Poems of the Week: Imagination

Johnny Burke (1908 – 1964) was one of the greatest popular song lyricists. One of the many web sites for Burke tells us that “Bing Crosby claimed he owed much of his success to a lyricist he dubbed ‘the Poet.’ Crosby said, ‘one of the best things that ever happened to me was a 145-pound leprechaun named Johnny Burke.’” For the movie Road to Morocco (1942) he wrote the lyrics to three great songs – Polka Dots and Moonbeams, Moonlight Becomes You, and Imagination. This last song begins:

Imagination is funny,
It makes a rainy day sunny,
Makes a bee think of honey,
Just as I think of you.
Imagination is crazy,
Your whole perspective gets hazy,
Starts you asking a daisy
“What to do? What to do?”
Have you ever felt a gentle touch
And then a kiss, and then, and then
Find it’s only your imagination again?
Oh, well.

Our subject this week is (as you might guess!) imagination, and this follows rather well from our previous article in this series on the Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. While I was reading his discussions on his literary life, Biographia Literaria (1817), I was struck by several points he made about the role that imagination plays in the art of poetry. For example, from Chapter XIV:

“During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both.”

Just a few years later, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822), a poet from the next period in the development of poetry wrote, in his article A Defense of Poetry:

“A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A poet therefore would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither.”

However, while the poets regard imagination as a good thing, ‘twas not always thus! In Genesis, Chapter 6, verse 5, we read:

“And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”

And later, following the end of the flood, in Chapter 8, verse 21:

“…the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth;….”

In Jeremiah, Chapter 19, verse 12:

“And they said, There is no hope: but we will walk after our own devices, and we will everyone do the imagination of his evil heart.”

In The Gospel According to Saint Luke, Chapter 1, verse 51, which is part of what is called ‘The Magnificat’ it is said that:

He hath showed strength with his arm;
he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

And in The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans, Chapter 1, verse 21:

“Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.”

I am not clear why the idea of imagination was so negatively perceived, and since I only know the material in the English translation, I am not sure what words were used in the texts from which the translation was made. However, this particular translation was made by scholars in the British Isles in 1611, at the same time Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) was writing. Here then, for comparison, is Henry Bolingbroke’s speech from Richard II, Act I, scene iii. Richard has banished Bolingbroke for six years. Bolingbroke is the son of John of Gaunt who is trying to persuade his son that the banishment won’t be all that bad, if you look at it the right way.

Here is the end of John of Gaunt’s speech, and Bolingbroke’s reply:

         JOHN OF GAUNT
Suppose the singing-birds musicians,
The grass whereon thou tread’st the presence strew’d,
The flowers fair ladies, and thy steps no more
Than a delightful measure or a dance;
For gnarling sorrow hath less power to bite
The man that mocks at it and sets it light.

         HENRY BOLINGBROKE
O, who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frost Caucasus?
Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite
By bare imagination of a feast?
Or wallow naked in December snow
By thinking on fantastic summer’s heat?
O, no! the apprehension of the good
Gives but the greater feeling to the worse:
Fell sorrow’s tooth dothe never rankle more
Than when he bites, but lanceth not the sore.

Later, Bolingbroke would become King Henry IV – but that’s another play!

In Hamlet, Act V, scene i, Hamlet is discussing Yorick’s skull in the graveyard with Horatio, and says:

To what base uses may we return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bung-hole?

Anyway, as we see, Shakespeare’s use of the word is essentially the same as ours today.

Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784), speaking at the opening of the Drury Lane Theatre in 1747, said this about Shakespeare:

When learning’s triumph o’er her barb’rous foes
First rear’d the stage, immortal Shakespeare rose;
Each change of many-color’d life he drew,
Exhausted worlds, and then imagin’d new:
Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign,
And panting Time toil’d after him in vain.

John Dryden (1631 – 1700), in his dedication to his opera King Arthur (1691) wrote:

"That fairy kind of writing which depends only upon the force of imagination."

However, Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay (1800 – 1859) said of Dryden, in 1828:

“His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar.”

Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870) appears not to have been involved with poets or poetry, so far as I can make out; but one cannot doubt the power of his imagination. Here is a quotation from Chapter 34 of Martin Chuzzlewit, which, like many of Dickens’s works, was published serially; in this case over the period 1843 – 4. Martin has visited America, and is trying to get back to England. He is present at a social gathering, at which (for reasons too complicated to discuss here) a lady in a wig says:

`Mind and matter,' said the lady in the wig, `glide swift into the vortex of immensity. Howls the sublime, and softly sleeps the calm Ideal, in the whispering chambers of Imagination. To hear it, sweet it is. But then, outlaughs the stern philosopher, and saith to the Grotesque, "What ho! arrest for me that Agency. Go, bring it here!" And so the vision fadeth.'

One of the most interesting discussions of imagination and what it means was written in about 1756 by Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797). Burke was famous as a philosopher, a politician, and a lawyer; and one of his most famous speeches, in 1775, was concerned with the development of good relations between America and England. However, his paper entitled On the Sublime and Beautiful contains much about imagination: here is a relatively brief section:

“Besides the ideas, with their annexed pains and pleasures, which are presented by the sense; the mind of man possesses a sort of creative power of its own; either in representing at pleasure the images of things in the order and manner in which they were received by the senses, or in combining those images in a new manner, and according to a different order. This power is called imagination; and to this belongs whatever is called wit, fancy, invention, and the like. But it must be observed, that this power of the imagination is incapable of producing anything absolutely new; it can only vary the disposition of those ideas which it has received from the senses. Now the imagination is the most extensive province of pleasure and pain, as it is the region of our fears and our hopes, and of all our passions that are connected with them; and whatever is calculated to affect the imagination with these commanding ideas, by force of any original natural impression, must have the same power pretty equally over all men. For since the imagination is only the representation of the senses, it can only be pleased or displeased with the images, from the same principle on which the sense is pleased or displeased with the realities; and consequently there must be just as close an agreement in the imaginations as in the senses of men.”

So far as poets are concerned, we have already seen Coleridge’s views. William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850) has this in his late poem The Prelude, Book 14, 1, 190:

                   Imagination, which in truth
Is but another name for absolute power
And clearest insight, amplitude of mind,
And Reason, in her most exalted mood.

However, it would be wrong to suppose that the Romantic poets were the first to identify imagination as a key component of poetry. There is an interesting poet in the eighteenth century, Mark Akenside (1721 – 1770), who wrote a long poem entitled The Pleasures of Imagination. This was published first in 1744, then almost completely rewritten later; it finally appeared posthumously in 1772.

Akenside was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, in the north-east of England, and attended the University of Edinburgh, intending to become a minister. Instead, he studied medicine. His first poem was The Virtuoso, in imitation of Edmund Spenser, which appeared in 1737. Eventually, he was appointed physician to the Queen. At the time, some of the sources say he was not regarded all that highly as a poet, but Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784) wrote a book entitled Lives of the English Poets (1781), and said of Akenside: “Akenside was one of those poets who have felt very early the motions of genius, and one of those students who have very early stored their memories with sentiments and images. Many of his performances were produced in his youth; and his greatest work, The Pleasures of Imagination, appeared in 1744. I have heard Dodsley, by whom it was published, relate that when the copy was offered him the price demanded for it, which was an hundred and twenty pounds, being such as he was not inclined to give precipitately, he carried the work to Pope, who, having looked into it, advised him not to make a niggardly offer; for 'this was no every-day writer’.

Here is the opening to Book One:

With what attractive charms this goodly frame
Of Nature touches the consenting hearts
Of mortal men; and what the pleasing stores
Which beauteous imitation thence derives
To deck the poet's, or the painter's toil;
My verse unfolds. Attend, ye gentle pow'rs
Of musical delight! and while I sing
Your gifts, your honours, dance around my strain.
Thou, smiling queen of every tuneful breast,
Indulgent Fancy! from the fruitful banks
Of Avon, whence thy rosy fingers cull
Fresh flowers and dews to sprinkle on the turf
Where Shakspeare lies, be present: and with thee
Let Fiction come, upon her vagrant wings
Wafting ten thousand colours through the air,
Which, by the glances of her magic eye,
She blends and shifts at will, through countless forms,
Her wild creation. Goddess of the lyre,
Which rules the accents of the moving sphere,
Wilt thou, eternal Harmony! descend
And join this festive train? for with thee comes
The guide, the guardian of their lovely sports,
Majestic Truth; and where Truth deigns to come,
Her sister Liberty will not be far.
Be present all ye genii, who conduct
The wandering footsteps of the youthful bard,
New to your springs and shades: who touch his ear
With finer sounds: who heighten to his eye
The bloom of Nature, and before him turn
The gayest, happiest attitude of things.

