Self and Soul A Defense of Ideals

Say that what we call the early modern period, with the ascent of
capitalism, initiates a relative triumph for worldliness and a victory
for the spirit of Self. But Self cannot triumph forever. People, and
young people especially, do not always live easily with the evasions
of middle- class life. They can’t always tolerate the exaltation of Self
and the denial of Soul. They will not always abide the view that what
is palpably the world of Self has all the beauty, grandeur, and
meaning of the world that Soul can create. Middle- class culture can
fabricate Soul, but there will always be those who see through the
fabrication. Late in the eigh teenth century an attempt arises not so
much to reassert the traditional ideals of the Soul as to disclose
another one. This new ideal is the ideal of imaginative creation— the
ideal of the imagination fi red by erotic love and thus empowered
to change the world, or at least some part of it.
Nietz sche once sneered at Romanticism, calling it the spiritu-
alization of sensuality. The wager of the great Romantics is more
worthy of consideration and res pect, if not yet quite of reverence.
More sympathetic than Nietz sche to Romanticism, Harold Bloom
remarks that, for many in the West, our erotic lives have become our
spiritual lives. Eros in some form has become what we perceive to

5

The Poet