Poetry and Imagination.
To examine this concept, I would like to examine some of the acknowledged great poets; and I thought it useful to start with Shelly.
Here is a small, but well-known part of the last poem he ever published, “Hellas.”
The world’s great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn;
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far;
A new Peneus rolls his fountains
Against the morning star;
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.
A loftier Argo cleaves the main,
Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,
And loves, and weeps, and dies;
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore.
O write no more the tale of Troy,
If earth Death’s scroll must be
Nor mix with Laian rage the joy
Which dawns upon the free,
Although a subtler Sphinx renew
Riddles of death Thebes never knew.
Another Athens shall arise,
And to remoter time
Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,
The splendour of its prime;
And leave, if naught so bright may live,
All earth can take or Heaven can give.
Saturn and Love their long repose
Shall burst, more bright and good
Than all who fell, than One who rose,
Than many unsubdued:
Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers,
But votive tears and symbol flowers.
O cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy!
The world is weary of the past
O might it die or rest at last
So, what was Shelly’s take on poetry. Luckily in Shelley’s eloquent exposition of ideas in his works, one can discern a perceptible radiance that allows us to look into the poet’s experience in conceiving and composing.
The world to him is a melancholy place, a ‘dim vast vale of tears,’ illuminated in flashes by the light of a hidden but glorious power.
Nor is this power, wholly outside the world. It works within it as a soul contending with obstruction and striving to penetrate and transform the whole mass. And although the fulness of its glory is concealed, its nature can, with effort, be known in outline.
It is the realized perfection of everything good and beautiful on earth.
And by “all” this would cover aspects such as: the splendour of nature, the love of lovers, every affection and virtue, any good action or just law, the wisdom of philosophy, the creations of art; all are equally operations or appearances of the hidden power.
It is of the first importance for the understanding of Shelley to realize how strong in him is the sense and conviction of this unity in life: it is one of his Platonic traits.
To Shelley, it is the revelation of those eternal ideas which lie behind the veil that we call reality or life.
Initially when reading his work, we hear nothing of that perfect power at the heart of things, and his poetry seems to be considered as a creation rather than a revelation.
But for Shelley, we soon discover, this would be a false antithesis. The poet creates, but this creation is no mere fancy of his; it represents ‘those forms which are common to universal nature and existence,’ and ‘a poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.’
We notice, further, that the more voluntary and conscious work of invention and execution is regarded as quite subordinate in the creative process.
In that process the mind, obedient to an influence which it does not understand and cannot control, is driven to produce images of perfection which rather form themselves in it than are formed by it.
The greatest stress is laid on this influence or inspiration; and in the end we learn that the origin of the whole process lies in certain exceptional moments when visitations of thought and feeling, elevating and delightful beyond all expression, but always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, reach the soul; that these are, as it were, the inter-penetration of a diviner nature through our own; and that the province of the poet is to arrest these apparitions, to veil them in language, to colour every other form he touches with their evanescent hues, and so to ‘redeem from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.’
Thus, that ‘Poetry’ which Shelley is defending is something very much wider than poetry in the usual sense. The enemy he has to meet is the contention that poetry and its influence steadily decline as civilization advances, and that they are giving place, and ought to give place, to reasoning and the pursuit of utility. His answer is that, on the contrary, imagination has been, is, and always will be, the prime source of everything that has intrinsic value in life.
Reasoning, he declares, cannot create, it can only operate upon the products of the imagination.
Further, he holds that the predominance of mere reasoning and mere utility has become in great part an evil; for while it has accumulated masses of material goods and moral truths, we distribute the goods iniquitously and fail to apply the truths, because, for want of imagination, we have not sympathy in our hearts and do not feel what we know.
The ‘Poetry’ which he defends, therefore, is the whole creative imagination with all its products. And these include not merely literature in verse, but, first, whatever prose writing is allied to that literature; and, next, all the other fine arts; and, finally, all actions, inventions, institutions, and even ideas and moral dispositions, which imagination brings into being in its effort to satisfy the longing for perfection.
