Keble perceived that the greatness of poetry lay in its genuineness and seriousness, and that it was not merely a metrical plaything. He perceived that it revealed the poet himself and that its mission was high.
One must also admire his broadmindedness in treating Lucretius, whom, in spite of his atheistic views, Keble places among the primary poets. The modern reader
might resent the placing of Sophocles and Theocritus among the secondary poets; nor does every personal poet belong to the primary class, for minor poets are often personal. Poets must, to be in the first class, voice a very compelling emotion based on a very profound idea. Burns and Heine, Shelley and Byron, Goethe and Ibsen, Balzac and Tolstoy are primary poets, not only because they are personal but because they are intellectual.
Keble anticipated the greatest of modern theories about the nature of art, poetry and literature. He saw that art was not play, as Schiller and Spenser believed, but an expression necessary to relieve both poet and reader. Its origin is not in play but in the desire to heal oneself and create a reality out of a dream. Poetry is an attempt to unburden oneself and adjust oneself to reality, which it does by complaint or by building a dream castle.
But its sources are always repressions of emotions, which in many cases have become unconscious. The best exposition of the imagination from this point of view is by E. S. Dallas, who published The Gay Science, in two volumes, in 1866. He was a successful book reviewer and had also written a book on Poetics, which David Masson reviewed. In chapters in his greater book, on "The Imagination," "The Hidden Soul," "The Play of Thought" and "The Secrecy of Art," he anticipated many of the modern discoveries of art in connection with the unconscious. He saw that man leads a hidden inner life of which he is unaware and that this life appears in his art. You will find more on the nature of imagination and poetry in Dallas's book than in many of the works on taste that have survived. He carried Keble's ideas to much further conclusions and saw that man unburdens not only his conscious emotions, but even those of which he is unconscious.
Dallas's four chapters at the end of his first volume form one of the most striking contributions to the nature of poetry and imagination that have ever been penned in English. He finds imagination but another name for the automatic action of the mind or any of its faculties. It is unconscious memory, its logic is the logic of the hidden soul, it is passion that works out of sight. Imagination is the unconscious. It suggests not only the power of figuring to ourselves the shows of sense, but also that of imagery or the comparison of shows. It does not differ from reason, but shows the process of reason working automatically. It is play of thought, it is hidden soul. It combines sensibility to images, wandering of the mind, and finding of comparisons. Its function is not different from reason, memory or feeling, but its peculiarity is that its work is done in secret automatically or unconsciously. Imagination not only builds images, but it creates types, it utters ideas, it speaks a natural language, it voices emotions.
Even the old critic who separated verse poetry from prose literature as a distinct branch of writing was always suspicious that he was in error, for he knew both were the products of creative imagination. Of the ancients, it was only Aristotle who, defining poetry as imitation, saw that he must include prose that "imitated" in his definition of poetry. The thing that counted was the imitation or imagination in determining poetry and not metre.
As imagination creates the literature of ecstasy, the real subject of this book has been the function of the imagination, but as the term, like poetry, has been so much abused and misunderstood, the nature of them both is studied by using other terms, like "ecstasy" and the "unconscious."
I suppose that no word has been more used in connection
with poetry than the word imagination. And probably no word has been more vaguely and diversely employed. Every one agrees that literature in general must be the function of the imagination. Many people when they speak of imagination really mean nothing more than the introduction of numerous figures of speech; others confuse it with the sportive play of the author with supernatural machinery in his work. To others imagination suggests something that is opposed to the convictions of the intellect and to the moral faculty. Even to-day many people do not know that Aristotle used the term "imitation" and Bacon the word "feigning" where we use the word "imagination." These older terms, in the course of evolution in meaning which words undergo, are used by us no longer to represent poetic creation, or imaginative work.