“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.”
-Albert Einstein
IMAGINATION
What is that magic that none of us see but that can bring us into a totally unexpected world? How do we use this “spell”? And why is it that some people don't know how to use it? The answer is simple: this wonderful world that arises from the games between our mind and our emotions is called "imagination". Unfortunately it is true, some people do not possess any imagination; even if it doesn't look like it, imagining and creating are two very difficult mental processes to carry out. But do not fear! We are here to help you build your world of imagination and, in doing so, we will use the ideas of the greatest English literary representatives and the theories of some truly significant artistic movements in the history of humanity. Let's start!
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Geoffrey Chaucer
Behind the purpose of entertaining and instructing, the narrative poems of the Middle Ages show how regular the use of imagination in those times. Indeed, in the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, entitled “The Canterbury Tales”, we see the use of imagination with ordinary things: the characters use their imagination and creativity to tell stories and tales. However, imagination was not important in the Middle Ages and it was neither a theme nor personified into a character.
"People can die of mere imagination"
The cultural revolution of Humanism in the second half of the fifteenth century develops with the Renaissance in the 16th century. The main aspiration in this period was the search for beauty, harmony and perfection. The 16th century was an upsetting century for England. It was full of crucial events as well as the development of its national and linguistic identity. Henry VIII declared the independence of the English crown from the Catholic Church, using Luther's new ideas.
Christopher Marlowe
Although his works do not speak directly of the imagination, Christopher Marlowe often deals with the limits of knowledge. And as happens in "Doctor Faustus", Marlowe speaks of a man who wants to overcome limits and does not want to stick to the words of the Church. Consequently, the writer bases the whole story on a metaphor in order to demonstrate how much society at the time was too attached to philosophy and theology. He also denounces the closed mindedness of that era, still tied to medieval superstition and too insecure to speak freely. With the image of a man who goes to the afterlife to make a pact with the devil, Marlowe teaches us that the desire for knowledge is not always a necessity, indeed sometimes we should be happy simply because we have an imagination that makes us free and is priceless.
“Hell is just a frame in mind”
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare influenced and changed language and storytelling, harnessing the imagination of the spectators. Some people believe that, through the desire to add creativity and novelty to daily life, he invented a new type of love. In fact, in the past the pure love of "Romeo and Juliet" was not considered a topic worthy of tragedies. Instead in "Hamlet" there is the imagination, above all, for the presence of a ghost and also because Hamlet finds himself trapped in an almost fatal psychological labyrinth both for him and for his loved ones. Also in this Shakespearean work, we find an interesting insight into reality and appearance. Shakespeare wonders how does one separate what appears to be real or absolute from what actually is so? And the answer is that truth seems to reside in the "existential idea", so every individual who thinks and imagines can prove the certainty of his existence.
“Words without thoughts never to heaven go”
With metaphysical poetry, in the 17th century, the role of the imagination changes. Starting from the name of this literary current, we know that the poets who belonged to it wanted to go beyond the limits of society. Furthermore, in those days poets had to have the ability to create unusual metaphors and images and arrange them in an unexpected way so as to surprise the reader.
John Donne
Like other metaphysical poets, John Donne figures things out in a new way, thanks to his imagination. His poems are not easy to understand and decipher because the themes are explained through unusual metaphors and analogies that would not come intuitively to us. But these metaphors open our mind to new discoveries about our relationship with the world. Love is a recurrent theme, but he also describes the complexities involved in exploring characters in expressing love, the role of religion and how it reinforces love, emotions and expressions while true love is being exchanged (including sexual favours). For example in the poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” he uses a lot of figures of speech to create a long analogy of the bond between two lovers trying to find the perfect way to communicate his message.
So we can say for Donne, love is strictly connected to the imagination and, therefore, to freedom. But since he was a man still influenced by the Middle Ages, he also thinks that the universe and various celestial phenomena restrict and control the love and, therefore, the creativity of each man.
"At the round earth's imagined corners, blow your trumpets, angels"
John Milton
John Milton’s visual imagination does leave several unanswered questions, but over the years a lot of scholars have studied his works. The most important imaginary creatures that he uses are the angels. They are the protagonists of his masterpiece “Paradise Lost” through which he sets the Fall of humankind against a cosmic background. His angels are real beings and their stories rely on the understanding of what they were. However, they are not made-up creatures, since he was inspired by religious texts and myths. There are mainly two interpretations of his way of conceiving imagination. T. S. Eliot described it as “purely auditory” and influenced by his blindness, because his “sensuousness, such as it was, had been withered early by book‐learning” and his “gifts were naturally aural.” Differently, Stephen Dobranski's thinks that Milton used to describe people and objects relying on the material reality around him. The language that he used was very physical and material. In fact, “Milton uses things in Paradise Lost to help him render the invisible visible”. It represents their status in between pure immateriality and fully embodied fallenness through the representations of both material and immaterial entities.
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven”
The 18th century is also called The Augustan Age. It is known as The Age of Enlightenment or The Age of Reason, highlighting the rational trend of the period and the attitude that places judgment and reason as the guiding principles of men.
Daniel Defoe
We see Daniel Defoe’s imagination in “Robinson Crusoe”. Defoe emphasizes the power of the image-making faculty to misdirect attention. The habit of imaginative transformation becomes a source of sin, it obviates rational action, for example, when the mariner in the boat-building scheme is dominated by his uncontrollable fancy. In fact, he spends five months making a canoe so heavy and big that it would take more than ten years to dig a channel deep enough to get it into the water. Imagination as in "Robinson Crusoe" provides the only conceivable guide to growth. Crusoe also describes willed exercises of the imagination, he says for example “in which fancy produces piety than self-will”.
