Bret van den Brink@BretVDB
“In Wordsworth’s case, so M.H. Abrams observes, [the imagination] ‘plays a role equivalent to that of the Redeemer in Milton’s providential plot’ It is a Christ-like capacity of redemption and reconciliation, one which mimes God’s own creative power. Like one who receives the Holy Spirit, the artist, inspired by this divine capability in his breast, feels a sacred charge to communicate it to his fellow creatures. It is by virtue of this power that we can project ourselves into the emotional interior of others, so that the imagination is deeply bound up with love. It is the ruin of the Kantian distinction between the moral and aesthetic, since virtuous conduct is founded on fellow feeling, and fellow feeling flows from imaginative sympathy. For the Shelley of A Defence of Poetry, the imagination is a form of sacrificial self-dispossession, and as such a riposte to possessive egoism. This is one of several senses in which it figures as a political force. There is a centrifugal motion about it which carries us out of our own purblind existence and allows us to recreate the experience of being something or someone else. If it lies at the core of the self, it is a decentring of it.”
—Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God
