who freely used myths. In England, it was
Coleridge who wrote on "infinite myriads of self-
conscious minds…Evolve the process of eternal
good”(Regensburg,1983).
Another poet who used this flavour was Keats
whose “Ode to the Psyche” fits this model. These
writers had come to believe that all that meets the
bodily sense to be symbolical, to involve
archetype. Carl Jung was a later proponent of this
valancing of primitivism over modernity and the
reinstatement of myth as a core practice. Once
this is believed a rock, a rose, a butterfly becomes
alive in an ecstasy of sight (Regensburg, 1983).
This is similar to Eliade’s “Archaic techniques of
ecstasy” laid out in the book of the same name.
Emerson and Thoreau would follow the full lesson
of Goethe and the English Romantics and
assimilate this belief in “ecstasy”. These were
arguably the first poets with more protracted
shamanic elements and would be followed by
Whitman who was the first fully fledged shaman,
he secluded himself off like shaman’s do and
thought of his poetry as “societal therapy”.
Whitman also travelled between worlds in his
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