“All our discontents about what we want appeared to me to spring from the want of thankfulness for what we have”
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s travels: The novel will illustrate the power of imagination. Gulliver’s travels ask whether social life should be governed by physical power or moral right. Jonathan Swift uses this novel to describe reality in an imaginative way. For example, he invents the characters of the Lilliputians to symbolize humankind’s excessive pride in themselves, or the figure of the Brobdingnagians to symbolize the personal and physical side of humans when examined closely. He has a strong sense of imagination directed to build an even stronger satire towards his contemporaries.
"Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others"
Romanticism is the literary and artistic movement in which imagination is one of the fundamental and main characteristics. With the beginning of the Romantic Age there is a new sensibility towards ideals of order, calm, harmony, balance and rationality. Inter alia, the Romantic imagination is known as the creative power totally superior to reason. It shapes the poets’ fleeting visions into concrete forms and it allows human beings to ‘read’ nature as a system of symbols.
William Blake
According to William Blake imagination consists in a divine power, through which man stand in the name of God. "Songs of Innocence" are an exaltation of the child that isn’t corrupted in his purity and freshness yet . For this reason the child is more suitable to get into God’s brain. Childhood is a state of mind, but for Blake no human being can stay innocent. Men must be tested by experience and suffering to reach a higher state. In the "Songs of Innocence" the feelings of pity and joy of the poet are expressed through the mouth of children, their innocence is seen as a condition of happiness and freedom. Blake believes that imagination is superior to reason and for him the word imagination is a vision beyond materiality. For Blake every poet is visionary and a prophet who is able to expose the evils of the society and to look deeply into reality. Through the use of imagination the poet has the possibility to go beyond the external appearance of things arriving to the real truth about life and reality.
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth saw imagination as a powerful and an active force that works on our senses, interprets our vision of the world and influencing how we react to events.
He believed that an imaginative life is essential for our well-being.
He sees imagination as a gift and he uses it as a synonym of intuition, in other words imagination is the power to see into reality. He also suggests that imagination is a process in which the mind of the poet moves from physical sensation to spontaneous emotion, then reactions like memory purified emotion. He thinks that only with this purified emotion a poet can truly express himself and produce poetry.
“The mind of man is a thousand times more beautiful than the earth on which he dwells.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
According to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in the fourth chapter of “Biographia literaria”, imagination is the faculty associated with creativity and the power to shape and unify. To him, imagination is divided into two distinct classifications. There is the primary imagination that can be experienced by any man and that is linked to perceptions. It manifests itself through images which recall relevant past sensorial experiences. Meanwhile, the secondary imagination can be experienced only by the poet, who dissolves the images linked to past experiences in order to recreate them. The result of this process is the ‘new world’ of the poem. Thanks to Coleridge, we can say that, as in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison", any mental cage can become a lush flower garden.
"Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain"
John Keats
John Keats believes imagination to be supreme and to take two main forms:
1. artificial poetry
2. poetry that comes from imagination
His work is a vision of what he would like human life to be like. Keats’s world of imagination has the power to redefine the rules we experience in the real world by heightening joys and extending them on and on. He also contrasts the imaginary world with the real world, as we can read in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”.
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty" - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know
Bram Stoker
The most famous work by Bram Stoker, “Dracula”, has a lot examples of Romanticism. First of all, we can see how much the choice of setting (Transylvania) and the general scenario are linked to the ideas of remote and superstition and, consequently, to the use of the imagination. The landscapes and all the men throughout the story are always connected to the idea of the sublime, typical of romanticism. According to Edmund Burke, the sublime was an artistic effect productive of the strongest emotions the mind is capable of feeling, such as terror, anger and danger. So, in "Dracula", the imagination alternates with the sublime as if they were two swaying harmonies that complement each other.
"There are darknesses in life and there are lights, and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights"
Mary Shelley
Though Mary Shelley incorporates aspects that resemble the Enlightenment period, she develops above all the imagination. With “Frankenstein”, we see that in her work there is a mix between imagination and science, in particular that of the new discoveries of her time, such as electricity. The imagination in Frankenstein is that Dr. Frankenstein created a monster out of miscellaneous body parts, so he had to deal with life and death. There is also a strong social denunciation in Shelley's work. She creates the character of the scientist Victor Frankenstein to demonstrate how the minds of that time (and perhaps even those of today) were full of rules. He could not be creative and spontaneous because he had too much rationality and scientific norms in his head.
"The whole series of my life appeared to me as a dream; I sometimes doubted if indeed it were all true, for it never presented itself to my mind with the force of reality"
Jane Austen
Jane Austen, famous for the work “Pride and Prejudice”, is known for dealing with light and worldly themes such as love, marriage and friendship. But in all her novels something much deeper is hidden, something that can only be understood with the use of imagination. Instead of talking about the sublime or monstrous creations, Jane Austen focuses on a seemingly simpler topic: the condition of women. The writer's imagination is so impactful that it should make tears come to the eyes every time one of her novels is read. Once, referring to her book “Emma”, she said: "I went to choose a heroine that nobody but me could love". So, Jane Austen used imagination to create a new world, where even women could be independent and free, because imagination also means flying to a better universe in search of happiness.