, IVe part., 1. 17.
TIMELESSNESS AND ROMANTICISM 5
But of all our senses, those of which the a
strongest seem to be taste, smell and, above all,

Cowper remarks:
There is in souls a sympathy with sounds;

And, as the mind is pitch'd, the ear is plea
With melting airs, or martial, brisk or grav
Some chord in unison with what we hear
Is touch'd within us, and the heart replies.

How soft the music of those village bells
Falling at intervals upon the ear
In cadence sweet, now dying all away,
Now pealing loud again and louder still,
Clear and sonorous, as the gale comes on!

With easy force it opens all the cells
Where mem'ry slept. Wherever I have heard
A kindred melody, the scene recurs,
And with it all its pleasures and its pains.
Such COMPREHENSIVE VIEWS the spirit takes,
That in a few short moments I retrace
(As in a map the voyager his course)

The windings of my way through many years.
Mme. de Stael, at very nearly the same time, made exactly similar
observations: "L'aspect des lieux, des objets qui nous entouraient

aucune circonstance accessoire, ne se lie aux evenements de la vi
comme la musique ... Elle rend un moment les plaisirs qu'elle retrac
C'est plutot ressentir que se rappeler." And, speaking about a famou
episode in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions where Jean-Jacques
at the sight of a modest periwinkle in a wood experienced an indescribable emotion, because many years before the smell of this flow
had been associated with all the happy feelings of his youth, and of h
love for Madame de Warens, Mme. de Stael adds: " Une seule circonstance semblable lui rendait presents tous ses souvenirs. Sa maitress
sa patrie, sa jeunesse, ses amours, il retrouvait tout, il ressentait tou
a la fois." Both these passages draw our attention to two very signif
cant aspects of this phenomenon. First, as Mme. de Stael said, " tou
est ressenti a la fois," or, as Cowper said, " it opens all the cells." A
these recollections, therefore, are perceived by the mind in such a
number and in such a short time that they appear quasi-simultaneou
in a sort of altogetherness, not one after the other with the ordinar
successiveness of time, but as if forming a widely spread panorama
" I retrace," Cowper said, "the winding of my way through man
years, as in a map the voyager his course."
GEORGES
POULET
The other point is that

"recollected ": " C'est plu
tion
of
feeling
complete
worthian
that
again,
the
of
mind
expressions,
"
for
by a " spontaneous overf

in a very different pheno
strange experience of tim
poets of that period.
The third and last of the
nature. It is not provoked
past in the present, but, o
past from the present, by
present moment, then, is
its transience gives way t
becomes eternity. This fee
especially in Keats, who pr
the
Moment."
Its
fulle
clarity by Rousseau in his

est un etat ou l'ame trouv
tout entiere et rassembler
peler le passe ni d'enjambe
elle, ou le present dure to
sans aucune trace de succ
past, perpetually lasting,
we find the same feeling
duration is not successive
ness grasps at once in an
which in normal circumst
other in the process of ch
Is it surprising therefor
prevalent sensationalism i
tion, were tempted to see
way of escape from a tim
aggregate of successive sin
towards the doctrine mos
trine which could best ex
which were for them so p
as it had been stated fro
ligious thinkers. Eternit
full and perfect possession
5
To
B.
Bailey,
Nov.
22,
1817
possessed, TOTA SIMUL. In it there is neither

nor future. As Boethius expresses it: " Nunc
nunc stans facit aeternitatem."

This famous theory, foreshadowed by Parmen
stated by the Neoplatonists, christianised by St.
by the Scholastics of the Middle Ages, adorned w
the philosophers of the Renaissance and particu
of the Cambridge School, had also been through
by the poets as the means for expressing their c
of the Future Life, or of the Ideal World. Je

Petrarch, Chaucer, Spenser, Ronsard, Vaughan,
Drummond had in turn sung this "everlastin
run-Without succession and without a sun " (Va

ages and all worlds together stand " (Traherne).
But this poetry was not the poetry of the Ro
not want to describe in their poems an ideal w
existence of God. They wanted to express their
ences, their own immediate realities, and to refle
the fixed splendor of God's eternity but their o
apprehension, in the here and now, of a hum
took hold of the idea of eternity; but they remo
rean world into their own. In brief, paradox

Eternity into Time.
II
This romantic paradox appears strikingly expressed in Coleridge.

