ABSTRACT
Passion is a fire from within, to use the idea of the poet Pablo Neruda (1990). It can be captured and transformed into moving works of art, or it can be deadly. It may be fulfilling, or cruel and ambitious. Whether to embrace it fully or to rein it in has been a dilemma since the beginning of time. How to balance passion and reason was a concern recorded as early as the writing of Genesis and Plato. Passion was perhaps most strongly valued in the Romantic period – the era when Wordsworth (1990) wrote: “In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs, in spite of things silently gone out of mind, things violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge, the vast empire of human society as it is spread over the whole earth” (p. 546).
