An Essay by GPT-3 on "Poetic Imagination"

Prompt: Write an academic-style essay on the subject of “poetic imagination”

(neural compute time, 18 seconds)


I.

Man, says Plato, is a creature of images- his reality is no reality, it is a
fabric of unrealized dream-images. He can think only insofar as he becomes aware of his
own unrealized dream-images, of his images that exceed the limits of himself- that
limitation which must be experienced before it can be articulated. In that moment of
articulation- that moment when man becomes conscious of his self- he transcends the
limits of his conscious existence and becomes truly aware of that of which he is capable.
Man’s self consciousness might be regarded as a reflection in words of the depths of his
unconscious; the very process of articulating the limits of the unknown then becomes
the process of realizing the boundary of his self, because he is in fact attempting to represent
the limits of his self in words. These symbolic operations are our only intimations of reality.
The more one lives among these operations, or acts by their authority, the more the symbolic
world itself becomes our reality.

This “unconscious life,” the “subterranean realm of being” is “a vast and silent world
which lies below our consciousness,” “in the hidden recesses of our being” “deep below
the stratum of all being of which we know”; it’s only through the art of poetry that we can
“reach to the depths of being, to that region where consciousness attains its deepest
self-knowledge” [4] This was Valery’s definition of the poet’s purpose. According to him,
one should be an artist because he sees reality more clearly than other men, because he
knows more of the depth of things than others,- because he knows the secret of knowing,
because he discovers what the poet is: to know all the way down, to give us a glimpse
into what’s there beyond all consciousness. [5]

The function of the poet is to reveal the secret of the universe, not to explain it, or even
to put it into words. He penetrates the hidden world, the deep and silent world, to
uncover things, the world of things which lies below the world of thought. For thought,
like the rest of creation, is only the surface of being, and beneath the surface lie things
which have not yet been thought of. And things which have not yet been thought of, or only
partly, or dimly, or perhaps not at all, or perhaps only at the moment when they are
thought of for the first time, are the things of the deep, the unconscious world, the world
of Being, to which the poets have access, and which they unveil before us. [6] For it is
this very unconsciousness, a passion which is almost totally repressed, but which we
understand intellectually and we translate into words, it is this that constitutes our
being. The universe is therefore only a symbol and in itself it has no existence at all. It
is nothing but a symbol. And this whole thing which the world-symbol which man has made
of the universe is not anything real except in the individual who projects it, and who
projects it within the limits of the possible by means of an imagination which is so
insistent that it is not allowed to see the limits of its own imaginings.

The artist is concerned with a more profound reality than that of ordinary man; he has
access to a world which the ordinary man cannot know. The ordinary man believes what he
knows, and his knowing is his reality. But the artist knows that even the most profound
and complex things are only a fragment of a reality which is far more vast and complex
than the things we know.

The struggle of the poet thus differentiates itself from that of the philosopher.
Hegel’s thought is the attempt to articulate that which the symbolization of the
ideal forms, of the “absolute,” attempts to express: that we need to recognize that
the absolute itself must be the limit of thought. And therefore we must consider that the
limit of thought is the absolute. But in this articulation, we cannot know it directly,
and to do that, we must find a synthesis, a synthesis that would bring in the totality,
the universal, the infinite that is the absolute, so that thinking can continue to express
it. Hegel’s synthesis is to bring the world, all that is real, to reason, to consciousness.
And so Hegel’s thought is a form of thought that seeks to reconcile the infinite and the
universe; in his own words, it is the “conversion of this existence into thinking,
or the transition from the immediacy of the finite into the mediation of the infinite.” And
it’s Hegel’s view that philosophy does not begin with the subject, it begins with the
object, with the finite, with the actuality of the world. And philosophy is
the science of the existing, the science of the actual, which exists in its finitude, its
unreliability.

As a matter of fact, the
mystical imagination is essentially a self-conscious imagination. That is to say that we
can conceive of something by giving it a certain form or aspect or dimension that has no
place in it as it is; only by giving it a form can we know it. In the same way we must
begin by making an abstraction of the universe in order to see it, to make it possible for
us to have a symbol or image that will in a sense give a shape or order to what we don’t
know or can’t perceive, for there is no chaos, as we might say, except in our own
minds.

