Imagination

«The desire of the Romantics is perhaps for what Blake calls "organized innocence", but never for a mere return to the state of nature. The German Romantics, however, because of the contemporaneous philosophical tradition which centered on the relations between consciousness and consciousness of the self (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel), gained in some respects a clearer though not more fruitful understanding of the problem. I cannot consider in detail the case of French Romanticism; but Shelley's visionary despair, Keat's understanding of the poetical character, and Blake's doctrine of the contraries, reveal that self-consciousness cannot be overcome; and the very desire to overcome it, which poetry and imagination encourage, is part of a vital, dialectical movement of "soul-making".
The link between consciousness and self-consciousness, or knowledge and guilt, is already expressed in the story of the expulsion from Eden. Having tasted knowledge, man realizes his nakedness, his sheer separateness of self. I have quoted Kleist's reflection; and Hegel, in his interpretation of the Fall, argues that the way back to Eden is via contraries: the naively sensuous mind must pass through separation and selfhood to become spiritually perfect. It is the destiny of consciousness, or as the English Romantics would have said, of Imagination, to separate from nature, so that it can finally transcend not only nature but also its own lesser forms.»

Geoffrey H. Hartman, «Romanticism and  "Anti-Self-Consciousness"», in  Harold Bloom, Romanticism and Consciousness