Joseph M Ditta
Imagination and Technology:
Reflections on the Future of Poetry

Mine is an old computer, one of the first generation of IBMs, the 

kind that have a dark screen monitor on which the words shine in 

bright green. Next to it is a dead printer, an old Epson, which 

refuses any longer to spike up the paper from the box underneath 

it. I have been resisting replacing these old machines for the 

newer models. I see these new ones every day. Their monitors have 

bright screens and words appear in black on them, though one can 

change the color of the words if one desires. I am not thrilled.



Why does this matter? It matters because I am fixed on these 

bright green words, because when I write, these words become vivid 

things in themselves, each one like a bright light that shines in 

the dark. I have learned to think of words this way over the ten 

years I have worked on this machine. I lose this feeling of 

numinousness with the new computers.



Why does it matter? It matters because technology affects us; it 

transforms not only how we do things and how we think about the 

doing, but also what we do. There have been times in our history 

when poets were not only regarded as but actually were the leaders 

of intellectual and creative life. Because they combined the 

aesthetic dimensions of art with the conceptual heritage of their 

culture, they shaped both the sense of life and its 

interpretation. And there have been troughs, when poetry declined 

and the leadership in aesthetic thought and experience--that 

cutting edge which opens new ground for artists of all sorts--

passed on to other media, painting, fiction, cinema.



Changes in technology characteristically produce both excitement 

for new potentials and nostalgia for traditions. Often, those who 

are most excited by these changes are the ones who most directly 

benefit from them; and those who seem not particularly affected at 

first remain loyal to the methods of the past and praise the 

virtues of tradition. In a world in which poetry has disappeared 

from the reading habits of the people, those first IBMs were pure 

magic--something out of an alchemist's lab. Words lit up by 

themselves the room one wrote them in; they glinted, shined, 

almost spoke themselves as they came letter by letter onto the 

screen. Admittedly, when time came to pass these words on to the 

vacuum, they took the old forms--black words on white pages 

pressed between paper covers of magazines or the stiffer covers of 

thin little books. But their moments of creation, that was where 

the alchemy was performed. Before the eyes, they came sprouting up 

onto the black velvety square like a lawn of grass at the command 

of one's fingers.



The new machines have made the experience of word processing so 

much more business like, with their rulers, white screens, black 

words, split screens, windows, tool bars, etc. One sits in front 

of them feeling more like a draftsman than a poet. I am one of 

those who love the old ways. A traditionalist, if you will though 

my tradition is only ten years old. Old and ancient at ten years. 

Though the maple, which I see through my study window even as I 

tap these keys, is over eighty years old. And still young, as far 

as trees go.



I have no antipathy for technology. The oral tradition in pre-

literate Greece was formulaic and could hardly have given us the 

rich interrelationships of parts and the structural and emotional 

unity of Homer's great epics which these works finally acquired in 

their written form. Writing was itself a technological advance and 

had a definite impact on the early cultures that had acquired it. 

As Walter J. Ong has shown in Orality and Literacy: The 

Technologizing of the Word, the transition from the primary oral 

stage of culture to the literate, with its dependence on writing, 

was accompanied by transformations of consciousness--how we 

experience and use our modes of self-expression and our 

imaginations. The advent of writing represented potentials for 

growth and reinvention of our own self-conceptions.



Our technologies, therefore, as much as our arts, are an 

expression of who and what we are as a people. But technology also 

has a life of its own, is put to purposes different from art, and 

some of these purposes can be dark, as we have found, often to our 

horror, in the twentieth century. Technology can and does change 

us, has been changing us at an accelerating rate since the 

industrial revolution, and is having profound impacts on us now, 

affecting not only how we do what we do, not only what we do, but, 

even more deeply, how we use our imaginations to live and express 

our living in the forms we offer for contemplation in our arts.



The whole situation is symptomatic of the role of poets and of 

poetry in our creative and cultural lives. We all know the story 

of cinema in the twentieth century. And the story of television. 

And the stories of walkman radios, audio tapes, CDs, video 

machines, video games, the internet, interactive cable, etc. For 

those of us to whom words matter, words that are not pictures, 

that do not make up pictures, and that are not music, and do not 

aspire to be music, for those of us to whom words are the 

essential makers of meanings, poetry still is the meaning-making 

medium, much as it was for the mythical blind man who chanted the 

first verses of the Iliad.