All his life he was painfully aware that the continuous association of
ideas in his mind perpetually threatened to become a mere chain of
logically disconnected parts: "A streaming continuum of passive
association," 7 c" an endless fleeting abstraction," 8 " an immense heap

of little things," 9 are some of the expressions characterizing this state
of mind that we may find scattered in his writings. More striking still
is the following passage: "What a swarm of thoughts and feelings,

endlessly minute fragments lie compact in any one moment! What
if our existence was but that moment? What an unintelligible affrightful riddle, what a chaos of limbs and trunk, tailless, headless.
nothing begun, nothing ended, would it not be! "10
No doubt, this feeling of anguish and fear when confronted with
the disquieting idea that the world is a shapeless continuum of dreams
succeeding one another in an arbitrary fashion, or flowing together in
7 Note in Tenneman's Geschichte der Philosophie. 8 Table Talk (Bell), 199.
9 To Thelwall, Autumn 1797. 10 Anima Poetea, 245.
8 GEORGES POULET
each moment of time in chaot

in part to the opium which Co
But on the 16th of October, 17
he wrote to John Thelwall, "
and parts are all little! My m
know something great, someth
a natural revulsion from wh
shapes," 11 he tried, first in his
the idea of a world conceived
world " one " and " indivisible,

added and following one anothe
perceived altogether at once in
day that he wrote to Thelwall
his inability to contemplate th
heap of little things, he wrot
"There are people who contem
are necessary little. And the u
things."
Here he is attributing to other people the very defect which, on
the same day, in another letter, he was attributing to himself! This
apparent contradiction is easily explained by the duality of his feelings and intellectual tendencies. Sometimes, when abandoned to the
continuous process of his perceptions, he is dominated by them and
passively submits to the discursiveness and succession of Time. Sometimes he has an inkling that it may be possible by his own action, that
is, either by the imaginative flight of his poetical powers or by the
intervention of speculative reasoning, to shape all those little things
into a whole.
We know that during the first period of his career Coleridge was
much under the influence of Hartley's philosophy. Of course, Hartley
was an associationist of Locke's school, and it has therefore been presumed that the young Coleridge's first system was pure associationism,
that is, precisely the very system which considers the world and the
representations we form of it as a train of ideas, as an aggregation of
little things succeeding one another in time. But we must not forget
that beside Hartley the associationist there is another Hartley who
appears in a rather disconcerting fashion in the second part of his
Observations on Man. "Since God," Hartley says, " is the cause of

all things, infinitely many associations will unite in the idea of Him,
and this idea will become so predominant that, in comparison with it,
ideas of all else, even of ourselves, are as nothing." 12 In other words,
11 Aids to Reflection (Bell), 346. 12 Observations on Man (London, 1801), II, 330.
all the infinite associated little things may be

sorbed in the total vision of the world, and the
in the vision of God: "The love of the world

annihilated, we shall receive pure happiness, o
the love of God .... We will be indefinitely h
God, by the previous annihilation of self and th

In this curious development of a system that
tionalism and ends in pure mysticism, is it sur
Coleridge paid more attention to the latter part
dry matter-of-factness of the dominant philos
so near, not only to the great idealist concept
noza, Plotinus and Bruno which will be the fav
Coleridge's later years, but also to the great Pla
Cambridge School and the English divines whic
tinue and prolong in the nineteenth century?
tatively suggest that it was the associationis

Coleridge that behind the reality of the many
the one, behind the reality of successive time ther
God but even in exceptional moments for man

of living in a non-successive time. In his Relig
during this period, it was these mystical possi
had in view:
'Tis the sublime of man,

Our noontide majesty to know ourselves
Parts and proportions of one wondrous whole!
And, more significantly, in another passage of the same poem:

From hope and firmer faith, to perfect love
Attracted and absorb'd; and centred there
God only to behold and know and feel,
Till by exclusive consciousness of God
All self-annihilated it shall make
God its identity: God all in all!

