IMAGINATION

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Heads of Poets
Shakespeare

Northrop Frye believed that Blake was involved in expanding the definition of imagination. In Northrop Frye on Shakespeare he speaks on the concept of imagination in his chapter on A Midsummer Night's Dream:

"In the ordinary world we apprehend with our senses and comprehend with our reason; what the poet apprehends are moods or emotions, like joy, and what he uses for comprehension is some story or character to account for the emotion: 

'Such tricks hath strong imagination,

That if it would but apprehend some joy, 

It comprehends some bringer of that joy'  

 

Theseus is here using the word 'imagination' in its common Elizabethan meaning, which we express by the word 'imaginary,' something alleged to be that isn't. In spite of himself, though, the word is taking on the more positive sense of out 'imaginative,' the sense of the creative power developed centuries later by Blake and Coleridge. So far as I can make out from the OED, this more positive sense of the word in English practically begins here." (Page 48)

Frye states that the character Hippolyta in saying, "It must be your imagination," implies that the "audience has a creative role in every play." So, using a definition  from his own mind Shakespeare has 'mended' the definition of the word imagination in Midsummer Night's Dream.

    

 From Puck's Final Speech:  

    "Gentles, do not reprehend.
 If you pardon, we will mend."

To Blake imagination was an inclusive term which had expanded to partake of an eternal dimension. His imagination included the Divine Vision and to him only imagination could make a poet. Without imagination he discerned that we live in a faint shadow of the real, eternal world. 

Annotations to Wordsworth's Poems. (E 665)

"One Power alone makes a Poet.-Imagination The Divine Vision"
...
"I see in Wordsworth the Natural Man rising up against the
Spiritual Man Continually & then he is No Poet but a Heathen
Philosopher at Enmity against all true Poetry or Inspiration"

Jerusalem, Plate 77, (E 231)

"I know of no other
Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body
& mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination.   
  Imagination the real & eternal World of which this Vegetable
Universe is but a faint shadow & in which we shall live in our
Eternal or Imaginative Bodies, when these Vegetable Mortal Bodies
are no more."

Milton, Plate 32 [35], (E 132)

"States that are not, but ah! Seem to be.

Judge then of thy Own Self: thy Eternal Lineaments explore       
What is Eternal & what Changeable? & what Annihilable!

The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself
Affection or Love becomes a State, when divided from Imagination
The Memory is a State always, & the Reason is a State
Created to be Annihilated & a new Ratio Created                  
Whatever can be Created can be Annihilated  Forms cannot"

Letters, To Trusler, (E 703)

"Why is the Bible more Entertaining & Instructive than any other book. Is it not because they are addressed to the Imagination which is Spiritual Sensation & but mediately to the Understanding or Reason Such is True Painting and such was alone valued by the Greeks & the best modern Artists. Consider what Lord Bacon says "Sense sends over to Imagination before Reason have judged & Reason sends over to Imagination before the Decree can be acted." See Advancemt of Learning Part 2 P 47 of first Edition But I am happy to find a Great Majority of Fellow Mortals who can Elucidate My Visions & Particularly they have been Elucidated by Children who have taken a greater delight in contemplating my Pictures than I even hoped. Neither Youth nor Childhood is Folly or Incapacity Some Children are Fools & so are some Old Men. But There is a vast Majority on the side of Imagination or Spiritual Sensation"

Letters, to Cumberland, (E 783)

"I have been very near the Gates of Death & have returned very weak & an Old Man feeble & tottering, but not in Spirit & Life not in The Real Man The Imagination which Liveth for Ever. In that I am stronger & stronger as this Foolish Body decays."

In The Educated Imagination Northrop Frye elicidated the relationship between science and imagination:

“Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the languages of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music.”