Technology is the application of science to industrial or 

commercial objectives, and, in a larger sense, is a body of 

knowledge about methods for accomplishing tasks. It tends to 

immerse us, naturally enough, in the realities it is designed to 

manipulate. The aesthetic imagination, on the other hand, is 

concerned with abstracting life impressions from their contexts 

for the purposes of embodiment in c-esthetic forms to be offered 

to our contemplation as autonomous objects--not, to be sure, 

directly connected to life, but, insofar as they are mediated by 

the artist's vision, radiant with meaning for life. Artists see 

their work, from the minutest details of craft to the broad 

vision, as both construct and expression and as being both 

impersonal and personal, embedded in the history of their art and 

ahistorically original. Our new technologies tend to intrude into 

this two sidedness, with the effect of dividing artists from 

themselves by externalizing craft and formalizing the imaginative 

content of their work. As such, the new technologies have profited 

most everyone but artists, and among these, poets the least.



Caught up in the competition for attention, when radio and cinema 

and vaudeville were creating new cultural experiences, poets had 

to innovate to keep their place in the world. But the world was 

seldom listening and, enjoying new forms of pleasure, was often 

deliberately deaf. In the lifetime of my maple tree, we have seen 

Imagist poets strive to make poetry more concrete, to concentrate 

on the "thing" itself. We have seen others strive to write their 

verses in the form of the musical phrase instead of the metronome. 

Poets have broken up syntax, restructured sound patterns, made 

poems in the shapes of things, broken up lines and line 

structures, abandoned rhyme and meter, made poetry objective, 

"found" poems in urban trash and technobabble, collapsed and 

revised spelling, made poetry surrealistic, dadaistic, futuristic, 

abandoned poetry altogether, or made it confessional folkways 

telling, colloquial democratic, and, in the fullness of time, 

captured poetry for all sorts of liberations-- when political and 

social agendas, serious in themselves, displaced aesthetics 

altogether. Through all of it, poetry became ever more distant 

from its readers.



Why does it matter? It matters because even though the 

technological and material world changes, the needs of humanity do 

not change--people do not lose their need for the direct encounter 

with meaning that is the special province of poetry. Poetry is 

inherently personal, private, and emotional. Its vehicle of 

expression is words, which are mental and conceptual in nature. 

But the drift of our technologies has been toward externalizing 

our aesthetic experience. Public taste regarding the arts has 

largely been transformed by this drift. Public arts that once had 

a partly private character by virtue of the craft needed to 

accomplish them--painting, sculpture, music--now have machines to 

take over the element of craft, supposedly freeing the artist in 

all of us from the constraints that craft imposes. The drift has 

been toward externalizing the aesthetic, a direction the poet 

cannot take.



But the adolescent, sensing in his or her body the breaking up of 

boundaries, the crossing of thresholds, still feels the world and 

the realm of possibilities it holds as a purely personal affair, 

and, like all dawn creatures, is prone to dream, needs to dream, 

and thus needs the personal psychic alignments that poetry offers, 

the visions of meaningfulness that can shape his or her knowledge 

of self and give meaning to the chaos. And at the other end of 

life, when the body is again crossing thresholds, the human mind 

becomes once more riveted to its own personal existence, and is 

again desperately in need of visions of meaningfulness--not the 

scientific explanations, nor the pulpit's, but the feeling 

meanings, the resonances and traces of life shaped into visions of 

wholeness, even if only glimpsed, only partly perceived--for what 

poet ever does more?



Most of us most of the time are insulated from the chilling and 

vigorous airs of these sunrise and sunset times. The prime of life 

is outward directed and likely to find the technological avenues 

to c-esthetic experience very convenient. One throws on a CD, or 

perhaps a video, or pulls out the keyboard--it's all programmed to 

select instruments, provide back up accompaniment, set the chords 

and tempo, and record. Instant Yanni. There is nothing wrong with 

this. It serves its purpose. But there are other purposes.



The complacencies are shook by early death, accident, disease, 

natural and human-made disasters, those metaphysical moments when 

reality intrudes into the fantasies of our lives. Suddenly our 

confidence and security are shorn away. When has there been a time 

when such things did not happen? Death and instability reside 

inside us like the darkness of a closet in a well lit room. Our 

cosmologies account for this aspect of our lives by providing us 

with literal readings of ancient myths that long ago lost their 

intensities. For this reason some of us manage to suppress our 

awareness of this darkness. But some of us are never able to. 

