ABSTRACT
This chapter explores changes in the idea of imagination in the period between John Locke and the Romantics. To place Romantic imagination in a philosophical context means, so far as English poetry and the native philosophical tradition are concerned, beginning with a consideration of some aspects of empiricism. This in turn means beginning with aspects of Locke's philosophy, which are central both to empiricism and to an understanding of the imagination, ideas about which in the writing of the Romantic poets and in their thinking about imagination break out of the limits imposed by empiricism. Phrases such as 'the poetic imagination' or 'Romantic imagination' are dangerous if they suggest that there is some single phenomenon to be explained or analysed. Besides the Romantic theme of imagination as a transcending agency, there is also the idea of imagination as the capacity to see -to see more deeply into the life of things.