We and Our Father One!
To these last lines Coleridge himself affixed the following footno

"See this demonstrated by Hartley, vol. I, p. 114 and vol. V, p. 32
Hartley's passage referred to is in the Observations on Man: " Sin
God is the source of all good, and consequently must at last appea
to be so, i.e. be associated with all our pleasures, it seems to follow
that the idea of God, and of the ways by which his goodness
happiness are made manifest, must, at least, take place and absor
other ideas, and He himself become . . . all in all."
10 GEORGES POULET
This Scriptural expression emp

become for Coleridge not an end
The infinite interdependence of
faculty by which all those related
ated along the infinite line of ti
a single moment, in the altogeth
Coleridge the cardinal principle o
First, of his philosophy of life
Coleridge said, "as the principl

life as the principle of individ
given all into a whole .... " 14
His philosophy of art: "What
the unity of the manifold, the coa
subjectively: "The Sense of Bea
itions of the relation of parts eac

Consequently Coleridge's famou
appear as a rigorous application o
tive artist to absorb the parts in
a tone and spirit of unity that b
each, by that synthetic and magi
We may therefore understand
tance accorded in Coleridge's tho
meaning of the epithets by which
and defines this quality in man,
Imagination is for him creative,
above all, there are two epithets
never tired of repeating, "esemp
got from the German of Schelli
both of which mean the faculty
which he opposed to the mere ag
for the inferior power of " fancy."
It seems clear that in Colerid
faculty of imagination endows th

with the power of eluding some
its patchiness and fleetingness
"multitude to unity" but also " s

another Coleridgean expression
into one moment of consciousness."
The Coleridgean imagination, therefore, by its creative activity,

but above all by its faculty of combining different moments of time
13 Ibid. 14 Theory of Life, 385,
15 Miscellanies, 51. 16 Ibid., 20. 17 Biographia Literaria, ch. XIV.
into one moment of consciousness, recalls irresisti

the Deity as formulated by the Schoolmen. This
fortuitous. In a letter written to Thomas Clarkso
1806, that is, in the more fruitful period of his m
defined Eternity in the very terms of the School
municable attribute, and may we not say, the
simultaneous possession of all equally," Coleridge

in the human soul a "reflex consciousness" which " seems the first
approach to, and a shadow of, the divine Permanency "; and he add
" The first effect of the divine working in us [is] to find [bind?] th
past and the future with the present, and thereby to let in upon u
some faint glimmering of the state in which past, present and futu
are coadunated in the adorable I AM " of God. It seems therefore
that for Coleridge there exists between the endless succession

moments, which is the ordinary lot of man, and the simultan
apprehension of those moments in the perpetually present conscio

ness of God, an intermediary state of consciousness, a quasi-simu
neity not unlike the concept of aevum in Aquinas's philosophy
which by the power of imagination the human mind is able to fus

least part of its past and its present, with some premonition of i
future, into a simultaneous whole. Precisely in this manner does
poetic faculty proceed. And it may even be possible that after

death this visionary activity would enlarge its scope to the point
embracing the totality of existence: "The very idea of such a c
sciousness," Coleridge wrote, " implies a recollection after the sleep
death of all material circumstances that were at least immedia

previous to it."
We come here to the essential belief of Coleridge, and moreover
nearly all the Romanticists, the belief in the continued existence
the past, in the wonderful possibilities of its revival. Nothing is lo
All our life, and especially all our childhood, with all our perceptio
images and feelings, and whatever ideas we have had, persists in
mind; but as we are living in duration, it is not permitted to us t
have anything but rare glimpses, disconnected reminiscences, of
immense treasure stored in a remote place in our soul. Should
imagination now be confronted at once with such an infinity of de
it could not but perceive them as details, that is, one after anoth
without possibility of taking in the whole; or, stunned as it were
the vastness of this expanse, it would be unable to perceive the ord
which binds the different aspects of our Past; it would be a chaos
delirium. And delirium, for Coleridge, is nothing else than unc
trolled memory and time gone mad.
12 GEORGES POULET
The last passage of Coleridge I

Biographia Literaria. After havin
theory of association as set forth
that if it were true, the span of
bits by the despotic succession o
or recollections, he proceeds to
woman who, being seized with a
full passages in Latin, Greek and
it was ascertained that many yea
to an old Protestant pastor, and
walk up and down a passage of h
opened, and to read to himself w
books.
" This fact," Coleridge said, " contributes to make it even probable,
that all thoughts are in themselves imperishable; and that if the

intelligent faculty should be rendered more comprehensive, it would
require only a different and apportioned organization, the body celestial instead of the body terrestrial, to bring before every human soul
the collective experience of its whole past existence. And this, perchance, is the Dread Book of Judgment, in whose mysterious hiero-
glyphics every idle word is recorded! Yea, in the very nature of a

