Quotes About Imagination

People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.

Poetry is the scholar's art.

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

unreal things have a reality of their own, in poetry as elsewhere.

The imagination is man's power over nature.

We say God and the imagination are one . . . How high that highest candle lights the dark.

They said"You have a blue guitar You do not play things as they are". The man replied,"things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar".

The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination. p. 919

Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination.

The villages slept as the capable man went down, Time swished on the village clocks and dreams were alive, The enormous gongs gave edges to their sounds, As the rider, no chevalere and poorly dressed, Impatient of the bells and midnight forms, Rode over the picket docks, rode down the road, And, capable, created in his mind, Eventual victor, out of the martyr's bones, The ultimate elegance: the imagined land.

Aún no habías nacido cuando los árboles eran cristal ni has nacido ahora, en esta vigilia dentro de un sueño.

They said, "You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are." The man replied, "Things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar.

The man bent over his guitar, A shearsman of sorts. The day was green. They said, "You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are." The man replied, "Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar." And they said then, "But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, A tune upon the blue guitar Of things exactly as they are.

Poets are never lonely even when they pretend to be.

Another Weeping Woman Pour the unhappiness out From your too bitter heart, Which grieving will not sweeten. Poison grows in this dark. It is in the water of tears Its black blooms rise. The magnificent cause of being, The imagination, the one reality In this imagined world Leaves you With him for whom no phantasy moves, And you are pierced by a death.

Her green mind made the world around her green.

To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.

It matters, because everything we say Of the past is description without place, a cast Of the imagination, made in sound; And because what we say of the future must portend, Be alive with its own seemings, seeming to be Like rubies reddened by rubies reddening.

He thought often of the land from which he came, How that whole country was a melon, pink If seen rightly and yet a possible red.

We cannot look at the past or the future except by means of the imagination but again the imagination of backward glances is one thing and the imagination of looks ahead something else. Even the psychologists concede this present particular, for, with them, memory involves a reproductive power, and looks ahead involve a creative power: the power of our expectations.

All Things Imagined Are of Earth Compact… All things imagined are of earth compact, Strange beast and bird, strange creatures all; Strange minds of men, unwilling slaves to fact: Struggling with desperate clouds, they still proclaim The rushing pearl, the whirling black, Clearly, in well-remembered word and name. Even the dead, when they return, return Not as those dead, concealed away; But their old persons move again, and burn.

Dwelling always in an in-between realm, between eras of the imagination, there exists a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagined are one. — Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, October 1, 1997)

To be at the end of fact is not to be at the beginning of the imagination but it is to be at the end of both.