Awareness of oblivion within pumping away our lives with each 

heartbeat is one of the essential motivators of the c-esthetic 

imagination. When that imagination becomes so technologized and 

externalized, and thus "captured" by the social forces (industry 

and commerce) that produce the technologies, aesthetics become 

secondary and pleasure dominates the arts and gives them their 

only meaning. Sunrise and sunset all too often go unrecognized.



Why does it matter? It matters because over time we gradually lose 

our capacities to embody in symbolic forms--forms that allow us to 

recognize and contemplate--the subtleties of our nature, which 

loss tends to make us ignorant of ourselves. We fall into the 

sickness of literal mindedness.Apollo and Dionysus, Athena and 

Aphrodite are such embodiments. As are the stories of Europa and 

Thalia, Leda and Io, Oedipus, Agamemnon, Odysseus, Medea, Jason, 

and Hercules. The inconceivable and the unique, the unrepeatable, 

the story of beginnings, the mysterious forces that drive men and 

women into all sorts of strange and unimaginable experience, the 

appetites that dominate our energies, the irrationalities, 

inhibitions, blindnesses, brilliancies that make our lives both 

fearful and incredibly rich, all come to focus in these figures, 

who stand in our imaginations as cautions, exemplars, 

explanations, guides, warnings, and as objects of terror, as well 

as divine beings who are aspects of ourselves.



Poetry is the medium in which words become, like the gods and 

goddesses, heroes and heroines, actualizers of the latent contents 

of the imagination. Words in themselves and juxtaposed become 

simultaneously metaphysically profound and sexy, dangerous and 

solacing, fusing present experience with unthinkable consequences, 

revivifying the past and annihilating the present. But most 

important of all, words make those surprising connections between 

things human and non-human that startle us into sudden 

recognitions, making intelligible what was not even suspected.



The poetic imagination has always sought for, found, and 

intemalized the connections between humanity's own rhythms and the 

mysteries of creation, between personal existence and all that is 

other, the universe outside the self. The poet's words create 

these connections, and these connections exist nowhere except in 

the experience of the words: "Westem wind when wilt thou blow, / 

The small rain down can rain. / Christ, if my lover were in my 

arms,/ And I in my bed again." In the voice of this thirteenth-

century lyricist we hear the poet mouming the loss of youth and 

virility, a loss expressed by inserting the aging self into the 

cyclical retums of spring. In the world view animating this poem, 

humans and nature are distinct creations, with different 

relationships to God. Yet this poet perceives within the self the 

ground of an identity found in the feeling of sexual love, a 

revivifying condition that can reconnect him to his own vitality 

and through it to nature. This cry that comes out of nowhere and 

speaks to no one in particular speaks to us as forcefully today as 

it did to its contemporaries.



"The whole idea of all life," writes D.H. Lawrence, "and all time 

suddenly heaves, and appears before us as an apparition, a 

revelation. We look at the very white quick of nascent creation. A 

water-lily heaves herself from the flood, looks around, gleams, 

and is gone. We have seen the incamation, the quick of the ever-

swirling flood. We have seen the invisible. We have seen, we have 

touched, we have partaken of the very substance of creative 

change, creative mutation. If you tell me about the lotus, tell me 

of nothing changeless or etemal. Tell me of the mystery of the 

inexhaustible, forever-unfolding creative spark. Tell me of the 

incamate disclosure of the flux, mutation in blossom, laughter and 

decay perfectly open in their transit, nude in their movement 

before us."



Tell me of the mystery, tell me of the incarnate--these are the 

demands of sunrise and sunset; but they are also the demands of 

the imagination when it tums its eye toward what most attracts it. 

Lawrence's eye is fixed to the Now, the instant in which all 

things that happen happen, the seething, teeming instant of 

becoming. Emily Dickinson's eye was fixed on the etemities, and 

she found and expressed those moments when etemity erupted into 

Lawrence's Now. Dylan Thomas fixed on the experience of Being 

itself and found life and living strangely merging into mystical 

oneness: "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, 

/ Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees / is my 

destroyer."



We interact in two ways with the non-human, imaginatively and 

technically. Technically, we reshape the non-human, giving it 

forms determined by our needs for our use. Imaginatively, we 

interact to know--as scientists to create a body of knowledge 

about it; as artists to create ever-denser experience of it in the 

acts of living in, through, and by it-experience that defines our 

aesthetic as well as actual lives. For the artist is always 

concemed with the value for life of our perceptions, impressions, 

and sensations, and this cannot be apprehended except through the 

emotion-charged transfiguration of metaphor, image, simile, and 

the feelings of rhythms, movements, pattems of sound, color, 

light, and texture. The scientist and the artist both work by 

abstraction; but the scientist abstracts to generalize, while the 

artist abstracts to particularize. The scientist's success has 

value for society as a whole; the artist's has value only for the 

individual. As the scientific enterprise succeeds, the pace of its 

leaming increases; and this success feeds back into faster and 

faster technological development and change. By nature, no such 

increase in artistic production or use accompanies the success of 

the artistic endeavor.



