Discuss how Wordsworth gives importance to imagination

Wordsworth gives importance to imagination : Wordsworth associates imagination with the creative power or the poetic principle. He selects incidents from humble and rustic life for the themes of his poetry. He throws over them a colouring of imagination to make them appear in an unusual light.

Wordsworth gives importance to imagination

Imagination is thus a transforming power. It has the ability to change the usual and the ordinary in an unusual and uncommon way. Poetry is a modified ‘image of man and nature’. The poet is able to impart ‘the glory and freshness of a dream’ to ordinary things of nature. He can present in his poetry the light that never was on land and sea.

He is able to do so through the creative faculty of imagination. It is thus an active power. The poet is not a passive reflector of the images formed from nature.

Wordsworth holds that the poet is a man who not only feels strongly but also thinks long and deeply. He is able to treat absent things as if they are present. He can imaginatively visualise objects which are not present before his eyes in their concrete forms. Poetry originates in emotion that is recollected in tranquillity.

The recollection of emotions enables the poet to ‘see’ the object which evokes the emotions. Imagination enables the poet to look deep into the heart and soul of things. It is through the imaginative faculty that he arrives at the general truths basic to human nature. Through the imaginative power, the poet is able to present emotions which he has not directly experienced. But he presents them in such a way that they seem personally experienced.

Imagination is a faculty which transforms the external world in a creative manner. It is a power that enables the poet to arrive at a realization of the connection between the particular and the eternal. It helps the poet to dig deep into the core of human existence and to get at universal truths. These appeal to us quite instinctively. This is what separates the poetic truth from scientific truth. Imagination transforms the apparent world into a world of higher import. The poet conceives the essential nature of his object and sees it in its basic reality. He is a philosopher.

Wordsworth never ignores the importance of thought and reason. He calls imagination a ‘higher reason’ –’reason in her most exalted mood’. He stresses on the importance of imagination in the process poetic creation. For him, it is the most important gift that a poet can have. Imagination to him is a divine power. It is ‘the vision and the faculty divine’. It transfigures sense impressions. It makes the poet a visionary. To Wordsworth, imagination is inventive, serious and superior. It is active and half-creates the world it perceives. The faculty of mind which creates is the faculty of the imagination.

To Wordsworth, the mind has two faculties—the passive fancy and the active imagination. Fancy merely reflects the external world. Imagination has the poetic power to confer, abstract and modify the original impressions in order to give them a fresh significance. True knowledge is obtained through insight. Imagination gives us the unified vision of reality. Wordsworth relates truth and poetry through imagination. It is the mental power that transforms the literal to the figurative.

The Solitary Reaper, Tintern Abbey, the Immortality Ode and To the Cuckoo—all seem to have been composed according to emotions recollected in tranquillity. These are intensely felt and well contemplated poems. The imagination is at its highest. The poet recreates the whole atmosphere and recreates it with the help of his imagination. He can recall his childhood passion for the Cuckoo which was a voice, a mystery and an invisible thing.

‘Thou bringest to me a tale
O visionary hours.

Tintern Abbey has been re-visited after five years but his imagination is so active that it seems:

These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye.

Wordsworth’s imagination is so powerful that he can remember the vision, the joy and then its loss in his early life.

    The vision splendid
On my way was attended.

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