The Authority of Imagination: Making the Ideal Real
Location
Beaman A&B
Presentation Type
Presentation
Start Date
26-10-2010 2:00 PM
Description
Plato’s ideal society, as reflected in his conception of “The Republic” would not have poets, as they were not truthsayers. And in the Fifth Canto of The Inferno, Dante represents poetry or at least literature as the gateway to hell for its power to cause readers to lose sight of communal morality in a sea of personal emotion. By contrast, in his work, “The Defense of Poesie,” Sir Philip Sydney argues for the superiority of poetry over the disciplines of history and philosophy because of the ability of the imagination to create, make real, or bring to life things which cannot be experienced, mentioning especially the ability to imagine ideal states of being. Sydney’s argument has a particularly English angle to it because of the moral authority the English literary tradition had long given to imaginative literature dating all the way back to the story of the old English poet Caedmon and pointing ahead to modern Science fiction.
In the works of two writers of English literature this authority of the imagination can especially be seen: Thomas Malory who in his Morte D’Arthur created against the backdrop of the horrors of civil war a model for ideal chivalric behavior; and John Milton who created not just a world but humanity itself in its first state of created perfection, using a fallen mind to envision its own pre-fallen state. Of modern writers, the one who comes closest to tackling a task of the magnitude of Milton’s is Ursula Le Guin in her work The Left Hand of Darkness, in which she creates a truly androgynous race of beings. In each case, the most effective aspect of these authors’ creations is in the working out of their ideas within the lives and interactions of a community. While it could be, and has been argued, the imagining of these three writers fails, the power of their works argues for the authority of the imagination to create not just works of art but ideas which live beyond the worlds for which they were created.
Recommended Citation
Monteverde, Maggie, "The Authority of Imagination: Making the Ideal Real" (2010). Humanities Symposium. 23.
https://repository.belmont.edu/humanities_symposium/2010/2010/23
The Authority of Imagination: Making the Ideal Real
Beaman A&B
Plato’s ideal society, as reflected in his conception of “The Republic” would not have poets, as they were not truthsayers. And in the Fifth Canto of The Inferno, Dante represents poetry or at least literature as the gateway to hell for its power to cause readers to lose sight of communal morality in a sea of personal emotion. By contrast, in his work, “The Defense of Poesie,” Sir Philip Sydney argues for the superiority of poetry over the disciplines of history and philosophy because of the ability of the imagination to create, make real, or bring to life things which cannot be experienced, mentioning especially the ability to imagine ideal states of being. Sydney’s argument has a particularly English angle to it because of the moral authority the English literary tradition had long given to imaginative literature dating all the way back to the story of the old English poet Caedmon and pointing ahead to modern Science fiction.
In the works of two writers of English literature this authority of the imagination can especially be seen: Thomas Malory who in his Morte D’Arthur created against the backdrop of the horrors of civil war a model for ideal chivalric behavior; and John Milton who created not just a world but humanity itself in its first state of created perfection, using a fallen mind to envision its own pre-fallen state. Of modern writers, the one who comes closest to tackling a task of the magnitude of Milton’s is Ursula Le Guin in her work The Left Hand of Darkness, in which she creates a truly androgynous race of beings. In each case, the most effective aspect of these authors’ creations is in the working out of their ideas within the lives and interactions of a community. While it could be, and has been argued, the imagining of these three writers fails, the power of their works argues for the authority of the imagination to create not just works of art but ideas which live beyond the worlds for which they were created.
Comments
Convo: AL