With all its swiftness of change, with its plethora of things, our 

world today is more inchoate and discordant than ever. Its 

electrical charge rearranges our identities, our modes of 

communication, our interactions, redefining our reality, adding 

virtual realities to our manipulations, and steadily drawing our 

hearts out of our bodies, daily dwindling the amount of time we 

spend integrating our selves into coherent personalities. Our 

daily experience runs at eyeflipping speed, like an MTV video. 

When something happens that stops the flow, we are disoriented, 

sometimes crazed with fear, for the incomprehensible seems to us 

then malevolent.



The poet stops this kaleidoscopic flow so that it can be examined, 

contemplated, intemalized. Prosody mimics mental experience, but 

also measures it, shapes it, makes it meaningful. "I wake to 

sleep, and take my waking slow. / I feel my fate in what I cannot 

fear. / I leam by going where I have to go." Foot behind measured 

foot, with incredible deliberateness, the poet shapes a permanent 

moment, wrests from the verge of time a moment of stillness. A 

moment we can experience forever. This forevemess, this shaping, 

is what poetry is. Words. The most fleeting of all things, the 

most ephemeral, outliving empires, lasting longer than the granite 

foundations of temples and palaces.



***



Technology extemalizes the imagination, thereby diminishing the 

free play of inventing and combining forms to make new meanings, 

and restricts the play of the mind to fixed forms. Technology 

therefore both enriches and impoverishes us. It gives solidity to 

fantasy, quickness to creation and distribution of thought, 

involves more individuals in shared experience and in dialogue, 

informs more people, and binds us together. At the same time, it 

makes it more difficult for us to take the imagination seriously, 

to see in the products of the imagination a certain penetration 

into metaphysical realities by means of which we formerly 

constructed our interpretations of the meaning of our lives. It is 

a question of belief.



When the poetic imagination figured the body as a cocoon and the 

soul as the butterfly which emerges from it, the figure brought 

together and sealed a relationship between concrete and 

metaphysical reality. This relationship, an expression of the 

imagination itself, had the power to structure our values and 

reinforce belief. But the capacity of our technologies to generate 

fantasy images has made all figures of the imagination 

ontologically unreal--virtual to use a word that is now redefining 

our concept of play. The impact of virtual reality on our use of 

the imagination today represents a qualitative change in the 

relationship between technology and the arts. The widespread 

cultural effect of this change is to deprive imagination of its 

persuasive power and thus to reinforce our tendency to literal 

mindedness. All products of the imagination are thus seen as alike 

unreal, virtual, things to be played with to the extent that they 

can give us pleasure or express, usually, the grosser emotions of 

sorrow, fear, happiness, sexual arousal.



There has been a tendency in our culture, from Plato to the 

present, to think of art as a commentary on life, as having a one-

to-one correspondence with reality. In such a view, art is 

essentially didactic, its value being determined by its "message." 

And for just as long, artists have rebelled against this 

conception of their inspiration. The divine madness of the artist, 

his or her Dionysian ecstasy, has always been tempered by the 

Apollonian verticality of thought and meaningfulness, which 

brought to art its social dimension. This tension is responsible 

for the meaningfulness for life of the artist's autonomous 

aesthetic object. And this tension is being undermined by the 

change in the ontological status of the imagination.







Now, poetry is, if nothing else, pure expression of the 

imagination. It is the last of the arts to succumb to technology. 

But succumbed it has. To my knowledge, there is no extemalizing, 

craft-replacing software for poetry writing equivalent to graphic 

arts software or music writing software, or the laser sculpture 

technologies that now can make perfectly accurate three-

dimensional portraits. Our modem technologies have affected poetry 

on the level of concept, and on the level of expressed content. To 

the extent that the poet today addresses the minutice of daily 

living, making his or her figures connect reality to reality, to 

that extent he or she still has a lien on public consciousness. 

