imagination and madness

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity. Moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical. Even chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles, like a poem. He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts, because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram.

—G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

ethical relationship

All good poetry depends on the ethical relation between imagination and the image. Images are not ornaments; they are truths.

—Eavan Boland, “A Kind of Scar,” Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (W.W. Norton, 1996)

list making

Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind, as it is related of Lord Chatham that he was accustomed to read in Bailey's Dictionary when he was preparing to speak in Parliament.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Poet"

new image, new world

But phenomenology of the imagination cannot be content with a reduction which would make the image a subordinate means of expression: it demands, on the contrary, that images live directly, that they be taken as sudden events in life. When the image is new, the world is new.

― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1994, p. 47)

best things ever said

Of the other poets, Baratýnsky wrote very little prose, but this little contains a quite disproportionate amount of the best things ever said in Russian on the subject of poetry. Two of his utterances should be especially remembered: his definition of lyrical poetry as "the fullest awareness of a given moment," and his remark that good poetry is rare because two qualities, as a rule mutually exclusive, are necessary to the making of a poet—"the fire of creative imagination and the coldness of controlling reason."

—D.S. Mirsky, "The Poets' Prose," A History of Russian Literature: From the Beginnings to 1900  (Vantage Books, 1958), edited by Francis J. Whitfield

language really used

   The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.

—William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (1800)

struck note

Uttering a word is like striking a note on a keyboard of the imagination.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Prentice Hall, 3rd edition, 1973)

hidden place

Poetry’s freedom resembles, thus, as Plato pointed out, the freedom of a child, and the freedom of play, and the freedom of dreams. It is none of these. It is the freedom of the creative spirit.

And because poetry is born in this root life where the powers of the soul are active in common, poetry implies an essential requirement of totality or integrity. Poetry is the fruit neither of the intellect alone, nor of the imagination alone. Nay more, it proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together. And the first obligation imposed on the poet is to consent to be brought back to the hidden place, near the center of the soul, where the totality exists in the state of a creative source.

—Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition In Art & Poetry (Pantheon Books, 1953)

way through emotion

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling...A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually--that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too--but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling.

—Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry, ch. 1

not luxury

I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

—Audre Lorde, “Mapping,” Lofty Dogmas (U. of Arkansas Press, 2005), edited by Deborah Brown, Annie Finch and Maxim Kumin

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)