"Imagination, or Reason in its most exalted mood"
(Wordsworth)
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“Imagination is eternity”
(Blake)
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Untitled, Mehrdad Rashidi
Ink on paper
Images courtesy Henry Boxer Gallery
Vicente Huidobro distinguishes between “cold reason” and that which “at the moment of the poet’s travail is in unison with the warmth of his soul.” Reason doesn’t dampen the imagination but helps to shape it, give it, we might say, not unity but coherence. Reason is opposed to the “horrible official stamp of approval,” and keeps the channels of passion and vision open as a steady esoteric current.
From a different angle, “reason” can transport “theory” to poetry, giving it a visionary rationale for its way of being, a poetics. It is popular today to insert thought back into poetry, but in Romantic poetry, thought drives and defines critique, a vision of betterment, a social agency.
Thought of this kind flattens the mental apparatus by torquing it with sensation stimulated by the density and shapeliness of poetic language, wresting it from familiarity and consolation: “thought’s torsion” (Louis Zukofsky). Reason, as the “outward bound and circumference of Energy” (Blake), brings thought to the hammering out of form. Blake, too, captures the overriding thesis of these manifestos that poetry can liberate us from narrow, destructive understanding of contemporary reality: “Imagination is eternity.”
Text by Jeffrey Robinson, from Romantic Manifestos Manifest (2024)
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