The poet's palette has in some ways, as a consequence, expanded 

enormously, making it much more possible for him or her to have 

green thoughts in a green shade. But to say "When at my back I 

always hear/ Time's winged chariot hurrying near" is no longer 

possible, for the figure's efficacy, its power to evoke anxiety, 

depends upon the readiness of the mind to transport a purely 

imaginary thing into the real experience of life. It does not 

depend upon belief in Apollo driving the chariot of the sun across 

the sky, but upon the capacity of the imagination to synthesize 

image with experience in a way that confers metaphysical reality 

upon the image, thus giving sensual texture to a meaning that is 

not part of reality, but which becomes part of reality in the 

figure.



We have then this double phenomenon, the power of the word, the 

formal fixing of experience in the aesthetic moment of the poem, 

and this change in the use of the imagination, this divide that 

has opened between reality and the now "unreal" realms of 

imaginative play.



The poet today who stretches the relationship between vehicle and 

tenor in the metaphor is regarded as flighty. Tastes have changed. 

But it is no longer just a matter of taste. Our orientation to the 

imagination has also changed. We see this changed orientation in 

the humdrum presentations of network television, with its emphasis 

on "reality" shows, and the pandering to public desire in made-

for-TV movies of the kind that depict the latest scandal of 

glamorous and even not-so-glamorous people, those who become 

celebrities for a day by some gruesome or titillating crime, and 

by the plethora of talk shows that endlessly recount bizarre but 

"real" experiences among their guests. We watch amusingly or 

fearfully the outrage among conservatives and Nixon republicans 

over Oliver Stone's Nixon, constemated as they are by the 

difference between the man they knew and the image of him 

portrayed in the film, unable to bridge the gap between reality 

and the demands of the aesthetic medium. CNN is another example, 

offering news, both national and world-wide (actually generating 

interest in local affairs in New Delhi and Nairobi feeding while 

itself creating an endless appetite for facts), twenty-four hours 

a day, and court TV, C-Span, and so on. Public interest in these 

programs is widespread and constant, and one would be wrong to 

deny that such interests are not an expression of a profound 

change in how we use our imaginations.



I am describing a dissociation, perhaps a continuation into 

profounder effects of what T.S. Eliot described as a decline in 

imaginative power, the growing incapacity of poets to "feel" their 

thought in their senses, and to manifest that feeling in imagery 

that compels the reader to a sensual appreciation of ideas.



Poetic ideas are not abstractions or generalizations, not concepts 

of the kind manipulated in discourse, even the simplest discourse. 

Poetic ideas are syntheses of moments of experience and words, 

words whose denotations have no direct or obvious relationship to 

those experiences but which together with them make new meanings, 

meanings that could not have existed until those combinations 

occurred. The dissociation is of this synthesis: between the 

moments of experience now and the words whose denotations once 

inserted us into unexpected meta-realities, no connection is any 

longer perceived to exist.



Shakespeare could write of the fall season and relate the time of 

year to the human condition of growing old, with its attendant 

emotional textures, in the imagery of the "cold, / Bare ruined 

choirs, where late the sweet birds sang." We can read this image 

today because it is part of our past, which we honor with our 

appreciations or our protestations of them. But with our emphasis 

on truth to experience, on the "realism" of image and import, such 

an image if produced today would be condemned as fanciful and 

affected.



Some might argue that service to truth is the ultimate duty of the 

poet, and that in a world whose boundaries are disappearing, and 

in which injustice and violence and mistrust are leading to new 

and strange political configurations, the dedication to truth has 

never been more necessary. The problem is how we think of truth--

for truth has always been an integral part of the aesthetic 

experience. Today we think of truth as the real in contrast to the 

virtual, the play image, which is thought of as purely 

recreational. That is, the virtual has its interest for us because 

it is not true. Formerly, truth had to do with the fitness between 

the experience and the meta-reality created by language, and it 

was this fitness that generated in us as readers or listeners what 

we understood to be the 2sthetic experience. Strange 

confabulations and admixtures occur now as we work out the 

ontology of our new "games" of life and death. Reality becomes 

entertainment, entertainment strangely mixes with mastery of the 

new environments created by our technology--a word whose meaning 

in this context stares us down like a tyrant; and our work 

environments and play environments merge, and sometimes become 

interchangeable.