living spirit, it may be more possible that heaven and earth should
pass away, than that a single act, a single thought, should be loosened
or lost from that living chain of causes, to all whose links, conscious
or unconscious, the free-will, our absolute self, is co-extensive and
co-present."
This passage is of some importance, first, because it gives a particularly complete statement of Coleridge's most profound beliefs, but
also because it offers us an opportunity to trace the sources from

which they are derived. Of course there is no doubt that they were
based, first of all, on personal experience. For Coleridge, the Past was
never dead. In his tragedy Remorse, he spoke of "the imperishable
memory of the deed," and indeed the whole tragedy was nothing else
but the development of that thought. The two poems that symbolically reflect his most intimate feelings express the same idea: in the
Ancient Mariner we find:
The pang, the curse, with which they died,
Had never passed away,

and in Christabel:
But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder
Shall wholly do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once hath been.
On the other hand, Coleridge considerably elabora

sonal certitudes by means of philosophical and m
He got the idea of the Totum Simul from the Cambr
or Bishop Berkeley. He found the idea of the ide
Kant, and Schelling taught him that it is imaginatio

man with the power of escaping the limitations of
were purely philosophical theories, and by their v
different from the deep, spontaneous feelings he ex
self and put into his poetry. I think that the lin
philosophical convictions and these living experience

in the writings of Swedenborg. Coleridge was dee
the Swedish mystic, whom he declared to be "ab

"a man of philosophic genius, indicative and invo
with " a madness indeed celestial and flowing from a
It will be remembered that in the passage from

Literaria just quoted, Coleridge suggests that it wou
body celestial instead of a body terrestrial to bri
human soul the collective experience, the totum sim

past existence. The distinction between body celesti
current among the mystics, is elaborated at great le
borg. But what is especially Swedenborgian is the
rior memory " specially allocated to celestial bodies.
lestia Swedenborg says: " The interior memory ... is
are inscribed in it all the particular things, yea, the
which man hath at any time thought, spoken and d
most minute circumstances, from his earliest infanc
age. Man hath with him the memory of all these
comes into another life."
These are the very words employed by Coleridge in the passage

quoted from the Biographia Literaria. But there is more. Immedi-
ately after the passage quoted Coleridge adds: " And this is perchance
the Dread Book of Judgment, in whose mysterious hieroglyphics every
idle word is recorded." In the similar passage from Swedenborg
writen half a century before, we find: " This is the Book of Life which
is opened in another life, and according to which he is judged." 19

Obviously, Coleridge's Dread Book of Judgment is a direct reminiscence from Swedenborg's Book of Life.
18 Note in Swedenborg's De Cultu et Amore Dei. 19 Arcana Coelestia (London,
1803), 2474.
14 GEORGES POULET
III
Coleridge is not the only English poet in whom we can find

theory. It is very easy to trace it in all the Romanticists. Bl
an obvious starting-point. Not only was he a mystic, but, d
some late recantations, a follower of Swedenborg, haunted wit
idea of evading the process of time, and possessing in the same m

as God in one's own consciousness the totality of the universe
most "minute particular." "His unremitting effort," Midd
Murry says, was to see his own life as the revelation of Eternity
And this Eternity again is no other than a Totum Simul:
Hear the voice of the Bard
Who Present, Past, and Future sees,
we read in his Introduction to the Songs of Experience. And he co

ceives in his poem of Jerusalem an ethereal city, Golgonooza, where
viewed
... all that has existed in the space of six thousand years
Permanent and not lost, not lost nor vanish'd, and every little act,
Word, work and wish that has existed, all remaining still . . .
For every thing exists and not one sigh, nor smile nor tear
One hair nor particle of dust, not one can pass away.
And in another poem, Milton:

Not one moment
Of Time is lost, nor one event of Space unpermanent,

But all remain . . .
They vanish not from me and mine, we guard them first and last
The generations of men run on in the tide of Time
But leave their destin'd lineaments permanent for ever and ever.
It may seem a little singular to pass without transition from
to Byron. No two poets are so unlike. But if we open the la
Hebrew Melodies, written not long after Blake's greatest poems

find with some surprise a note not dissimilar. Speaking of the s
the Hereafter, Byron says:
Eternal, boundless, undecay'd,
A thought unseen but seeing all,
All, all in earth or skies display'd
Shall it survey; shall it recall:
Each fainter trace that memory holds
So darkly of departed years,
In one broad glance the soul beholds
And all that was at once appears.
20 William Blake (London, 1933), 107.
In Byron, however, as one would expect, the
manifests a sort of nostalgic impatience: " Let me

