Of Imagination All Compact

Of Imagination All Compact

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,

Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

A Midsummer Night's Dream · 5.1 · Theseus

Six units of philosophical, visual, and musical context — from the medieval foundations that all later periods react against, through Modernism's crisis of certainty.

§ I The Six Units 1000 – 1950
00
UNIT
c. 1000–1400

The High Middle Ages

HamletShakespeare
01
UNIT
c. 1400–1700

Renaissance & Reformation

HamletShakespeare
02
UNIT
c. 1600–1700

The Baroque

Paradise LostMilton
03
UNIT
c. 1700–1800

The Enlightenment

Pride and PrejudiceAusten
04
UNIT
c. 1789–1880

Romanticism

Moby-DickMelville
05
UNIT
c. 1900–1950

Modernism

Invisible ManEllison