Painters and musicians are poets. Plato and Bacon, even Herodotus and Livy, were poets, though there is much in their works which is not poetry. So were the men who invented the arts of life, constructed laws, disclosed, as sages or founders of religion, the excellence of justice and love. And every one, Shelley would say, who, perceiving the beauty of an imagined virtue or deed, translates the image into a fact, is so far a poet. For all these things come from imagination.
Shelley’s exposition of this, which is probably the most original part of his theory, is not very clear; but, essentially the meaning is that the imagination, that is to say, the soul imagining, has before it, or feels within it, something which, answering perfectly to its nature, fills it with delight and with a desire to realize what delights it.
These aspects are as various as the elements and forms of its own inner life and outward existence; and so the idea may be that of the perfect harmony of will and feeling (a virtue), or of the perfect union of soul with soul (love), or of the perfect order of certain social relations or forces (a law or institution), or of the perfect adjustment of intellectual elements (a truth); and so on.
The formation and expression of any such idea is thus the work of Poetry in the widest sense; while at the same time any such idea is a gleam or apparition of the perfect Intellectual Beauty.
Shelley also talks about what he terms ‘rhythm.’ He uses this word in reference to an action. Thus, he says for example, that the true poetry of Rome, unlike that of Greece, did not fully express itself in poems. ‘The true poetry of Rome lived in its institutions: for whatever of beautiful, true and majestic they contained, could have sprung only from the faculty which creates the order in which they consist. The life of Camillus; the death of Regulus; the expectation of the senators, in their god-like state, of the victorious Gauls; the refusal of the Republic to make peace with Hannibal after the battle of Cannæ’, these he describes as ‘a rhythm and order in the shows of life,’ an order not arranged with a view to utility or outward result, but due to the imagination, which, ‘beholding the beauty of this order, created it out of itself according to its own idea.’
If this, then, is the nature of Poetry in the widest sense, how does the poet, in the special sense, differ from other unusually creative souls?
First, he claims for language the highest place among the vehicles of artistic expression, on the ground that it is the most direct and also the most flexible. It is itself produced by imagination instead of being simply encountered by it, and it has no relation except to imagination.
It is to the superiority of its vehicle that Shelley attributes the greater fame which poetry has enjoyed as compared with other arts. He forgets that the media of the other arts have, on their side, certain advantages over language, and that these perhaps counterbalance the inferiority which he notices.
Language, Shelley goes on to say, represents in it’s meaning, a perfection which is always an order, harmony, or rhythm. It is measured language, which is not the proper vehicle for the mere recital of facts or for mere reasoning.
But we must remember that Shelley’s strength and weakness are closely allied, and it may be that the very abstractness of his ideal was a condition of that quivering intensity of aspiration towards it, in which his poetry is so unique.
Secondly, Shelley remarks that a poet’s own conceptions on moral subjects are usually those of his place and time, while the matter of his poem ought to be eternal, or, of permanent and universal interest. This, seems true, and has a wide application; and it holds good even when the poet, like Shelley himself, is in rebellion against orthodox moral opinion.
Lastly, and this is Shelley’s central argument, as poetry itself is directly due to imaginative inspiration and not to reasoning, so it's true moral effect is produced through imagination and not through doctrine. Imagination is, for Shelley, ‘the great instrument of moral good. It is not ‘for want of admirable doctrines that men hate and despise and censure and deceive and subjugate one another’: it is for want of love. And poetry ministers to moral good, the effect, by acting on its cause, imagination. It strengthens imagination as exercise strengthens a limb, and so it indirectly promotes morality.
And so, in conclusion, I think we can say that the moral virtue of Shelley’s poetry lay, not in his doctrines about the past and future of man, but in an intuition, which was the substance of his soul, and of the value of love.