fer, " let me, or happy or unhappy, learn / To an
tality." For him eternity is an "intoxication."
resemblances to some of Coleridge's and Blake's p

ous that we may be tempted to say that Byron f
either in them or in their common source, Swed
of Byron reading Swedenborg doesn't somehow
On the other hand, he did not even know of the
and as for Coleridge, whom he admired as a p
avoided studying him as a philosopher. But there

through which the poetical possibilities of the To
been presented to Byron. In 1793 Samuel Rog

poem entitled The Pleasures of Memory, whic
much that he wrote expressly for Rogers a shor

blank leaf of the Pleasures of Memory." There
idea that Rogers was dead and that the Goddess o
The homage offer'd at her shrine,
And blend, while ages roll away,
Her name immortally with [Rogers's !].
We may doubt that this highly fanciful but slight

appeared altogether satisfactory to his friend, b
that this particular poem of Rogers had arrested
Now, in these Pleasures of Memory the central ep
dead souls who in their new quality become an

recollect all their past life: 21
All that till now their rapt researches knew

Not call'd in slow succession to review
But, as a landscape meets the eye of day,

At once presented to their glad survey.
Compare this last line with Byron's " In one broad glance the sou
beholds / And all that was at once appears;" and you will conclude
that it is highly probable that Byron got his Totum Simul idea from
Rogers. But from whom, in his turn, did Rogers get his? We might
indulge in fanciful suppositions if Rogers had not been good enough
to give us most clearly this source in a footnote. It is a quotation
" The several degrees of angels may probably have larger views [than
ours] and some of them be endowed with capacities able to retain

21 The Pleasures of Memory (1793), 62-64. See also note, p. 90.
16 GEORGES POULET
together, and constantly set befo
past knowledge at once." And t
Totum Simul can hardly be called

is no other than Locke himself
standing (b. 2, ch. 10).
Neither did Shelley feel obliged,
the same theme, to read the fe
borrowed it from the most obvio
Godwin. In his quality of profe
not accept the idea of God and th
other hand he had a vivid appreh
" Time is evanescent, but poetry,
ing apparitions which haunt the i
ticipates in the eternal, the infin
his conceptions, time and place
kind is this poetical eternity if i
not exist? The answer is rather
larges the mind itself by render
unapprehended combinations o
cumference of the imagination
his Defense of Poetry. At first,
the relation between eternity and

ence of the mind. But if we put t
side of another from Queen Ma

which separate them make up ne
be able to see what he is aiming
fortunately rather involved. Her
Him, still from hope to hope the
Which from the exhaustless lore of human weal
Dawns on the virtuous mind, the thoughts that rise

In time-destroying infiniteness, gift
With self-enshrined eternity, that mocks

The unprevailing hoariness of age,
And man, once fleeting o'er the transient scene
Swift as an unremembered vision, stands
Immortal upon earth.22
Out of this rather intricate sentence, it is possible to extract some

definite ideas: 1) Eternity may be apprehended in time by the " virtuous mind." 2) It will prevail over the transience of time, and in
some way substitute for its fleetingness a sort of immobility: Man
once fleeting over the transient scene, is now standing. To stand!
22 Queen Mab, 11. 203-211.
These very words remind us of one of the familiar ex

Boethius for the Totum Simul: " Nunc Stans," a stan
the Totum Simul conceived not under its aspect of
union of past, present and future, but under the asp
sive duration. The present moment may be, to a par
consciousness (that is, to the virtuous mind of Sh

particulars, so full in details ordinarily unperceived
equivalent to a far wider span of time in the commo

therefore, is merely an infinite intensity of attentio
a single point of time; or, as Shelley puts it himself
the lines quoted before: " If the human mind, by any
ment of his sensibility, should become conscious of
ber of ideas in a minute, that minute would be et

adds: "See Godwin, Political Justice, vol. I, p. 411,
epoque IX." Following his directions, we find in Godw
"We have a multitude of different successive perc

