186 Ideals in the Modern World
be the source of meaning, which to past women and men arose from
thought and bravery and faith. But Eros can be many diff erent
things, from Shelley’s intense and overtly sexual desire to Words-
worth’s quietly dispersed love, not for any individual woman or
man, but for Nature. The wager that love, taken up by the imagina-
tion in the interest of human freedom, can provide fullness and dan-
gerous joy: that is the Romantic wager. For the Romantic, love is a
means to break through the Self hood into another mode of being,
one that can contribute to the redemption of the world.
A great deal of art and lit erature since the late eigh teenth century
has defi ned itself in relation to the question of erotic love. Some
writers celebrate its power to give life depth and fullness: Blake and
Shelley, Whitman and Hart Crane and Ginsberg, and more. Others
have rebelled potently against what they see as the overvaluation of
imaginative desire. Schopenhauer, Freud, and T. S. Eliot are among
the most prominent of these deniers of the erotic imagination. And
yet they exist within the Romantic horizon, as Jesus and Homer do
not, in that they see the question of love as a, and perhaps even the,
central question in human life. Freud may call love the overestima-
tion of the erotic object, but he understands the centrality of love to
his patients and readers. Many of them are, in their ways, Roman-
tics. They have placed their hopes in Eros, attempting to make their
erotic lives their spiritual lives. Freud is determined to cure them
of their delusion. But Freud does not doubt the centrality of
Romantic love to modern life. He simply doubts—in the most com-
prehensive terms— what can be made of an erotically charged
imaginative existence.
The Romantic faith in Eros is inspired at least in part by Shake-
speare. Shakespeare’s renderings of love tend to be bittersweet, but
he clearly feels a sympathy for individuals in love, and particularly
for women in love. Juliet, Rosalind, and even Cleopatra are rendered
with brio and aff ection. In Shakespeare the Romantics found a mag-