We are serializing the lecture Poetry i: Imagination Is All This, by Eli Siegel. And as I’ve been saying in my commentaries for this series: Mr. Siegel is the critic who explained what imagination is. He explained the fundamental difference between the two kinds of imagination—good and bad—that have existed, uncomprehended, throughout history.

And so, for readers who may not have seen our last two numbers, I’ll state that distinction freshly. There is the imagination—bad imagination—that arises from the most hurtful thing in every human being, contempt: the desire to be big by lessening, looking down on, what’s not oneself. Contempt is the desire in a person that makes the person cold, mean—even cruel on a large scale. Contempt has one feel one can imaginatively change any fact one pleases, to suit one’s ego. Contempt has one make the feelings of other people into nothing—or at least see others’ feelings as much less real than one’s own.

Good imagination, on the other hand, arises from what Aesthetic Realism shows is the deepest desire, the largest desire, really the most practical desire, in a person: to be our individual self, take care of that self, through being just to the outside world. From that source comes the imagination in all true art. This imagination is beautiful, and has what Aesthetic Realism shows all beauty has: “the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality.” Good imagination is a oneness of freedom and exactitude; of a person’s individuality yet relation to everything; good imagination is assertion and yielding, sharpness and tenderness… more