ABSTRACT
The imagination puts the future world either up in the heights, or down in the depths, or in some transubstantiation. To make poetry is to create. All poetry must be living and individual. Imagination alone can grasp the mystery of love and present it as a mystery; and this mysterious quality is the source of all that is imaginative in the form of poetic representation. Imagination strives with all its might to express itself, but the divine can be conveyed and expressed only indirectly in the sphere of nature. The dead and empirical view of the world is that things are; the philosophical view is that everything is in an eternal process of becoming, an incessant creation, as is shown by a host of phenomena in common life. From time immemorial man has subsumed this active, generative force into a single concept, namely that of nature in its truest and highest sense.
