ABSTRACT
it has long been recognized that the imagination, far from being the ‘reine des facultés’ of Baudelaire’s aesthetic, was until the later decades of the eighteenth century the ‘folle du logis’, and that tradition viewed it with varying degrees of suspicion in the fields of both psychology and aesthetics. I do not propose therefore to examine the historical position or consider its origins in any detail; 1 suffice it to say that this suspicion had its roots in two basic assumptions. On the one hand, in so far as the imagination ‘invented’, it strayed from the path of truth into the byways of fiction and falsehood, and this indeed has been one of the major obstacles facing poets who wished to raise the status of imaginative activity in their theories of poetry; and on the other, whatever variations might be found among the traditional attitudes, it was generally agreed that the imagination was related to the body or at best the lower realms of self, and was therefore likely to come into conflict with essential being or the spiritual aspects of the mind.