moment of our existence." No doubt Shelley got the
infinite number of ideas in one moment of consciou
may perceive, for Godwin these perceptions are succ
fore not in timelessness or eternity. So Shelley, in r
leaves out the essential idea of succession; more than
it by the Nunc Stans, i.e., its very opposite.
Besides, Godwin concerns himself only, as Lock
fluctuations of ideas in the common mind, in comm
ley dreams of a super-humanity, attaining in the fut
of super-awareness that the conditions of time woul
gether for each and every man. This implies the ide
education of the mind, the source of which may be foun
reference of the Queen Mab passage. In his Esquis
historique des progres de l'esprit humain, Condorcet

by the progress of scientific methods will be more
combine in a very little space of time the proofs of
of truths: " Ce qu'avec une meme force d'attention o
dans le meme espace de temps, s'accroitra necessa

purely rational belief, associated with the pedagogic
familiar to the eighteenth century; just as Godwi
mere development of the eighteenth-century's no les

tionalism. It is therefore significant that by the co
so unmystical systems Shelley evolved boldly a doct
eternity very similar to those which Coleridge or Bl
an entirely different process.
18 GEORGES POULET
It would be also of great intere

followed by the other great writ
Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, B
Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Eme
them, the idea of Eternity posse

form or another again and again.
we have selected as objects of
delaire.
IV
In De Quincey and Baudelaire this mysterious feeling of eternity

in time receives its most modern expression. Without losing anything
of its mysteriousness, it seems in these writers so intimately related
to their dominant emotions and spiritual life, and on the other hand
so aptly and spontaneously put into the medium of their own particular mode of expression, that it appears completely natural and as it
were the very essence of their genius. As regards some of the poets
we have just reviewed, Byron for instance, we cannot entirely get rid
of the idea that this feeling was no more for them than a deep but
accidental experience; in others-I mean Shelley especially-an ex-
perience that was indeed essential but perhaps realized only in part.
In Coleridge, on the other hand, there is no doubt that the sentiment
of eternity was not only felt but thought; but the two activities are
not always fused into one. Blake, of course, is different; in him the
fusion is complete; both the emotional experience and the rational
idea manifest themselves at once; they are one. But Blake is very
exceptional; he has the abnormality of the pure mystic. It is only in
De Quincey or Baudelaire that this blending of feeling and thought
appears as a natural achievement.
This does not mean, however, that De Quincey or Baudelaire

stands alone, independent of any intellectual influence. In both of
them it is possible to discern the mark of their predecessors. But the
Totum Simul was not for them a ready-made system which they
blindly accepted or submissively repeated. First of all, it was a tremendous experience whose consequences they were ineluctably forced
to accept on the sheer weight of an inner personal evidence. To
understand this fully, we have to remember that both were opiumeaters. Now, one important effect of opium-eating is that which it
has upon the senses of space and time: " The sense of space and, in
the end, the sense of time," De Quincey said, "were powerfully affected .... Space swelled and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast
expansion of time! I sometimes seemed to have live

a hundred years in one night." As Baudelaire will
du mal (Les Poisons): " L'opium agrandit ce qui n'
Allonge l'illimite,-Approfondit le temps, creuse la v

If time therefore in these exceptional circumstan
nitely lengthened, it will appear intolerably shortene
" The narrow track of time," deplores DeQuincey, "
narrow is the true and actual present," and again: "A
present," "The time contracts into a mathemati
Baudelaire insists on the psychological contrast whi

the two times, in a prose poem, La Chambre double
minutes, il n'est plus de secondes! Le temps a dispar
qui regne, une eternite de delices.-Mais un coup

retenti a la porte. ... Toute cette magie a disparu
frappe par le Spectre."
It was therefore natural that both De Quincey

were inclined to escape from the
to try to create for themselves,
illusion of an artificial eternity.
infinite amplification of time by
narrow track of or
and maintain as lo
And they proceede
swelling the " narr
many memories as they could. Time for them te
eternity in so far as the present was more and more
recollections of the past. This process of evocatio
"Je sais l'art d'evoquer les minutes heureuses,-Et

blotti dans tes genoux." Compare with these disc
jotted down by Baudelaire in his diary: "Un culte (m

lerie evocatoire) . . . intensite, sonorite, limpidite, v
fondeur et retentissement dans l'espace et dans le t
moments de l'existence ou le temps et l'etendue sont
le sentiment de l'existence immensement augmente
crease of the sentiment of existence, is a very apt defin
ern, preeminently psychological apprehension of th

