Poetic imagination

A form of language which is proper to imaginative and creative discourse. It is through such discourse, at once universally and perennially the language of man's spiritual destiny, that the needs of the human spirit are met so as to allow man to reach beyond the confines of a merely quantitative order of things. Poetry is one such language of analogy whose terms establish relationships of a mental character, and within an immaterial order that does not exist for the positivist mentality. By means of analogical and symbolic thinking, by mediating images and the play of correspondences and unusual associations, and by virtue of a language through which is transmitted the very rhythm of being, the poet clothes himself in a surreality to which the scientific mode of thought cannot aspire.

Poetry may thus be experienced as a mode of thought, or kind of consciousness, in whose expression mythological themes, images, ideas, languages and music are indivisible. True poetry has the power of transforming consciousness itself by presenting icons, images of forms only partially and superficially realized in ordinary life. The beauty of their truths rectifies and informs the formless reality (or unreality) of the everyday world. The recognition of such beauty is immediate and intuitive, but it is the response of a higher faculty than that of discursive reason.

Knowledge of the symbolic language of tradition is essentially a kind of learning, but it is the learning of the imagination, not of the merely conceptual mind. It is the learning of poets and of symbolic art. From this perspective the created world is, at every level, a manifestation of anterior causes. Symbolic art is thus the natural language of such thought. Thus an image of apparent simplicity may contain a resonance that sets into vibration planes of reality and consciousness other than those of the sensible world. The language of symbolic analogy is only possible upon the assumption that these multiple planes exist. Those for whom the material world is the only plane of the real are unable to understand that the symbol (and poetry in the full sense of symbolic discourse by analogy) has as its primary purpose the evocation of one plane in terms of another.

All poets, and all readers of poetry who pass beyond the writing or reading of poetry for merely descriptive purposes, cross a frontier from the personal world into the world of those experiences which lie beyond the reach of everyday consciousness, but to which, in moments of greatest vision, of expanded consciousness, may be occasionally glimpsed. Those poets for whom imagination is meaningful endeavour to embody insights from subtler planes into an imagery of perfect correspondence in which thought and image are one (simple), perfectly realized in the image (sensuous) and felt as living experience (passionate), and not merely conceptually comprehended. In contrast to the analytic distinctions of philosophy, such poetry brings together, creating wholes and harmonies in a synthesis that may be experienced. The poem is thus able to create in the reader a sense of the wholeness and harmony its symbols and its rhythmic unity both realize and affirm. It is impossible to experience such an interior and archetypal vision without at the same time experiencing it qualitatively, as an epiphany of knowledge for which such images are the vehicles.

In western thinking spiritual knowledge is embodied and transmitted principally within that tradition which descended from Orphism to Plato, to the neo-Platonists and the Gnostic sects, and their successors both within Christendom and without it. It is the language of alchemy and the kabbalah, and of allied ways of thought. In Hinduism, the kavi is both poet and seer, one who reveals knowledge from his own insight; and the rishis added to this a knowledge of the divine, producing hymns revealing eternal truths which they grasped intuitively.