Romantic Origins of the Imaginal First, it is important to realize that, although Corbin’s notion of the imaginal may have been invoked to interpret Iranian mystical literature and possesses its own distinct features, it is very much in line with earlier Romantic philosophy, poetry, art, and music, which sought to vatically—that is to say, out of its own inspiring mystical states—express what M. H. Abrams paradoxically sums up as a “natural supernaturalism.” This Romantic paradox resulted in a series of artforms and philosophies that preserved but also transformed the earlier spiritual modes
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