ABSTRACT
Nineteenth-century Romanticism was strikingly like the contemporary counter culture in its explicit attack on technology, work, pollution, boundaries, authority, the unauthentic, rationality and the family. It had the same interest in altered states of mind, in drugs, in sensuousness and sensuality. Like today’s counter culture it was hypochondriacal and narcissistic. Hypochondria (as well as an interest in changed states of mind and feeling) helps to account for Coleridge’s drug-use and Shelley’s (intermittent) vegetarianism. Like the poet in Shelley’s ‘Alastor’ – and like Shelley himself – the markedly counter-cultural today are inclined to a ‘self-centred seclusion’; yet also like Shelley and the poet in ‘Alastor’, they are paradoxically deeply concerned with communication and community. But perhaps the most striking and significant similarity between the Romantics and today’s counter culture is this: the imagination of today’s counter culture feeds on science fiction. The Romantics invented it.
