The Life of Milton
Lives of the English Poets (1779–81)
“Order is the pleasure of the reason; but disorder is the delight of the imagination.”
Si l'ordre est le plaisir de la raison, le désordre est le délice de l'imagination.
Le soulier de satin: ou, Le pire n'est pas toujours sûr (Paris: Gallimard, [1929] 1936) vol. 1, p. 12; John O'Connor (trans.) The Satin Slipper (London: Sheed & Ward, 1931) p. xxiii.
The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value
Context: The best definition of true imagination is that it is the sum of our faculties. Poetry is the scholar's art. The acute intelligence of the imagination, the illimitable resources of its memory, its power to possess the moment it perceives — if we were speaking of light itself, and thinking of the relationship between objects and light, no further demonstration would be necessary... What light requires a day to do, and by day I mean a kind of Biblical revolution of time, the imagination does in the twinkling of an eye. It colors, increases, brings to a beginning and end, invents languages, crushes men, and, for that matter, gods in its hands, it says to women more than it is possible to say, it rescues all of us from what we have called absolute fact...
“Imagination may be called the dynamic force in art.”
Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)
Context: Imagination... implies originality. It results in a reflection... of the working mind of the designer.... Imagination may be called the dynamic force in art.... It is the quality which distinguishes the artistic from the photographic representation of nature.
"Definitions of Poetry" (1811).
Context: Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication, of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.
quoted by Albert Frederick Calvert, in Goya; an account of his life and works; publisher London J. Lane, 1908; as quoted in Francisco Goya, Hugh Stokes, Herbert Jenkins Limited Publishers, London, 1914, pp. 355-377
Goya wrote this inscription upon a later copy of the etching-plate Capricho no. 43
1790s
"Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare", Rehabilitations and Other Essays (1939)
On how poetry has given him insight into his sexuality in “‘Every poem is political’: Danez Smith, the YouTube star shaking up poetry” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/28/danez-smith-interview-poetry-dont-call-us-dead-dear-white-america in The Guardian (2018 Jan 28)
