Imaginary Gardens
IMAGINARY GARDENS
I.
Poetry is like magic. The poet takes ordinary words and transforms them into art. But what is the catalyst for this transformation? By what alchemy are ordinary words transformed into poetry? Marianne Moore hints at an answer. The work of the poet, she declares, is to create “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” Hidden in this paradox is the secret of poetry.
Imaginary gardens are not real. We cannot walk in them, smell their flowers, feel their grass tickle our feet. They are made of words. Words are symbols – ideas in the mind. But words have creative power. Words can make reality. Spiritual traditions all over the world confirm this. In the Mandukya Upanishad, the word is OM.
“OM. This eternal Word is all:
what was, what is and what shall be,
and what beyond is in eternity.
All is OM.”
In the Gospel of John, it is the Logos.
“In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.”
The aim of poetry is not verisimilitude – the illusion of reality. The aim of poetry is to convey the ineffable, to express the inexpressible, to use words to say that which is beyond words. The work of the poet is not imitation. The work of the poet is to create imaginary gardens. But it is only when real toads appear that the magic of poetry occurs.
Imaginary gardens can harbor that which is real. They can harbor truth. Truth is the real toad in the imaginary garden. The toadless garden is not true. It may be beautiful, but it is not true. The poet does not create the truth just as the poet does not create the toad.
II.
Nor does the poet conjure art out of thin air. All words have creative power. It is the gift of poetry that frees this creative power. The source of poetry, the wellspring that waters the garden, is variously called imagination, inspiration, vision. It may be called possession or even hallucination. Blake called it the Poetic Genius.
Works of poetry born from this mysterious source have a reality that other things of the imagination do not have. This is because they are not mere inventions. They are imposed from a source other that the mental machinations of the poet. These “imaginary gardens with real toads in them” are the fruit of perception, not thought.
The poet must translate perception into words. Moore believes that poets must be “literalists of the imagination” to do this. She borrows the phrase from Yeats. It is a reference to Blake’s visions. For Blake, visions are representations of the eternal. The visionary is the spectator who beholds the cosmos as it unfolds. Unlike the rational and self-aware artist who composes and directs creations of the human will, Blake paints and writes what he sees in his visions. In “A Vision of the Last Judgment,” he affirms the sacred mission of the visionary artist.
“Poetry Painting & Music
the three Powers <in Man>
of conversing with Paradise.”
Visionaries like Blake flourish in the unreality of imagination, dream, even madness. Indeed, it comes as no surprise that some “literalists of the imagination” were mad. In madness, unreality infiltrates reality. Poetry is madness in reverse. In poetry, reality infiltrates unreality. The poet dissolves the distinction between reality and imagination in order to reproduce the numinous experience. Like the magician, the poet alters our perception of reality.
The language of the imagination is a language of dream and symbol. Blake understood this.
Words have creative power, but a poem only evokes the numinous experience of the visionary when the poet puts the right words in the right order. Thus poetry is an act of revelation.
III.
The poet reproduces the visionary experience in others. This is the magic. This is the enchantment described by C. S. Lewis in his spiritual autobiography Surprised by Joy. He names it Sehnsucht. He was five years old the first time it happened. It was not a poem that evoked this experience. It was not a painting. It was not music. It was merely a toy garden – the lid of a biscuit tin decorated with moss and twigs and flowers – but this toy gave him a glimpse of eternity.
The toy garden became for Lewis an intimation of paradise. The real garden, for all its beauty, did not inspire Lewis with this longing for joy that is itself joy. The toy garden did. It was an imaginary garden with real toads in it.
Moore’s “literalists of the imagination” are visionaries who plant imaginary gardens made of words and each word contains the seed of eternal truth from which it sprang. This is the power of the word to create reality. This is poetry.