A little while ago, we discussed here the ‘slave poet’ Phyllis Wheatley (1753 – 1784). Her collection Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) includes a poem entitled On Imagination; here is the second stanza:

Imagination! who can sing thy force?
Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?
Soaring though air to find the bright abode,
Th' empyreal palace of the thund'ring God,
We on thy pinions can surpass the wind,
And leave the rolling universe behind;
From star to star the mental optics rove,
Measure the skies, and range the realms above.
There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,
Or with new worlds amaze th' unbounded soul.

As we move into the nineteenth century, following the Romantics, imagination becomes more important, and over the course of the next hundred years it becomes a key element in both poetry and prose. Generally, we do not think of the Brontë sisters in quite this context, but as we will see Emily at least was very conscious of this aspect of literary creation.

The Brontës were a remarkable family. The Brontë Parsonage Museum web site summarizes the family history as follows: ‘In 1820 Patrick Brontë was appointed as incumbent of Haworth, and arrived in the township with his Cornish-born wife, Maria, (they had married in 1812) and their six children. Although Haworth remained the family's home for the rest of their lives, and the moorland setting had a profound influence on the writing of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, the family history began not in Yorkshire, but in Ireland, where Patrick, the first of ten children, was born in County Down, on 17 March 1777. Driven by ambition, Patrick left his humble origins far behind and was accepted at St. John's College, Cambridge, where his original family name of Brunty was dropped in favour of the more impressive sounding 'Brontë'. The hard work and commitment which had won him a place at Cambridge carried him through several curacies, mainly in the North of England, until he arrived at Haworth. By this time Patrick Brontë was a published author of poetry and fiction, so that his children grew up accustomed to the sight of books carrying their name on the Parsonage shelves.

On 15 September 1821, Mrs. Brontë died of cancer, and her unmarried sister, Elizabeth Branwell, came to take charge of the running of the Parsonage, exchanging her comfortable home in Penzance for the harsh climate of a bleak northern township.’ She died in 1842. Patrick Brontë lived the rest of his life in the Parsonage, dying on June 7th, 1861.

Emily Brontë (1818 – 1848) was perhaps the most gifted of the family. Her only novel was Wuthering Heights (1847). In 1845, her older sister Charlotte (1816 – 1855) came across some poems by Emily, and discovered that all three surviving sisters (the third was Anne (1820 – 1849)) had written poems. They decided to collect and publish them: they appeared as Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell in 1846; 21 of the poems were by Emily (whose pseudonym was Ellis Bell). According to Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature, “A consensus of later critics believes that Emily’s verse alone reveals true poetic genius.” The book was reviewed, but only two copies were sold. One of Emily’s poems was To Imagination, and this will be our first poem of this week.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson ( 1809 – 1892) wrote many poems that related to the imagination: his poems related to the Arthurian legends are typical. Here are the first few stanzas of a long poem called The Palace of Art, written in 1830:

I built my soul a lordly pleasure-house,
Wherein at ease for aye to dwell.
I said, "O Soul, make merry and carouse,
Dear soul, for all is well."

A huge crag-platform, smooth as burnish'd brass,
I chose. The ranged ramparts bright
From level meadow-bases of deep grass
Suddenly scaled the light.

Thereon I built it firm. Of ledge or shelf
The rock rose clear, or winding stair.
My soul would live alone unto herself
In her high palace there.

And "while the world runs round and round'" I said'
"Reign thou apart, a quiet king,
Still as, while Saturn whirls' his stedfast shade
Sleeps on his luminous ring."