We find, described at some length, in the Confessi
Eater, one of those culminating points of existence
by a near relative of mine, that having in her child
river, and being on the very verge of death ... she
her whole life, in its minutest incidents, arrayed b
taneously as in a mirror." This instance of inwar
case of approaching death is well-known; it has bee
cussed by the psychologists; but De Quincey was the
full emphasis; and what is even more important is
Quincey insists on the non-successiveness to be f
20 GEORGES POULET
nomenon. In Suspiria de Profun

the Confessions, he insists again
twinkling of an eye, every act,
again, arraying themselves not a
istence." Why insist so much on
not that it may be possible to e
replace it by the simultaneity of
That he was aware of the meta
such a conviction is proved by t
De Quincey made use of at leas
physical implications are clearly
fessions already quoted, after h
he adds: " This, from some opiu
I have indeed seen the same thin
accompanied by a remark which,
dread book of account, which th
mind itself of each individual
getting possible."
This Book of account which is
to us. We have still in mind Col
raria: " This is perchance the Dr
terious hieroglyphics every idle
"This is the Book of Life . . .
There seems to be no doubt tha

found asserted the double idea o
the simultaneity of all our recol
sciousness, were Biographia Lite
that De Quincey's relations to C
master; and on the other hand
initiated at a very early date int
Mr. Clowes. He tells us in his reminiscences that "more than once
on casually turning over a volume of Swedenborg, he has certainly

found most curious and felicitous passages." In 1824, less than three
years after the publication of the Confessions of an Opium-Eater, D
Quincey published in the London Magazine a partial translation o
Kant's Dreams of a Ghost-Seer (1763), under the title of Abstract of
Swedenborgianism by Immanuel Kant. Kant's essay was in fact an
attack against Swedenborg, but it was also, as duly translated by De

Quincey, a very adequate summary of the system of the spiritua
world exhibited by Swedenborg, and we can find there in particular
this passage: " [For Swedenborg] in the inner memory is retaine

whatsoever has vanished from the outer .... And, after death, th
remembrance of all which ever entered the soul of man and even all
that had perished to himself, constitutes the entire book of his life."
De Quincey, of course, published this translation three years after hi
Confessions, but in consideration of the identity of the two passages,
we may fairly suppose that he knew Kant's essay before writing his
Confessions, and made use of it in them.
Just as De Quincey made use of Coleridge and Swedenborg, Bau-
delaire made use of De Quincey. De Quincey's Confessions had
already been translated into French in 1828 by Musset, and this trans
lation was not without influence on the development of French romanticism, as has been demonstrated in the Mercure de France in a
very able essay.23 The author of this essay, Professor Randolph
Hughes, failed however to see the importance of the factor of time

in both De Quincey and his French followers, especially in Balzac
Gautier and Nerval: " Ces hommes," Balzac wrote in La Peau de
Chagrin, " ont-ils le pouvoir de faire venir l'univers dans leur cerveau,
ou leur cerveau est-il un talisman avec lequel ils abolissent les lois du
temps et de l'espace? " And in the same book, again: " Vous etes-vous
jamais lance dans l'immensite de l'espace et du temps? " Gautier also:
"Rien ne meurt. Tout existe toujours," or "Les esprits pour qui le
temps n'existe plus n'ont pas d'heure puisqu'ils plongent dans l'eternite." And Gerard de Nerval: "Rien ne meurt de ce qui a frappe
l'intelligence. L'eternite conserve dans son sein une sorte d'histoire
universelle visible par les yeux de l'ame, synchronisme divin qui nous
ferait participer un jour a la science de Celui qui voit d'un seul coup
d'oeil tout l'avenir et tout le passe."
But among the followers of De Quincey Baudelaire stands first.
He did not content himself with reading Musset's translation. He

read De Quincey in the English text, and he endeavoured to give a
French version of the Confessions. This version is the Paradis arti-
ficiels. It is not a mere translation. It is less and it is more. It is a

continuous commentary, interpretation, development of the English
text; and, above all, it is a personal appropriation of De Quincey's
masterpiece, the substitution of Baudelaire's own experiences to those
of his English master; so that, in what is apparently a free translation
of a foreign author, Baudelaire betrays his innermost feelings.
Now, in the Paradis artificiels we find the following passage directly
inspired by De Quincey: "Souvent des etres, surpris par un accident

subit . . . ont vu s'allumer dans leur cerveau tout le theatre de leur
vie passee. Le temps a ete annihile .... Et ce qu'il y a de plus

