ABSTRACT
This chapter explains some aspects of the engagement of the romantic poets with the Gothic. It examines in detail the three principal symbolic figures which run through their Gothic work: the wanderer, the vampire, and the seeker after forbidden knowledge. As a symbol, the Wanderer is almost infinitely flexible; the connotations range from the defeated aspirations of humanity towards perfection, to a dreadful warning of the consequences of defiance. The vampire is also an anomaly, and one which crops up repeatedly in the works of the romantics. The figure of the seeker after forbidden knowledge turned, in 1818, into the most significant and popular of modern terror-symbols with the writing of Frankenstein. In this universe all is threat and violence, and the comfortably traditionalist features of the Gothic are pressed into the service of an all-embracing vision of the horror of the fallen world.
