“I believe that living is an act of creativity and that, at certain moments in our lives, our creative imaginations are more conspicuously demanded than at others. At certain moments, the need to decide upon the story of our own lives becomes particularly pressing—when we choose a mate, for example … every marriage [is] a narrative construct—or two narrative constructs. In unhappy marriages, I see two versions of reality rather than two people in conflict. I see a struggle for imaginative dominance going on. Happy marriages seem to me those in which the two partners agree on the scenario they are enacting.”

—Phyllis Rose, from Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages

Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave
A paradise for a sect; the savage, too,
From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep
Guesses at Heaven: pity these have not
Trac’d upon vellum or wild Indian leaf
The shadows of melodious utterance.
But bare of laurel they live, dream, and die;
For Poesy alone can tell her dreams,
With the fine spell of words can save
Imagination from the sable charm
And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say,
‘Thou art no Poet; may’st not tell thy dreams?’
Since every man whose soul is not a clod
Hath visions, and would speak, if he had lov’d
And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.
Whether the dream now purposed to rehearse
Be Poet’s or Fanatic’s will be known
When this warm scribe, my hand, is in the grave.

—John Keats, “The Fall of Hyperion,” 1819

“One can make one’s dream real—as Moneta does—by making others dream it. The reality of the imagination, the reality of Adam’s dream, is constituted by the audience for that dream: the reality of the dream is not constructed by the dreamer, who knows that it is only a dream. Rather, the reality of the dream is constructed by the transgressive reading of the dream’s audience.”

—Andrew Bennett, “The ‘Hyperion’ Poems,” 1994

I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love; they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty… . The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream—he awoke and found it truth.
John Keats, in a letter to Benjamin Bailey, November 22nd, 1817

A Noiseless Patient Spider

by Walt Whitman

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. In all matters of discovery and invention, even of those that appertain to the imagination, we are continually reminded of the story of Columbus and his egg. Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, introduction

“… at the moment when the made thing is only an idea or image or belief (with no verbal or material extension), insofar as it has any reality at all, it will only have reality in the mind of the embodied imaginer who is at that moment in the act of imagining or believing it. It will have no reality for anyone outside the boundaries of the believer’s body. It is crucial to notice here that even for the imaginer it has ‘less reality’ than do the contents of his or her perception.”

—Elaine Scarry, from The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, 1985. p. 147

But Poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar: it reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it coexists. The great secret of morals is Love: or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. 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 pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting up on 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 for ever craves fresh food.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, from A Defense of Poetry, 1840
The imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation int he infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects are essentially fixed and dead.
Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word choice. But equally with the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from Biographia Literaria, 1817