ABSTRACT
A primary preoccupation of the romantic writers was passionate desire. This preoccupation led both to celebrating such passion as the height of joy in human experience and to condemning such desire as something to be deplored, rationalised, sublimated, suppressed, or transcended. The battle between indulging and controlling or transforming desire continues today. Robinson (1991:10) sees the relevance of romanticism to the present age as consisting of ‘dramatizing in our culture the competing drives…toward the beautiful as transcendence and the beautiful as erotic pleasure and desire’.
