When reading Renaissance-era literature, the impact of major cultural changes begins to be reflected in more vivid and less empirical ways. The literature of this period makes many claims about how social forces, and perhaps existence itself in the “real” world, corrupt “being,” as well as examining the positive and negative aspects of a society in which the meaning of the word value has completely changed the way of existing. With these changes, however, I found that the Renaissance era was very interested in this concept of value and existence and how these forces interact with internal perception. In this essay I will try to explore how prose artists and poets explored concepts of the inner mind in relation to the world. I hope in this article to illustrate the differences in how perception and subsequent memories influenced the subjectivity of the works, as well as to express how the experience was valued by different writers of the period, contrasting the differences and also highlighting the similarities that come from the fact that this concept has been explored recently and is the result of a change in what society valued in an individual. One of the interesting emphases in the literature during this period is the importance of the individual and, with this focus in mind, the different ways in which the world what one sees depends on that individual's evaluation. This concept extends beyond what we see as the “presented” world, the one in which beings are present and perform (“life is a stage” and all that), to the internal world. One of the great analogues I found in class is in the discussion of M.H. Abrams' book The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, in which pre-Romantic literature served as a... paper medium..... .in memory of his youthful visit. And in de Quincey, while we can recount strange dreams and their impact, we cannot enter into his visions in the same way, for they will always be other experiences for us, no matter how similar the circumstances we may experience. In Keats's urn, however, there is no frame of reference: there is no truth, there is only the impression of a thing that exists or does not exist, and even if the impression existed only in the mind of Keats, as far as we know, delivering it as existing and having value for interpretation creates mystery in our minds, allowing us to fill in the blanks as to what it might mean. This is what I find to be the true illumination of the mysteries of memory and perception in these examples, and a great way to bridge the gap between writers seeking to interpret the experience of "being in the world"”.