To which my soul made answer readily:
"Trust me, in bliss I shall abide
In this great mansion, that is built for me,
So royal-rich and wide."

Joseph Conrad (1857 – 1924) wrote, in A Personal Record (1912), “Only in man’s imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.” This is similar to a comment made by the philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952), a philosopher, psychologist, and educator. As an educator he is famous for his system of teaching through experimental observation (progressive system in education); as a philosopher he is known for the new development which he gave to James's Pragmatism. He said that the structure of reality is not fixed and immutable but dependent upon human action, which may modify the data of experience; and human action is not directed by fixed and immutable ideas, as the traditional philosophy held, but by the memory of past experience: "Given data which locate the nature of the problem, there is evoked a thought (memory) of an operation which, if put into execution, may eventuate in a situation in which the trouble or doubt evoked in the inquiry will be resolved." In 1929 he published The Quest for Certainty, and in Chapter 11 he says “Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination”.

These two remarks show how in the twentieth century the concept of imagination became not just a matter for romantic poets, but an important concept of thought in general. John Lennon (1940 – 1980) starts his lyric Imagine like this:

Imagine there's no heaven,
It's easy if you try,
No hell below us,
Above us only sky,
Imagine all the people
living for today...

Imagine there's no countries,
It isnt hard to do,
Nothing to kill or die for,
No religion too,
Imagine all the people
living life in peace.

William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) in New Poems (1938) wrote An Acre of Grass; we have already included this poem here before, but here is the second stanza:

My temptation is quiet.
Here at life’s end
Neither loose imagination,
Nor the mill of the mind
Consuming its rag and bone,
Can make the truth known.

And Robert Frost (1874 – 1963) in Tree at My Window (1928):

Tree at my window, window tree,
My sash is lowered when night comes on;
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.

Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongues talking aloud
Could be profound.

But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.

That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather.

However, the poet who most uses the concept of imagination in its twentieth century mode is probably Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955). Here is a brief extract from Wikipedia:

“Stevens' subjects are the interplay between imagination and reality, and the relation between consciousness and the world. In Stevens, "imagination" is not equivalent to consciousness or ‘reality’ to the world as it exists outside our minds. Reality is the product of the imagination as it shapes the world. Or rather — as the title of one of his late poems puts it — Stevens sees reality ‘as the activity of the most august imagination.’

Reality is an activity, not a static object, because it is constantly changing as we attempt to find imaginatively satisfying ways to perceive the world. Stevens sees the poet (who, as for Wordsworth, is qualitatively the same as other people) as continually creating and discarding cognitive depictions of the world. These cognitive depictions find their outlet and their best and final form as words; and thus Stevens can say, ‘It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self.’”

Here, for example, is his poem Men Made Out of Words:

What should we be without the sexual myth,
The human revery or poem of death?

Castratos of moon-mash -- Life consists
Of propositions about life. The human

Revery is a solitude in which
We compose these propositions, torn by dreams,

By the terrible incantations of defeats
And by the fear that defeats and dreams are one.

The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.

And The Snow Man:

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Our second poem of this week is his The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937).

One of my favorite song lyrics relates to imagination. It is A Kiss to Build a Dream On, and it was written in 1935. The song is credited to Bert Kalmar (1884 – 1947), Harry Ruby (1895 – 1974) & Oscar Hammerstein II (1895 – 1960); the credits do not distinguish who was responsible for the words and who for the music, but it is probable that Ruby was the composer; both Kalmar and Hammerstein are better known as lyricists, although both did write music as well. Kalmar began as a vaudevillian, but had to give that up following a knee injury that prevented him dancing: he took up songwriting, and created a music publishing company. Ruby began working as a pianist and song plugger for music publishers in New York. From 1917 to 1920 he too wrote songs collaborating with a number of others, including George Jessel. However, their careers took off when they met in 1920. Among their hits were Who’s Sorry Now? (1923 – this was their first big hit), I Wanna Be Loved By You (1928), and Three Little Words (1930 – their biggest hit. Bing Crosby, accompanied by the Duke Ellington orchestra, sang it in the Amos n' Andy film Check and Double Check. In 1930, they moved to Los Angeles, and were involved with writing for movies.

