ABSTRACT
Romanticism takes the intimacies between reality and fiction and twists them irrevocably into one another, squeezing out the apparent distinctions. Romanticism is an acceptance that there are no boundaries to discover except those that are being made, and in the making something about the human self is revealed. In fictionalized language the experienced reality of social and historical lives and the intelligibility of these lives connects and stays connected. The aesthetic age – Romanticism – emerges in gloriously vociferous expressions from writers who got stuck into the historical, symbolic, and material reality of things and signs. Wordsworth’s reminiscent Romanticism found in the lives of others a way of adorning the sequestered, leafy quadrangle of his own personal power: the sympathy he mustered for the plight and delight of ordinary folk in his excursions into nature – and at times it was considerable – was in thrall to an almost patrician self-elevation.
