English-speaking Cultures
Within the European and American literary traditions, oracular speech that links the individual creative artist with forces larger than the individual ego have been part of several movements. The Pre-Raphaelites objected to the humanism that was a feature of the Renaissance and sought for an earlier, presumably more holistic, art. The English Romantics found in nature a source of inspiration and a model for human societies. American Transcendentalists found inspiration in an oversoul, which Ralph Waldo Emerson also called an "oracular soul." Surrealists sought to move past the logic of the waking mind and to draw from more universal material in the unconscious. Imagism based art on deep connection with an object outside the self, thus allowing some of its practitioners to develop an art with oracular content.
Important writers whose work has been defined as oracular include Arthur Rimbaud, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Butler Yeats, and H.D.
Read more about this topic: Oracular Literature
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“Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and cruelties; it accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)