206 Ideals in the Modern World
from what oppresses him. He wants complete liberation— and he
thinks that through the imagination and through love he can
achieve exactly that.
For Freud, Romantic love is always an illusion. It is narcissistic,
or it is regressive, or it is a way of installing a temporary (and mild)
superego created in the image of the beloved. Love, to Freud, arises
when the ego is so full of energy (which he calls libido) that it must
either send some out into the world or grow ill with anxiety. Or love
is the inevitably failed attempt to embrace the parent of the oppo-
site sex. Freud has no end of ways to denigrate love; never mind that
they are not always consistent with one another. Love to Freud is
not part of the solution but part of the prob lem. In fact, it often is
the prob lem. It seems sometimes that he comes on to rid the world
of Romantics, people who think that love and imagination can
change them from what they have been into something better.
We live, Northrop Frye says, in two worlds: the world we expe-
rience day to day and the world we aspire to live in. The Romantic
poet uses his powers of imagination to disclose the truth about the
world that we actually inhabit. For what is in front of us is not al-
ways understood for what it is. We are too busy, too preoccupied,
too concerned with the desires of Self. “The world is too much with
us,” says Words worth at the outset of a sonnet that in many ways
crystalizes his Romantic faith. “Late and soon, getting and spending,
we lay waste our powers.” We’ve given too much to commerce and
hustle. And— the word “spending” suggests—we may even have
turned erotic life into a matter of business. We’re in a mess. Blake
registers a similar sense of dislocation in “London” and all through
the Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Shelley registers the feeling
that we have fallen low— and by our own devices—at the outset of
his greatest poem, Prometheus Unbound. Jupiter, Shelley’s equiva-
lent of Blake’s Urizen, rules the world, exacting brutal tribute from
men and women. Keats is shadowed by what he calls “the Identity,”