The Nature of Imagination in British Poetry - Article Example

Compare and differentiate the nature of the imagination in "Tintern Abbey" by William Wordsworth and "Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge Wordsworth and Coleridge, as individuals, were two of the most important influences on the philosophical tenets and aesthetic sensibilities of the Romantic movement. Together, they published one of its most important works, Lyrical Ballads. Yet, despite this firm connection, it cannot be said that their vision of the Romantic (and of one of the concepts at its heart: the imagination) were the same; in fact, the beliefs of each poet on what precisely Romantic poetry was are quite different. Furthermore it seems unlikely that the articulation of these differences could be more marked that in Coleridges “Kubla Khan”, and Wordsworths “Tintern Abbey”, two poems that are as different in tone, subject matter, and treatment that it seems possible for two poems to be. “Kubla Khan” is an elaborate and sensual adventure, it is fantastical and a phonic treat, conjuring amazing, startling images in the minds eye and enacting this creation through the medium of sybaritic, mesmerising poetry. “Tintern Abbey”, on the other hand, written as it is in blank verse, is more austere and more consciously philosophical. Its dominant mode is not that of the image, but of thought, its rhythm more steady. These differences, albeit whilst they mask some similarities, are indicative of Wordsworth and Coleridges divergent understanding of the nature of the imagination. For a large part of the critical history of “Kubla Khan”, the poem has been considered as something slight, when it was published it was considered nothing more interesting that a nonsense poem. This reading is certainly a mistake and one made, I imagine, because of a misunderstanding of how to read the poem. It cannot be read, or at least to understand its significance it should not be read, on an ordinary level, for its word by word, phrase by phrase significances. Rather the very motion of the poem, its exaltation in creation is its sense; the poems means of creation is equal to what is created. In other words, the meaning of this imaginative poem, a poem that the imagination has slaved long over, is imagination itself. If we see the imagination at work as that which is represented in the poem, then we can also decipher precisely what the nature of imagination is in Coleridges conception. For example, in the very first stanza we see Kubla Khan “decree” his “stately pleasure dome” (2). Note that he decrees it, he does not decree that it be built. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, its construction begins: “So twice five miles of fertile ground / With walls and towers were girdled round/And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills.” (6-8) Notice that by using the passive voice (the towers were girdled round, there were gardens) Coleridge avoids any question of how the pleasure dome was built. It arises out of the earth as if a spontaneous creation, without the work of hands; indeed, it arises out of the earth as suddenly and as complete as its image has arisen from Coleridges imagination. Whats more, whilst the creation of the imaginative object is spontaneous and does not require the work of hands, it is also seems to arise from the earth itself. As we will see to also be the case in Wordsworths poem, the landscape takes an important role in the functioning of the imagination. In “Kubla Khan” the whole world seems to be at work (again spontaneously) in the creation of the imaginative object, “As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, / A mighty fountain momently forced.” (18-19) Not only is the landscape personified here (it is as if it is “breathing” with “pants”) the image is also sexualized; the panting and the forcing forth of the “sacred river” (24) mirrors both the act of sex and the act of birth. The whole sensuous melange seems to mark the act of the imagination as procreation– and, whats more, a procreation that is begot upon itself. Once the act of creation has begun, once it has been “decreed”, the imagination runs upon itself, and is created by itself. At line 37 the poem makes a definite change, a shift of tone and style. Whereas the first thirty-six lines had been full of luxurious imagery, sensuous sounds and images, the following eighteen are much more bare, more stark, more cold. The first four are the simple: A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on the dulcimer she played. (37-40) There is not extravagant description here, no elaborate simile (as the water of the river was like “chaffy grain beneath the threshers flail” (22)) , the sentence structure is simple and the repetition of the word dulcimer seems to draw attention to the fact that it the quartet of lines is purposefully lacking in linguistic artifice. This section of the poem is a step away from the imaginations act of creation, with all its voluptuous fury, and considers how imagination can be represented through poetry. Notice the dominant motifs now are audible (the damsels “dulcimer”, the “symphony and song”), whereas before the force of the poem was very much visual. The poetic voice says: Could I revive within me Her symphony and song... I would build that dome in air. (41-2, 45) This seems to suggest that there needs to be a synthesis, of the heat of imagination, and the coolness of poetry so as to create the “dome”, which is representative of the poetic object. In the final passages of the poem there is a decidedly religious tone; one that seems a little strange given the explicitly pagan nature of the subject matter hitherto. But the religious aspect of the imagination has always been implicit in the earlier stanzas, the pleasure dome was described as “A savage place!...holy and enchanted” (14). There seems to be a strange confluence of meaning here – can a place be both “savage” and “holy”? Coleridge seems to be marking out a place for the imagination in a religious context, one that he returns to in the later parts of his poem. “Beware! Beware!” (49), the poet says people should shout at the suggestion that he recreate “that dome in air”. They should attempt to protect him: Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed And drunk the milk of paradise. (51-54) By consuming the combination of “honey-dew” and the “milk of paradise” the poetic voice seems to be comparing himself to the Gods (who might sup on such ambrosial goodness), and therefore surely the cries of “beware” are to protect him from hubris or a belief that he is a great as Gods. Imagination and its expression through poetry, Coleridge seems to suggest, can produce in the creator a quality of godliness. The vision of the imagination in Wordsworths “Tintern Abbey” is quite distinctly different. Whereas “Kubla Khan” was extravagant, grandiose and fantastical, “Tintern Abbey” concerns itself with more seemingly ordinary matters: the poetic voices return to the hillside and