MENTAL FIGHT

First posted June 2016 

On page 26 of Fearful Symmetry, Frye writes:

"It appears then, then, that there are not only two worlds, but three: the world of vision, the world of sight and the world of memory: the world we create, the world we live in and the world we run away to. The world of memory is an unreal world of reflection and abstract ideas; the world of sight is the potentially real world of  subjects and objects; the world of vision is the world of creators and creatures. In the world  of memory we see nothing; in the world of sight we see what we have to see; in the world of vision we see what we want to see. There are not three different worlds, as in the religions which speak of a heaven and hell in addition to ordinary life; they are the egocentric, the ordinary and the visionary ways of looking at the same world."

British Museum
Illustrations to Young's Night Thoughts

The world of vision, of creator and creatures, is Blake's world of Imagination; Jung's of Intuition. This is the mental world of which Blake writes and in which he lives. He takes up the sword for mental fight and never puts it down.

Blake is the teacher par excellence who presents his subject, asks his students to incorporate an understanding of it into their own thinking and then gives them opportunities to practice the paradigm of acting which he hopes to teach. The student has not learned anything experientially until he incorporates an altered behavior into his range of options.

An aspect of becoming aware of the imaginative dimension in what goes on in the world around us, is finding patterns which enable us to fit together diverse pieces of our experience. If we recognize similar patterns in, for example religion and science, we expand our ability to assimilate a cohesive view rather than multiple limited views. If we look through a different window of perception, if we alter our preconceived assumptions, or back away form emotional involvement, the whole picture may begin to become visible.

When I was trying to catch site of a comet in the sky, I simply couldn't see it although I knew its location and that it was visible to the naked eye. I was trying to focus my eyes as I would when looking for detail in a picture. When I instead gave up on seeing the comet and looked at the whole sky, the faint light of the comet came into view. Our eyes are actually constructed with special receptors to see faint light as well as receptors for bright light. Until I 'turned off' the receptors for bright light, the receptors for dim light couldn't make the comet visible.

Frye and Blake are telling us that we have receptors for peering into the mental world of vision or imagination. But if our focus of attention is occupied with sensation, emotion or rationalization, we miss the fainter light of intuition.      

Milton, Plate 1, (E 95)
"I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land."

A Vision of The Last Judgment, (E 555)
                   For the Year 1810
        Additions to Blakes Catalogue of Pictures &c 
"This world of Imagination is the World of
Eternity it is the Divine bosom into which we shall all go after
the death of the Vegetated body   This World of Imagination is
Infinite & Eternal whereas the world of Generation or Vegetation
is Finite & Temporal    There Exist
in that Eternal World the Permanent Realities of Every Thing
which we see are reflected in this Vegetable Glass of Nature
     All Things are comprehended in their Eternal Forms in the
Divine body of the Saviour the True Vine of Eternity
The Human Imagination who appeard to Me as Coming to Judgment.
among his Saints & throwing off the Temporal that the Eternal
might be Establishd. around him were seen the Images of
Existences according to a certain order suited to my Imaginative Eye 
     Here follows the description of the Picture" 

BLAKE & DIOGENES

First posted Sept 2016

 Isaiah 20

[1] In the year that Tartan came unto Ashdod, (when Sargon the king of Assyria sent him,) and fought against Ashdod, and took it;
[2] At the same time spake the LORD by Isaiah the son of Amoz, saying, Go and loose the sackcloth from off thy loins, and put off thy shoe from thy foot. And he did so, walking naked and barefoot.
[3] And the LORD said, Like as my servant Isaiah hath walked naked and barefoot three years for a sign and wonder upon Egypt and upon Ethiopia;
[4] So shall the king of Assyria lead away the Egyptians prisoners, and the Ethiopians captives, young and old, naked and barefoot, even with their buttocks uncovered, to the shame of Egypt.
[5] And they shall be afraid and ashamed of Ethiopia their expectation, and of Egypt their glory.
[6] And the inhabitant of this isle shall say in that day, Behold, such is our expectation, whither we flee for help to be delivered from the king of Assyria: and how shall we escape?

