ABSTRACT
The modern world has tended to oscillate between extremes in its attitude towards the imagination, so that people still have to turn to ancient Greece for the best examples of works in which the imagination is at once disciplined and supreme. Keats himself may serve as a type of the new imaginative spontaneity and of the new fullness and freshness of sensuous perception. If Johnson is wise without being poetical, Keats is poetical without being wise, and here again people need to remember that distinctions of this kind are only approximately true. If Keats is highly imaginative and poetic without on the whole rising to high seriousness or sinking to sophistry, Shelley, on the other hand, illustrates in his imaginative activity the confusion of values that was so fostered by romanticism. Though the mature Goethe, then, always stands for salvation by work, it is not strictly correct to say that it is work only according to the natural law.
