The realms of reverie: A rhetorical investigation of the Romantic daydream

For the Romantic poets, reverie is a willed state subject to disciplined exploration. In the history of consciousness, Rousseau is a pivotal figure, influencing Wordsworth and Leopardi. In their "vagabondage interieur," the daydreamer poets seek images and sensations to be stored in memory. The tropes of reverie trigger a recovery of the primordial imagination. The antique world and the world of childhood become ideal fictional spaces. Reverie draws on the pastoral, an exemplar of staged wish-fulfillment. Associationism and the autobiographical reveries of Rousseau prepare the way for Romantic habits of introspection, an interplay of memory and imagination. Like the fantastic, reverie is not confined to a single genre but can appear in a variety of rhetorical situations. For the Romantics, the psychological mechanisms that generate metaphors themselves become appropriate subjects for poetry. Figures of speech such as prosopopeia, personification and apostrophe dramatize the daydreamer's quest for an authentic poetic voice, identified by the Romantics with an edenic and primitive past. In general, language acts as supplement for the inaccessible object of desire. Poetic language operates most powerfully within the spaces of absence, as epitomized by the epitaphic mode. While Romantic poets and critics repeatedly excoriated rhetoric, they could not abandon those rhetorical devices crucial to the imaginative process and instinctive to the human mind. The Romantics judged the validity of any rhetorical device precisely by its truth to their own psychological processes. Ekphrasis in poetry can be associated with the epitaphic mode and the "ars poetica." The ekphrastic poem is a specific kind of reverie, in which the "locus amoenus" is a visual artwork rather than a natural setting. Ekphrastic encounters by Leopardi and Keats with ancient artworks illustrate the complexities of a special form of disciplined reverie. While the act of reverie is ultimately solipsistic, a self-epitaph, the attempt to bridge the gap between past and present, visual and verbal, former and present self, creates, at least, a poetic reality more lasting than the ephemeral daydream.