Imaging and Imagining Realities: Conceptualising Poetic Imagination in Contemporary Poetry

Zalipour, Arezou, (2007) Imaging and Imagining Realities: Conceptualising Poetic Imagination in Contemporary Poetry. In: Re-visioning Realities Through Literary Discourse. Pearson Malaysia SDN BHD, Petaling Jaya, pp. 158-176. ISBN 9789673004041

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Affiliations

Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, School of Language Studies and Linguistics

Abstract

One important function of imagination is to understand reality. Imagination and reality are inherently related and poetry is perhaps where imagination reaches its zenith of conception. In the history of Western culture, it was only with the Renaissance that imagination came to be discussed in poetry. Later, poetic imagination was revaluated and formulated by the giants of Romanticism. Close to the present, however, we do not hear much about the concept of poetic imagination as it has been taken for granted in poetry and literature. Therefore, the existing concepts, ideas and theories of poetic imagination are the scattered remnants of its Romantic glorification inherited by the contemporary poet. The account of lost notion of poetic imagination in contemporary poetry put a good deal of emphasis on a reflection of a change in the modes of representing realities in the contemporary. This
paper attempts to conceptualize the state and nature of poetic imagination in contemporary poetry to explore the different worlds that imaging and imagining of realities might capture. My focus is to elucidate the dimensions of the relation between the imagined, the imaged and the real. To do this I will look at and discuss imagination in some samples of contemporary poetry from the perspectives of Bachelard’s notion of imagination. Gaston
Bachelad’s philosophical studies of poetic image provide some insights into the current state of imagination in poetry.

Item Type:

Book Section

Keywords:

Imaging, imagining, reality, Poetic imagination, Bachelard, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, contemporary poetry

Subjects:

P Language and Literature

ID Code:

10615