The mystery is that we must not attempt to know the ultimate ground of the universe
even from within that universe, which is the task that mystics have taken up
from the very beginning of time. This is why the humanist mystics have always sought to penetrate
beyond this boundary, the demarcation of man from the universe, and to understand the ground of
the universe within man. A mystic’s most basic task is that of realizing his own limits and transcending
them. That’s the point of the journey of mystical consciousness to which all human life is
tending, but in which, and to which most human beings cannot go. It’s the task of the
mystic to recognize his own limits and to strive to transcend them, and to recognize the
presence within man of some reality which transcends the limits of his particular self,
that place in the whole.

II.

The limits of the known universe were once defined as the edge of the universe, at the
centre of which mankind is, a sort of middleman between the two, at one end of a great
universe to which we are a point of reference and at the other a point of departure, a
center with two hemispheres. For the very first time in our lives we recognize a center,
which is the source of our own existence. In doing so, we become more human, it’s true.
But we are also more finite, more closed, more human, less infinite. The boundary of
finite and infinite, man and cosmos, of each of these organizations, is the very boundary of
our conscious being. This is the limit of our creativity, of our imagination, and
that is the source of our mystery, our uncertainty, and our fear. We want to be able to
control things, to make them as we want them to be. This is perhaps what lies at the root
of the whole problem. We want to be able to know everything, to control every aspect of
reality. When man first left his original, primordial dwelling, he had some means of
controlling his environment. In his cave, he could decide when the sun was high, and the
season was beginning, and the days were turning from autumn to winter. He did not need to
know all about all these things in the same way we can learn things about computers or
machines. He did not need to know the exact number of the units in the decimal system,
nor did he need to know what a computer did or that there were two and a half thousand
places of one in that number. He knew when it was spring and when it was winter, and he
had only to mark the appropriate days on the calendar. He did not need to know much at
all about the weather, for he only needed to be able to know when the sun was high and
when it was going to rain.

Even if we knew that there are an infinite number of angels above the archangel
Michael, we can only speak of the infinite as far as our own knowledge actually extends.

The
theoretical physicists of the early 20th century were in a similar dilemma: since they
were dealing with abstract mathematical concepts, they were not always certain how to
apply them. They knew that space was infinite, but they had a clear conception of what
they meant when they used this word. So they applied their understanding of space and
extended the ideas they already had to other dimensions. They discovered, for example,
that the universe was a continuous structure with no limit.

The real infinite was even more
troubling for them. There is no way to imagine the infinite, no way to construct a
mental picture. Mathematics enables us to conceive of numbers, but the real infinite is
beyond our powers. This is the paradox of the real infinite. Mathematics has brought
light to the mind, but the human imagination does not grasp the real infinite. It is the
real infinite that is behind this paradox.

The
real infinite is the very essence of all that is, all that has ever been, all that ever
will be. It exists beyond the realm of space, it exists beyond time. It is always with us.
As the Upanishads say, “that which is eternal abides in me.” This reality that abides
in us is pure consciousness.

III.

The artist is the most subtle and discriminating being, the one most refined, the one who
examines and thinks most deeply, who penetrates most deeply into the universe, the one who
knows the most about the things of reality. He sees the world more profoundly than any
other, and he says more about it than others say. [7]

Valery was also concerned to find how little of his poetry he had written
himself, how often he had used another’s words, or had borrowed from one or another
thematic group of ideas in poems or novels which he was now writing. But he also realized
how much he owed to the works of others, and how much he still owed to others for the
ideas of which he was making use in his poems. One of the most important sources for
him, as we have seen, was the writings of Proust and Baudelaire, and it was in reading
these that he had been driven to explore the theme of the human condition which had
animated the great poets since the Renaissance. His own poem on the theme of mortality,
La Mort dans la vie, had been written as an answer to the poem of Baudelaire on the
same theme, though Valery was conscious that his piece differed from Baudelaire’s in
that it did not treat of the actual experience of death, and was thus concerned more with
the conditions and processes of the process than with the end. Another important theme
which had been suggested to him by Baudelaire was the use of the visual imagery of
the great painters in poetic expression, and Valery had worked out several poems on
this theme. As a writer of short prose sketches he had not been much preoccupied by
the subject, but now that he was writing verse he saw that the possibilities of this
form of expression were far greater, as they depended on purely verbal, musical and
harmonic relations which could not be expressed in prose. Here again the reading of
Baudelaire had come to his aid; he had learned how to evoke the images of paintings
in his verse, and he had used as a model his masterly essay on the painting of Eugène
Delacroix. He began to wonder how far he might use this technique in his new poetic
compositions, and in his poems on the theme of death and the images of painting he
already found the germ of some of his ideas.