Here is the verse (which you don’t often see!) and the opening stanzas of A Kiss to Build a Dream On:

How am I to bear this separation?
Give me just a little hope to cling to:
Fan the flame of my imagination,
So I can dream until we meet again.

Give me a kiss to build a dream on
And my imagination will thrive upon that kiss
Sweetheart, I ask no more than this
A kiss to build a dream on

Give me a kiss before you leave me
And my imagination will feed my hungry heart
Leave me one thing before we part
A kiss to build a dream on

In 1947 Bert Kalmar died. Harry Ruby continued writing, but never had another big hit. A Composers and Lyricists Database webpage has a biography of Ruby, from which the following comes: “In 1950, the film, Three Little Words was released. It was based, loosely, on the career of Ruby and Kalmar. Even though the picture was successful, Ruby found sadness in its triumph. "Kalmar signed the contract for the movie just two days before he passed away," Ruby wrote. ‘My father, who waited for the movie of his son, counted the days and minutes for its release. He died the morning the picture opened in New York.’”

Robert William Service (1874 – 1958) has appeared here before, particularly for his ‘Yukon’ poems. Although most of the sources one finds on the web refer to him as a Canadian poet, he was in fact from England. Following the success he had with poems like The Shooting of Dan McGrew and The Cremation of Sam McGee in his early collection, Songs of a Sourdough, he decided to become a full-time writer. In 1912, having finished Rhymes of a Rolling Stone he accepted the job of war correspondent in the Balkan war. During his travels in Europe Service married a woman from Paris and purchased a villa in Brittany. In the First World War he served in an America volunteer ambulance unit and became a war correspondent for the Canadian government. Following the war he travelled and wrote two volumes of poetry and several novels. With the outbreak of the Second World War he escaped from Poland to Hollywood where he lived in exile until the end of the war and his return to France; he died in Lancieux.

In a late collection, Rhymes for my Rags (1956) he writes in the Prelude:

Because the rhymes I make for raiment
Fail to avail its meed of payment,
I fain must make my well-worn tweeds
Suffice me for tomorrow's needs--
Until my verse the public reads.

I used to go to Savile Row,
But now their prices are so high,
With royalties at all time low,
Because my books few want to buy . . .
No, I don't blame them, but that's why.

Well, anyway I'd rather fare
In tattered rags and ring my chimes
Than strut around in wealthy wear.
--So in these tough and trying times
Let me flaunt like defiant flags
The jubilation of my RAGS.

One of the poems in this late collection is Imagination, and it will be our third poem of this week.

Philip José Farmer (1918 - ) is well-known as a writer of imaginative fiction. It is scarcely surprising that a poem of his entitled Imagination appeared in America Sings Anthology of College Poetry 1949. At that time, Farmer was a part-time student at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois; he received his B.A. in 1950. I have enjoyed Farmer’s fiction for many years; The Green Odyssey (1957) was an early favorite. Here is the first stanza of his poem:

Can imagination act
Perpendicular to fact?
Can it be a kite that flies
Till the Earth, umbrella-wise,
Folds and drops away from sight?

Obviously, no article on imagination in poetry would be complete without something from Edward Estlin Cummings (1894 – 1962). Here is poem 72 from his 1958 collection 95 Poems, I shall imagine life:

i shall imagine life
is not worth dying,if
(and when)roses complain
their beauties are in vain

but though mankind persuades
itself that every weed's
a rose,roses(you feel
certain)will only smile

So there we are. The concept of imagination has grown over the last two or three centuries, and in the last one hundred years the development of science fiction from Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, to the books of Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, and William Gibson has transformed our views of alternative realities. Poetry has followed a somewhat different path, although the works of Philip José Farmer may offer a bridge. One can argue that the definitions of poetry we have been discussing here would cover the ‘alternative reality’ aspect of science fiction, but it is not easy to think of a ‘serious’ poem that really fits into the genre. Lewis Carrol’s The Hunting of the Snark perhaps fits, but that is stretching the use of the word ‘serious’ quite a bit!