Poetry and the Imagination

Poetry and imagination are joined at the imaging.  --Sheila Packa

I imagine that yes is the only living thing.  --e. e. cummings

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.  --John Keats

What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth."  --John Keats

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are, the more necessary it is to be plain. --Samuel Taylor Coleridge

People can die of mere imagination.  --Geoffrey Chaucer

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.  --Percy Bysshe Shelley

We say God and the imagination are one… How high that highest candle lights the dark.
 --Wallace Stevens

All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.  --Wislawa Szymborska

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.
  --Denis Diderot

For women . . . poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we can predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
  Audre Lorde

Do you know how poetry started? I always think that it started when a cave boy came running back to the cave, through the tall grass, shouting as he ran, “Wolf, wolf,” and there was no wolf. His baboon-like parents, great sticklers for the truth, gave him a hiding, no doubt, but poetry had been born—the tall story had been born in the tall grass.
  Vladimir Nabokov

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
  Carl Sandburg
 
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. --Sylvia Plath.

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