empire of chimeras

Horace was not one of these who believe that the caprice of the poet suffers no law above itself. In modern times, Young sounded the tocsin of Pseudo-Romanticism, when he declared that “in the fairy-land of fancy genius may wander wild; there it has a creative power, and may reign arbitrarily over its own empire of chimeras.” The poet, indeed, can create a world of his own, and, if he is endowed with the true genius of the poet, can insure our belief in his creation. But, even the poet must not offend our sense of congruity by endeavouring to unite things that are essentially incompatible. Horace would have no sympathy with the false Romanticism which could bring into being a world of chimeras having no conceivable relation with existing experience. Such things he would regard as the fevered dreams of a diseased imagination. He would thus look askance at the riot of imagination, and the unfettered play of emotion, which many regard as the divine prerogative of poets.
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In a later passage of the Ars Poetica, he seems to go still further, when he insists that the poet’s fictions be “proxima veris.”

—J. F. D’Alton, Roman Literary Theory & Criticism (Russell & Russell, 1962)

everything contemporary

If he doesn’t put down the contemporary thing, he isn’t a great writer, for he has to live in the past. That is what I mean by “everything is contemporary.” The minor poets of the period, or the precious poets of the period, are all people who are under the shadow of the past. A man who is making a revolution has to be contemporary. A minor person can live in the imagination.

—Gertrude Stein, How Writing Is Written: Volume II of the Uncollected Writing of Gertrude Stein (Black Sparrow Press, 1974), edited by Robert Bartlett Haas

auditory imagination

What I call ‘auditory imagination’ is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and obliterated and the trite, the current, and the new and surprising, the most ancient and the most civilized mentality.

—T.S. Eliot, “Matthew Arnold,” The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism (Faber and Faber, 1933)