 Marriage of Heaven and Hell

"I also asked Isaiah what made him go naked and barefoot three
years? he answerd, the same that made our friend Diogenes the
Grecian."

 Blake's Memorable Fancy on Plates 12 and 13 of Marriage of Heaven and Hell uses the Hebrew prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel to emphasize the point that a conventional mindset that follows the popular mores fails to understand the voice of prophecy. Isaiah and Ezekiel developed their ability to listen to the voice that spoke from within. To convey the message they received, they occasionally behaved in ways which startled their contemporaries. They sought to change their societies by demonstrating what were the consequences of continuing in behaviors which were leading to destruction. Blake further emphasized the technique of shocking people out of habitual nonproductive attitudes by indicating that Isaiah attributed his going naked and barefoot for three years to the influence of Diogenes who had practiced the same kinds of outrageous stunts to his Greek contemporaries.

Blake was not averse to looking to the Greek philosophy of Diogenes to reinforce his principle that man could not depend upon only data from his senses to interpret his environment and experience. Isaiah, Ezekiel and Diogenes risked being outcast from their societies in order to encourage men to have their intellect and courage opened to perceiving the limitations of conventional thinking. In writing Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake was engaging in similar strategies to those used by his heroes. He was presenting his ideas in forms and statements which were unacceptable to his public. He risked the ridicule of the critics and the indifference of potential readers by writing poetry which seemed ridiculous on the surface, and making images which appeared unpolished and obscure to current taste.

Fitzwilliam Museum
Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Plate 21

We can judge that Blake had an affinity toward Diogenes from the label cynic which is often attached to the name of the fourth century BC philosopher. As a young man Blake wrote An Island in the Moon: satirical observations on the set of people with whom he was acquainted. He gave himself the name Quid the Cynic. The Greek word cynic was derived from a word meaning dog-like, and Diogenes was thought of as a dog by his critics. Perhaps the unexpected pictures of dogs in Blake's images is meant to point out his viewing whatever situation was being illustrated from a cynical perspective which he shared with Diogenes.

Marriage of Heaven and Hell, PLATE 12, (E 38)
                    "A Memorable Fancy.                            
   The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked
them how they dared so roundly to assert. that God spake to them; 
and  whether they did not think at the time, that they would be 
misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.
   Isaiah answer'd. I saw no God. nor heard any, in a finite
organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in
every thing, and as  I was then perswaded. & remain confirm'd;
that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared
not for consequences but  wrote.
   Then I asked: does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so?
   He replied.  All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination
this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable
of a firm perswasion of any thing.
   Then Ezekiel said. The philosophy of the east taught the first 
principles of human perception     some nations held one
principle for  the origin & some another, we of Israel taught
that the Poetic Genius (as  you now call it) was the first
principle and all the others merely  derivative, which was the
cause of our despising the Priests & Philosophers  of other
countries, and prophecying that all Gods [PL 13] would at last be
proved. to originate in ours & to be the tributaries of the
Poetic  Genius, it was this. that our great poet King David
desired so fervently  & invokes so patheticly, saying by this he
conquers enemies & governs kingdoms; and we so loved our God.
that we cursed in his name all  the deities of surrounding
nations, and asserted that they had rebelled; from these opinions
the vulgar came to think that all nations would at last be
subject to the jews.
   This said he, like all firm perswasions, is come to pass, for all 
nations believe the jews code and worship the jews god, and what
greater subjection can be
   I heard this with some wonder, & must confess my own
conviction.  After dinner I ask'd Isaiah to favour the world with
his lost works, he said none of equal value was lost.  Ezekiel
said the same of his.
   I also asked Isaiah what made him go naked and barefoot three
years? he answerd, the same that made our friend Diogenes the
Grecian.
   I then asked Ezekiel. why he eat dung, & lay so long on his
right  & left side? he answerd. the desire of raising other men
into a  perception of the infinite this the North American tribes
practise. & is he honest who resists his genius or conscience.
only for the sake of present  ease or gratification?"