For minds habituated to the ontological divide between historical 

and virtual reality, the poetic idea can have no explanatory 

power, no catapulting effect on the emotions. The world of 

imagination is reduced to a recreational function. When in his 

deep-toned bardic voice the whitehaired Whitman announces that he 

is "stuccoed with quadrupeds and birds all over," the imagination 

is presented with an enormously complex task of synthesizing, 

interpreting, and grasping a meaning whose truth is not to be 

found in reality (for in reality, the image is absurd), but in a 

way of feeling one's relationship to the world, a truth moreover 

that, the more deeply we grasp it, the more profoundly it confirms 

our suspicions that our notions of reality are inadequate. There 

is less and less room in our lives today for the imagination to 

function this way.



***



I have been reading poems by American minority writers, poems that 

are emphatically accompanied by little biographical narratives to 

make sure the reader fully appreciates the details. Some of them 

are very moving, and the writers are all gifted. But I can't help 

wondering whether the entire content of these poems could not as 

easily have been presented in photographs, or in documentary 

films, or in straight narrative forms. Their dedication to the 

truth of experience and to the feelings that their experiences 

give rise to inevitably binds them to memory, to accuracy, to 

life, and binds them in a way that limits the imagination to 

presentation. Connecting the real to the real these poems 

subordinate poetry to subject matter.



Æsthetic value is not located in social or political 

significance, nor is it located in reality, so that faithfulness 

to reality and accuracy are not in themselves means to aesthetic 

experience. Marianne Moore's imaginary toad in a real garden was a 

misconception, a step towards where we are today. Blake's tyger 

nowhere treads a real rainforest. He is a numinous being, a "y" 

beast in a world of "i" beasts. No knowledge of tigers in 

rainforests can ever help a reader to understand Blake. No 

photograph can illuminate him, no narrative reproduce him.



The value of the aesthetic experience, and uniquely of poetry, is 

that it initiates us into the mysteries of our own psyches and 

guides us toward realization--an enrichment that the common paths 

of human experience cannot provide. And so we come to our final 

question. Can poetry as we formerly knew it have any role to play 

in a world of dissociated imagination, a world that crazily 

shuttles between virtual reality and historical reality?



Youth and age are permanent states of human being, the darkness 

within remains a permanent part of our experience of life. The 

conditions that warrant the 2sthetic moment still warrant that 

personal, private, emotional encounter with the poem. What has 

retreated is the metaphysical reality that once was the province 

of the imagination. This, then, is the challenge for poets. In the 

past, the belief system of the culture was the point of entry to 

the metaphysical realm, either directly, as for Dante, or as the 

oppositional structure against which the poetic imagination 

constructed its altemative visions of human nature, as for 

Lawrence and for many of the modems. Today, that belief system has 

largely been discredited, and, as yet, no new system has taken its 

place. Our scientific cosmologies are no substitutes, mainly 

because these have been the instruments by which the old has been 

dismantled, and because they are themselves incomplete, still 

growing, and, more importantly, because they contain within them 

as part of their essence the notion that they will always be 

incomplete, for their field of activity is co-extensive with 

existence.



Science leads to wonder and awe, and that is a beginning. But 

wonder and awe are not enough, for these are states that must 

finally come to rest in our experience of them, and because, as 

beginnings, they inevitably lead to metaphysical questioning, 

where science itself leaves off.



The poetic medium is especially suited to penetrating the 

opaquenesses of personal private experience, connecting that 

experience to other, larger realms of human knowing and intuition 

that radiate meaningfulness into our lives. I think, for example, 

of the ancient story of Tristan and Isolde and the depiction in 

that tale of the world-transforming nature of romantic love--in a 

world whose vision of this experience was negative, condemning it 

as the surrender of rationality, as Dante does in the story of 

Paolo and Francesca. Here is an instance of the poetic imagination 

creating a new vision of the meaningfulness of life. So powerful 

was this vision that in the coming centuries it seized Westem 

culture and transformed the relations between the sexes. Joseph 

Campbell writes in depth of this seizure in the impressive final 

volume of his Masks of God. This is the poet's contribution to our 

lives, for by playing with words and combining them with 

experience, he or she reshapes our assumptions about values, 

redirects our line of sight, and focuses on what lies hidden in 

our experience of the world because it is masked or overlaid by 

convention, familiarity, and tradition. Playing with words is no 

idle time-killing, it can be and is dangerous--for its 

repercussions can be infinite. This is the nature of art.



The field is open for poets, and I cannot believe that the poetic 

imagination will fail of the challenge. For all that our 

technologies offer, poetry remains irreplaceable. What is needed 

is a combination of faith and daring--faith in the enterprise and 

the daring to break with those conventions that confine the 

imagination to the real, to be the poet.