But for all the importance of these three influences, Valery’s real source of
inspiration remained Gide’s book. In the first and last chapters of the book Gide
had described what he called the ‘human landscape’. It was not a physical landscape,
as in the ordinary sense of the word, but an inner one; it was a landscape in the
mind. Valery accepted this idea of the human landscape, as something quite apart
from the ordinary physical elements, but he changed it. Whereas Gide saw the
landscape of man as a kind of reflection of the whole of nature and of man’s
existence in time, Valery saw the landscape of man as a combination of the real
world around him, and of the various elements in his own mind and personality. The
idea of nature and of man as both a product of nature and as part of nature had
taken firm hold of him, and in his poetry he sought to convey the nature of man as
something distinct from that of animals, a species, part of nature in its own
way. The human landscape then might be conceived of as an entangling of man
and world, or a web. A great deal has been written about how man is part of a web, and
how to understand our position in the web is to understand our ultimate place in the cosmos.
That was particularly emphasized by the Greeks, when they spoke of God as the First Cause,
as the God of beginnings, and they spoke of man as in some sense also being a creation of that
First Cause, that God, or the absolute Spirit, whose essence, as a cause, is absolute.

But before looking at the more specific nature of the human landscape in the
poems of this time, let us trace in the poetry of the previous few years a gradual
transformation in Valery’s mode of expression. This transformation was caused by
his reading of the works of two writers of the late nineteenth century, Mallarmé
and Verlaine. These poets, and particularly the latter, were interested in finding
a new poetic method which would be more ‘absolute’. In the early 1890’s Valery had
already been influenced by Maeterlinck and by his discovery of ‘The Mystery of the
Earth’, and his poetry in these years became more and more an attempt to find the
right way to express the ‘absolute’. (Valery’s reading of Mallarmé can also be
observed in his reading of Hervé. For an interpretation of Valery’s and Hervé’s
relations to Mallarmé, see ‘Esprit de Valery’ (‘The Spirit of Valery’), pp.
119-136). Valery became involved with an ‘Absolute Symbolism’ as defined by his
friend Maurice Denis:

[B]y the Absolute Symbolism I mean to express an attempt to create a universal
language which will enable every poet to see and express the general laws of
being. The word ‘Language’ is inadequate, because it implies that there is only one
language. In other words, in order to achieve it, there must be a complete
universal symbolism, which would be in a direct relation with the entire cosmos.
We have reached the goal: we have a new universal language…a universal aesthetic
poetry which is completely abstract.

(M. Denis, ‘Vrai et faux symbolisme’ in ‘Littérature et vrai et faux symbolisme’
(1892), p. 17)

In this ‘Language’, the poet has the freedom to create without any obligation to
the present or to previous poetry: for the Absolute Symbolist there is ‘always
time’.

(M. Denis, ‘Littérature et vrai et faux symbolisme’ in ‘Littérature et
vrai et faux symbolisme’ (1892), p. 11)

From this point of view, Valery’s poetry was an attempt to find an appropriate
metaphysical means to express absolute emotion, a search which was to lead him
into an involvement with many mystical doctrines, notably the doctrines of René
Guénon. Guénon, ‘the teacher of a new spiritual and intellectual discipline which
was to prove so fruitful to many other poets in the twentieth century’, believed
in a mystical, ‘esoteric’ religion; in 1912 he founded a ‘Society of the Inner
Path’ to promote this ‘spiritual discipline’. Through his teaching, Guénon aimed
to return to a way of poetry which was no longer dependent on the ‘false’ world,
but could explore its hidden forces. Valery became very interested in this idea
and began to write poems which were in fact a further development of the kind of
poetry he had been writing from 1912 onwards.

During the years 1912-14, Valery wrote most of his poems, which have a definite
thematic structure: the first part of each poem describes a moment or a
condition of the soul and the second a vision, usually in the form of an
impassioned hymn. The themes have been various: the beauty of childhood, of the
forest, of the mountains and of the sea; the ecstasy of prayer; the nature of
love, the mystery of birth and of death. These poems are often very emotional,
for, as he said, ‘there is no emotion which cannot be expressed in poetry’.
Their rhythm is irregular, sometimes quite free, and has an emphasis on the
final syllable, often very strongly stressed.

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