Malcolm Guite is a poet, singer song writer, Anglican priest and academic. He is also one of humanity's natural enthusiasts, and even if you're unable to fully align with his religious perspective, you can find yourself being swept up in the sheer verve and lively momentum of his conversation. He has an unusual and engaging presence. Plus a phenomenal memory for poetry to boot.
In a hour long conversation available online (a link to which is at the bottom of this transcript) he recounts the influence of his Mother reciting poetry at the drop of what, his own appreciation for Tolkien, C.S.Lewis, folk tales, and of his new ballad rendering of the Arthurian legend. He also talks beautifully, with great clarity about what the imaginations role in human creativity is. Here are a few salient extracts from that conversation on this subject matter, which I have judiciously edited where I felt necessary for improved comprehension.
"The world itself is a language."
"We have been so busy weighing and measuring (things) for the last three hundred years, we've forgotten what they mean."
" You could say your whole life could be seen as a slowly evolving poem.... You are God's poem."
"We live in a world where all kinds of analogies, parables, symbols and metaphors are naturally and richly available to us. But there is a reason why that rational analytical mind doesn't get how to do that, it can't make that leap. That is the imaginations business. The imagination is precisely to see the thing out there, and recognise that the visible thing out there, is more than itself. That it provides you with an image through which to think about what is in here ( in us)."
"The imagination is the faculty by which we apprehend meaning, not just information."
"How do we get from apprehension to comprehension, of things that are true, but not divisible or a weighable part of the material realm? We have been used to seeing the imagination as something that just makes stuff up. It's some airy fairy little whimsy of our own, that has no purchase on reality, as it really is.
And it is true we can make up things that have no purchase on reality. But it's also equally true that when we tell stories, when we paint pictures, when we write poems, we can create a verbal or visible form which embodies, which bodies forth things we need to know, and might not be able to know in any other way.
In fact, the idea that the poetic imagination enables a certain kind of knowledge, that it is a truth bearing faculty is clear when Shakespeare says 'imagination bodies forth things unknown.' They are there, they are real, but they are unknown to us, and we only faintly apprehend them."
"Essentially, when we read a great poem or look at a great painting, its as though things half known or reached after or faintly apprehended have suddenly come and made a home in this place. You walk through the door of the poem into the local habitation of the poem, and you meet them."
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