Arnold’s ‘Imaginative Reason’ and Sellar’s Roman Poets

Abstract

Challenges readings by other twentieth-century critics that the term “imaginative reason” is a synthesis of feeling and intellectualism, arguing instead that it is a specific kind of reason. Looks to the criticism of Arnold’s contemporary William Sellar, whose work on the Roman poets Arnold admired, to support this claim. While Arnold may not have been directly influenced by Sellar’s analysis, both seemed to believe that the great classical poets achieved special insight into the nature of their world by the application of this rational power.