1. 1 year ago 

   Very Important Quotes of Very Important Poets (and commentary by me :))

   “The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them. The imagination is the mechanism by which we consciously conceptualize the normal patterns of life, while reason is the way we consciously conceptualize these patterns.”—-Wallace Stevens

   …and a poem by William Butler Yeats:

   The Choice

   The intellect of man is forced to choose
   perfection of the life, or of the work,
   And if it take the second must refuse
   A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
   When all that story’s finished, what’s the news?
   In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
   That old perplexity an empty purse,
   Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.

   The overarching theme that is paralleled in the poetry of Yeats and in the philosophy of Stevens seems to me to be one of an apparent rift between that of the imagination and that of reason. In Breton’s “Manifesto of Surrealism,” it is hypothesized that around the age of 20,one will allow the imagination to take a backseat to the seeming “pitfalls” of the human condition and will surrender the creative need for innovation for a mere life of monotony. While Breton seemed to exaggerate the “settling” one might do in the expanse of their “lifetime,” it would still seem that this theme is pervasive throughout literature spanning from the Victorians (probably earlier) and now. The question that asks :how does one’s perspective of the human condition actually infiltrate their waking reality? <A little sidenote on perspective: each individual has their own opinion of how a coffee should taste, so much so that entire companies can market X amount of coffee types and will appeal to X amount of people, so one’s perspective has everything to do with how they see everything in their lives, subtle to vast. (ie: Rain makes me happy, while the sound may make others want to cry <—reactions due to conditioning)> So, if the imagination is the medium through which we conceptualize our reality and reason is only the way we consciously conceptualize this pattern, it would seem to me to theorize that the conscious state of imagination is one of false identification (like seeing a beautiful pattern and color and good feelingness and slapping the label “rose” onto it). The experience comes before the pattern processing that we feel must be accomplished in order to make sense of our reality.

   In any case, maybe what we need to do to inspire an imaginative revolution is try to allow our conscious “making-senseness” of reality to take a backseat to immediate experience. Allow new experiences to break out of old patterns and withhold the constant urge to label things.
   

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