Something else than the imagination is moved by the statement that the horses of the gods are all of them noble, and of noble breed or origin. The conventional interpretation is that the singer as creator imposes order on chaos of natural world. Level is an abbreviated form of level of resemblance. No politician can command the imagination, directing it to do this or that. Life, not the artist, creates or reveals reality: time and experience in the poet, in the painter During this last September, I visited the old Zeller house in the Tulpe- hocken, in Pennsylvania.
McConnell explores the life and works of Wallace Stevens. As to the definition itself, it is an expedient for getting on. One looks at this work of Clark Mills and thinks of the remark of Bertrand Russell that to acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy. The individual dialect of a poet who happens to have one, analogous to the speech common to his time and place and yet not that common speech, is in the same position as the language of poetry generally when the language of poetry generally is not the common speech. New York: Western Publishing Company, Inc.
There is a real difference here even though people turn to the im- agination without knowing it in life and to reality with- out knowing it in arts and letters. What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality. There is enough green in the sea to relate it to the palms. The feeling is not a feeling peculiar to exquisite or per- haps, as better precise realization, and hence confined to poets who exceed us in nature as they do m speech. To say the same thing another way, the thing stated has been accompanied by a restatement and the restatement has illustrated and given definition to the thing stated. In spite of the confusion of values and the diversity of aspects, one arrives eventually face to face with arts and letters I could take advantage of the pictures from the Kaiser Friednch Museum in Berlin, which are being exhibited throughout the country and which many of you, no doubt, have seen. The practice confined them to the briefest generalization.
From this premise, at any rate, Stevens maintains that imagination is a faculty of mind that internalizes data and other externalities which themselves sound no ethical tones until reason—with its perpetual processes of association—synthesizes the real and the visionary. Nowhere in the poem does she speak directly of the subject of the poem by its name. This volume also contains a balanced historical record of critical reception to Stevens. And for more than ten years, the consciousness of the world has concentrated on events which have made the ordinary movement of life seem to be the movement of people in the intervals of a storm. About nobility I cannot be sure that the decline, not to say the disappearance of nobility is any- thing more than a maladjustment between the imagina- tion and reality We have been a little insane about the truth We have had an obsession In its ultimate exten- sion, the truth about which we have been insane will lead us to look beyond the truth to something in which the imagination will be the dominant complement It is not only that the imagination adheres to reality, but, also, that reality adheres to the imagination and that the inter- dependence is essential We may emerge from our has- sesse and, if we do, how would it happen if not by the intervention of some fortune of the mind' And what would that fortune of the mind happen to be? Yet we un- derstand it rather than participate in it. Again, many thanks for your work. It is one of the multitude of figures of speech that are merely idle.
The discourse about the two elements seems endless. Thus, in the Second Part where Christiana and young Mercy are on their way toward the Caelestial Country with Christiana's children to rejoin Christian, they come at evening to the house of the Interpreter. It is often said of a man that his work is autobiographical in spite of every subterfuge It cannot be otherwise. What is it that these two have in common? If a rational idea does not satisfy the imagination, it may, nevertheless, satisfy the reason If an imaginative idea does not satisfy the reason, we regard the fact as m the nature of things. Three Academic Pieces 73 The business of the press is to furnish an indefinite pub- lic with a potentially indefinite number of identical texts.
Eliot Change the Face of American Poetry Modernist poets such as E. It has the strength of reality or none at all What has just been said demonstrates that there are degrees of the imagination, as, for example, degrees of vitality and, therefore, of intensity. We have been assured, by every visitor, that the American busi- nessman is absorbed in his business and there is nothing to be gained by disputing it. It seems to me that the subject of modern relations is best to be approached as a whole The paramount relation between poetry and painting today, between modern man and modern art is simply this that The Relations between Poetry and Tainting 171 in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their meas- ure, a compensation for what has been lost. We have to stop and think now and then of what he writes as implicit with that significance.
I could also take advantage, so far as letters are concerned, of a few first books of poems or a few first novels. Yet today poetry is lit- erature more often than not, for poetry partakes of what may be called the tendency to become literature Life it- self partakes of this tendency, which is a phase of the growth of sophistication. Thus, a false ex- aggeration is a disturbing of the balance between reality and the imagination. The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book. This site, I repeat, does not give legal advice. He is able to read the inscription on the portal and he repeats: The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet 63 I am myself a part of what is real and it is my own speech and the strength of it, this only, that I hear or ever shall He says, so that we can all hear him- I am the truth, since I am -part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me And I am imagination, m a leaden time and in a world that does not move for the weight of its own heaviness Can there be the slightest doubt what the decision will be? To look at it at all makes us realize sharply that in our present, in the presence of our reality, the past looks false and is, therefore, dead and is, therefore, ugly; and we turn away from it as from something repulsive and particularly from the characteristic that it has a way of assuming: something that was noble in its day, grandeur that was, the rhetorical once.
This overwhelms us with direct anal- ogy, that is to say the personifications of allegory. Once on a packet on his way to Germany Coleridge was asked to Join a party of Danes and drink with them. It is as if a man who lived indoors should go outdoors on a day of sympathetic weather His realization of the weather would exceed that of a man who lives outdoors. The imagination is the liberty of the mind. This being so, my time and yours might have been better spent if I had been less interested in trying to give our possible poet an identity and less in- terested in trying to appoint him to his place But unless I had done these things, it might have been thought that I was rhetorical, when I was speaking in the simplest way about things of such importance that nothing is more so. We know that in poetry bigness and gaiety are precious characteristics of the diction. The truth is that we are constantly outliving it and yet the ideal itself remains alive with an enormous life.