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Imagination
as a concept |
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Imaginative power is still something that most poetry
editors look for in submissions, but the term is differently
understood. Aristotle
saw imagination
as mental reproduction of sensory experience, a form of memory
and so the mother of the Muses.
The Neoplatonists
made nature a cypher of a Divine mind, to which they
and later
Romantics
believed imagination provided the larger access. Imagination
allowed Renaissance
poets
to create what could not be seen directly, and even Augustan
writers felt that through imagination art became something
more than a copy and rearrangement of the external world.
In Fichte
and Schelling,
so important to Coleridge
and the transcendalists,
imagination became a form of knowledge, and therefore essential
to philosophy, a view that continues in today's
hermeneutics.
In Croce's
aesthetics
a unifying image was created through feeling, intuition and
imagination, and (as cultural inheritances) such images are
now the shared province of anthropologists,
literary
critics and psychiatrists.
For
cognitive science, imagination forms a part of consciousness,
the subject of fascinating experiments
and philosophical
problems. |
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Imagination: some problems |
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So
what are creative writing classes, in school and later,
attempting to achieve by stimulating the literary imagination?
Can close
reading, which detaches
poetry from contemporary events, really demonstrate
an imaginative
unity? What do we say to our latter-day Dadaists, the
Postmodernists,
who see imaginative power as rooted in language itself and
not in any supposed author's intentions? How do we explain
the imaginative flowering of the arts that so often marks
the onset
or heady
first years of social revolution? Or reply to the anti-capitalists,
who see the economics of global
exploitation as a failure in social imagination? On
answers to these questions depends our view of poetry, its
aims and challenges.
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Imagination: suggested approaches |
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How
could we decide? Perhaps by studying and comparing the
great
art of the past in its intellectual context: if that art
is inconceivable without its animating ideas then the ideas
of today will be important for current art and should be taken
seriously. If, on the contrary, persuaded by literary theory
that a broader conception of art is now required, then three
approaches are possible. One is judgement by results, comparing
the work featuring in contemporary
magazines
with, say, poetry of some 50
years ago.
A second is to probe the bases of literary
theory itself — intellectual,
social
and political.
And a third is to see what what psychology
(not psychiatry)
and cognitive
science make of artistic concepts like imagination. |
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Further reading |
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A
tall order, but much material can be found at the following.
Histories of ideas: Imagination section of The
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1993),
Internet
Encyclopedia, Stanford
Encyclopedia or Noesis.
Literary theory: Literary
Resources, The
Notebook. Imaginative
power in poetry: Poetry Online box at top left. Cognitive
science:
Imagination,
Mental Imagery, Consciousness and Cognition. Psychology
Resources. Practical exercises in developing a literary
imagination: creativity,
pathways,
wordweave,
creative
writing, lyrical
works, writing
without the muse.
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