William Blake Now by Higgs John

Author:Higgs, John
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orion

7

Once Only Imagin’d

Blake was born in the Age of Enlightenment, which rejected the medieval idea that our most important value was faith. Instead, reason was declared to be primary. Only reason could trump faith.

For Blake, this wasn’t going far enough. Reason was important, but it was only a small, bounded part of what the mind was capable of. Blake recognised that it was imagination, not reason, that was fundamental, because reason was only a product of the imagination. As he describes the situation, ‘What is now proved was once only imagin’d.’ We use reason to understand the world, but it only shows us a tiny part of what is out there. When we become stuck, we have to go outside of established reasoning in order to find answers. Here Blake’s position was similar to that of Albert Einstein, who said that ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.’

It’s worth stressing, however, that Blake’s understanding of imagination is different to how the word is typically understood today. If you ask someone in the twenty-first century what the word ‘imagination’ means, they will probably say that it is just making stuff up. This is not how the word used to be understood.

According to the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, there was an important difference between fantasy and imagination. Fantasy was indeed ‘just making stuff up’, he thought. It was essentially a form of mental collage – taking existing ideas and putting them together, in a way that was unrelated to the real world of time and space. You could take the idea of a horse and the idea of a horn, stick them together as a form of collage, and you had the fantasy of a unicorn in a world where no physical unicorns existed.

This was fine, as far as it goes. Fantasy could be entertaining in its own right. But it is unconnected to reality. It doesn’t change things. It doesn’t matter.

Imagination was something different. Imagination was the arrival, from the depths of consciousness, of something genuinely new. True, it might contain things that already exist, but they had now become part of something larger, and unprecedented. Coleridge invented the word ‘esemplastic’ to describe this process, in which separate elements are combined to create something entirely original. Fantasy was just the same old stuff rearranged with a healthy disregard for the real world. Imagination, in contrast, was engaging with existing stuff to produce something never seen before. This, being brand new, had the power to change the world in a way that fantasy did not. Something new now existed, and the world had to adapt around it.

Imagination had a vivid quality that fantasy lacked. In fantasy, a thought was just a thought. In deep imagination, a thought was something that you encountered. It was participatory. It was a living, vital process that you were part of. You were not separate from what you imagined, and imagination

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