I'm working on a paper for Romantic literature, and I've decided to address directly the issue that puzzles me most about the Romantics. How can a group of people that produce such good art have such a bad epistemology? So I'm going to write about Wordsworth, who seems the most sensible and is undoubtedly the most orthodox of the Romantic period.

Wordsworth is described as having something that seem to me very similar to the erotic type experiences that we learn about in Plato's Phaedrus. How could have that kind of experience using the faculty of imagination? Unable to answer this question with an internal inquiry of Wordsworth's works, I'll instead try to figure out how he thought he had that experience. Important poems in my paper will be The Prelude, which I hope I can read in full by the time I write the paper, but am somewhat skeptical about, and the Ode (Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood) which is a poem I lead a session on my Junior year fall semester, anyway. I'll throw in Tintern Abbey for fun if I have time.