his thoughts on the return. Whereas for Coleridge the function of the imagination was to produced wide vistas and extraordinary sights, to create the remarkable and lay it before his reader; Wordsworths understanding of the term imagination is much more concerned with finding the remarkable in the mundane. However, as in “Kubla Khan”, the landscape plays a large part in the operation of the imaginative faculty. In the more extravagant poem the landscape seemed to have a double function; it was created by the imagination and, in that act of creation, seemed to feed off its own creative energy, producing more and more sumptuous linguistic play. In “Tintern Abbey”, however the landscape is already very much in existence before the poet comes to it, the poet is reacting to the “steep and lofty cliffs that he has been retuning to”. Indeed, it is much more the case that it is the landscape that has worked upon him; it has given him a “gift” - “To them I may have owed another gift, / Of aspect more sublime...” (36-7) They have given him an “aspect” or a way of seeing that is more than the world he is part of when he is absented from the hills and dales near the Abbey. So much so, in fact, that when he is absent from their beauty, he still sees them, “As is a landscape to a blind mans eye” (24), they are alive forever in his imagination. Whereas Coleridge saw imagination as a procreative process, then, Wordsworth sees it more as an ability to react, to see. However, it is certainly not true that Wordsworth does not envision any active role for the poet in the nature of the imagination; that he is simply someone who is subjected to nature. Indeed, as the first twenty lines of the poem show, he is very much working upon the landscape, forming it for his own ends. He looks on the cottages grounds, “...with their unripe fruits, / Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves / Mid groves and copses...” (12-14). Here, just as in “Kubla Khan”, albeit without the same dramatic bombast, the landscape is personified; the fruits are able to lose themselves. Similarly, the “little lines / Of sportive wood run wild.” (15-16); the wood is sportive (a human attribute) and the “running wild” could represent both an active action (as children run wild) or passive (like weeds in a garden run wild). Although not imbuing the landscape with the same genitive powers as Coleridge, we do see that Wordsworths notion of imagination is not simply passive. He is actively making the landscape come alive. However, this artistic intervention on the part of the poet, does not necessarily suggest that Wordsworth, like Coleridge, considers the poet some magician or God, who creates as is his will through the power of his poetry. Rather, it seems that this artistic addition to the countryside on which he stands is analytical. Imagination has given him “...an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, / We see into the life of things” (47-49). The landscape, which when seen by another may have been dead earth, is given – in Wordsworths poetic conception – a life, not one that is added by Wordsworth, but one which already adheres within the landscape, and was merely awaiting the power of the poets imagination to bring it out. As such, imagination, for Wordsworth is still a question of seeing, of using the eye – but in a slightly different way. One that accepts that imaginative seeing (along with all the other senses) is a matter of a synthesis between poet and world “Of eye, and ear – both what they half create, / And what perceive...” (106-7) There is another dimension to the imagination, and one that Coleridges poem touched on with his implicit suggestion that to use the imagination will somehow anger the Gods. Wordsworth poem sees it in a less classical conception; his, perhaps, could be said to have more of an implicit Christian bias. It emerges in the section of “Tintern Abbey” after line 111, when the poetic voice begins to address “my dearest friend” (115) – who many critics believe to be Wordsworths sister, Dorothy. He detects in her a similarity to himself earlier in his life, “in thy voice I catch / The language of my former heat...” (116-7) This earlier incarnation seemed to be entirely passive in the face of nature, that applied no thought to the senses he received, who felt: ...a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, nor any interested Unborrowed from the eye... (80-3) To be able to feel this love is represented as something purer than coming to the wonders of nature with the preconceptions of a poet already in place. For this is how Wordsworth used to come to nature, not going towards the thing he has learnt to love; but merely to escape an uglier life. The love he received, then, was purely proffered by nature to a man running away: “...more like a man / Flying from something that he dreads, than one / Who sought the thing he loved.” (71-2) It strikes one that the way Wordsworth represents nature without the power of imagination applied, as simple and single and there, has a touch of the pre-lapsarian about it. He sees his sister as an innocent Eve, walking on a “solitary walk” (135), in the “misty mountain-winds” of something close to an edenic paradise. Only such a concourse with nature allows one to be free of “evil tongues” (128); “sneers of selfish men” (129); “the dreary intercourse of daily life” (131). The final indignity seems, in Wordsworth poem, to be the worst. Although he admires the imagination, and the imaginative sensibility within himself, he realises that it is something of the “dreary intercourse of daily life” and that to be able to be in touch with nature in a primal way, without the embellishments of poetry, is perhaps the best life of all. Whats more, it is somehow holy, for the poetic voice calls himself a “worshipper of Nature” (152) and bends his knee in service to it with “holier love.” (155) Whilst “Kubla Khan” and “Tintern Abbey” both place the imagination at the very centre of their poetical experience, they have very different notions of what the imagination is. Coleridge suggests that the imagination should create the fantastical, and that the imagination feeds on itself in a frenzied creative motion. Poetry is the song by which imagination can manifest itself in the world, and in that manifestation the poet is given the power of the God. Wordsworth, on the other hand, considers the operation of the imagination to be a kind of concourse with nature. It is, in part, creative, but mostly it enables the synthesis of experience and the primacy of nature; it is an analytical method of seeing into natures truth. Although Wordsworth also sees the imagination as holy, unlike Coleridge he does not see it as raising the poet up to a god-like state. Rather, the poet is fallen man, coming to nature with guilt, and trying to understand it the best he can. Works Cited Coleridge, S.T. The Complete Poems. London: Penguin, 1997. Wordsworth, W. The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford Press, 2000. Read More