singulier dans cette experience ... ce n'est pas la simultaneite de tant
23 Merc. de France (ler aout 1939).
22 GEORGES POULET
d'elements qui furent successifs

l'Stre ne connaissait plus mais qu
comme lui etant propre. L'oub
is pure De Quincey, of course, bu
speaking this time in his own

quelque chose d'infiniment con
tourne vers cette partie de nous
avec complaisance, n'y a-t-il p
terrible, dans le cas .. .ou notre e

nous-meme que nous ne pouvons
spirituel aussi bien que dans le m
delaire is speaking for himself a
The promise of integral resurrec
but of terror. Unlike De Quin
regrets as by remorse. He is the

But, as we have seen, he is also
to the faculty of total resurre
Therefore it is not without reaso

of reminiscence in our time, Ma
was the most important of his
may find the culmination of tho

down to the level of man. His en
quest to bring back the past into
as a series of points of time, but
its entirety. For, those resurrec
qu'elles durent, sont si totales qu
spirer l'air de lieux pourtant s

qui goutait en moi cette impre
ssait que, quand par une de ces i

il pouvait se trouver dans le seu
du temps."
The only medium in which he could live, out of time! This timelessness, this mystical and yet real experience of eternity, on which
Proust gives the fullest and most elaborate testimony in our time,
would it have been possible to experience this, as Proust did, and as
indeed all our generation does still, had it not been for the long chain
of philosophers and poets who expressed their thoughts or their feelings on this essential problem of humanity-and divinity-from Par-
menides to Baudelaire? Each poet, each religion, each philosophy,

each time has collaborated in man's attempts to escape out of time.
Johns Hopkins University.

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Timelessness and Romanticism

Author(s): Georges Poulet

VOLUME XV NUMBER 1 JANUARY, 1954

Romanticism is first of all a rediscovery of the mysteries of the

consciousness of the enigmas of the self. Now there is nothing so

the Romantic Poets should be especially attracted by the immense

sider is paramnesia. It is well defined by Coleridge in a letter to

Seem a mere semblance of some unknown past ... 1

One of the most impressive examples of paramnesia may be found

of a lane. "The scene was," Shelley said, "a tame uninteresting

obliged to leave off, overcome by thrilling horror." "I remember

excited." 2 Paramnesia, therefore, is a very potent emotion which

sometimes unpleasant in the e

lesced: "To find no contradi

feel the riddle of the world,"

The time, indeed, is out of jo

Nouvelle Heloise: "En les revoyant moi-meme apres si longtemps,

TIMELESSNESS AND ROMANTICISM 5

But of all our senses, those of which the a

strongest seem to be taste, smell and, above all,

There is in souls a sympathy with sounds;

Some chord in unison with what we hear

Is touch'd within us, and the heart replies.

Clear and sonorous, as the gale comes on!

(As in a map the voyager his course)

observations: "L'aspect des lieux, des objets qui nous entouraient

The other point is that

by a " spontaneous overf

clarity by Rousseau in his

TIMELESSNESS AND ROMANTICISM 7

possessed, TOTA SIMUL. In it there is neither

nunc stans facit aeternitatem."

of the Future Life, or of the Ideal World. Je

Drummond had in turn sung this "everlastin

run-Without succession and without a sun " (Va

rean world into their own. In brief, paradox

This romantic paradox appears strikingly expressed in Coleridge.

logically disconnected parts: "A streaming continuum of passive

association," 7 c" an endless fleeting abstraction," 8 " an immense heap

is the following passage: "What a swarm of thoughts and feelings,

each moment of time in chaot

shapes," 11 he tried, first in his

the idea of a world conceived

world " one " and " indivisible,

Observations on Man. "Since God," Hartley says, " is the cause of

TIMELESSNESS AND ROMANTICISM 9

all the infinite associated little things may be

in the vision of God: "The love of the world

God, by the previous annihilation of self and th

tatively suggest that it was the associationis

the one, behind the reality of successive time ther

God but even in exceptional moments for man

'Tis the sublime of man,

And, more significantly, in another passage of the same poem:

God its identity: God all in all!

To these last lines Coleridge himself affixed the following footno

This Scriptural expression emp

Coleridge said, "as the principl

the unity of the manifold, the coa

subjectively: "The Sense of Bea

itions of the relation of parts eac

It seems clear that in Colerid

faculty of imagination endows th