ABSTRACT
The difference between transcendental experience as portrayed in the Platonic myth of Socrates and in its Romantic counterparts, the mythic ‘heroes’ of the Wordsworthian Poet, Coleridgean Mariner, Shelleyan Prometheus, and Keatsian Apollo, would be the distinction which is best expressed (quite unexpectedly, or perhaps justifiably so) by Keats, the poet of ‘sensations rather than thoughts’, in a letter to Reynolds:
An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people-it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the Burden of the Mystery: a thing I begin to understand a little, and which weighed upon you in the most gloomy and true sentence in your Letter. The difference of high Sensations with and without knowledge appears to me this-in the latter case we are falling continually ten thousand fathoms deep and being blown up again without wings and with all [the] horror of a <Case> bare shoulderd Creature-in the former case, our shoulders are fledge<d>, and we go thro’ the same <Fir> air and space without fear.
