Daniel Xu

"The poem itself metaphysically encapsulates the primary imagination—it is “an eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am” through poetry. The poetic persona of “Beyond Imago,” despite imagining the ruined Urn as a potential warning for those looking to understand infinity, still has faith in these ideas (“No teaching lessons learnt”)."

In Daniel's poem, the interplay between imagination and immortality encapsulates an ouroboric, Hegelian dialogue between the primary and secondary imagination. The poetic persona can only understand the urn's creation (thesis) by extrapolating its decreation (antithesis), whose synthesis reveals the truth of the matter: negative capability, or the negation of the mortal self, is the only way to asymptotically approach immortality. Yet despite being imagined by “Beyond Imago,” Daniel never directly interacts with Isaac as an artist—thus demonstrating the limits of time.