Keats's Secret: Exploring the Real Power of the Imagination

If you live under a rock like I do, you may have missed out on the phenomenon that is The Secret, an uber-popular film (turned book) by Australian writer and producer Rhonda Byrne. I know, I know. How could I resist opening one of those faux-parchment paperbacks with the "secret" emanating toward me in glossy beams of light? Well, curiosity finally got the better of me this week. If you don't know already, The Secret claims that "people's feelings and thoughts attract real events in the world into their lives; from the workings of the cosmos to interactions among individuals in their physical, emotional, and professional affairs." More simply: if you imagine something you want hard enough, it happens.

In a materialistic twist, the film actually encourages people to use this imaginative power to get rich and collect stuff they want. As Reason's Greg Beato put it, for Secret believers, "The universe is a giant vibrating ATM, ready to shower you with new cars, fine jewelry, unexpected checks in the mail, and magical sunsets." Byrne herself admitted that her inspiration for the film came from a book called The Science of Getting Rich Quick.

No, this is not your daddy's New Age philosophy. I miss those days. When I was in college, a girl approached me at a coffee shop convinced that I had something to tell her. I tried to laugh it off, but she insisted that I was supposed to be some sort of guide. You see, she'd been reading The Celestine Prophecy. I could have given her a dead-serious look and told her to go to Machu Picchu and wait for Miguel, but I ended up offering advice so banal I can't even remember what it was.

Some guru I would be.

Anyway, according to Byrne, the Secret isn't something she invented. It has been known to certain highly successful people throughout history. Her list of "keepers" includes Plato, Einstein and Alexander Graham Bell(!) but is surprisingly bereft of great writers. Honestly, if the guy who may have invented the telephone made the list, how about a poet or two?

In fact, long before Byrne had ever been thought up, the English poet John Keats was exploring the power of the imagination. In a letter to a friend, Keats famously wrote: "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affection and the truth of Imagination--what the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth--whether it existed before or not..." Keats didn't think that the imagination could create, say, money or a woman, but it could create beauty--and he was certain that beauty, even when imagined, is real.

Whether you agree or not, the beauty you imagine can certainly spill into and impact your reality. I experienced this idea firsthand a few years back when I had a dream about a friend of mine. I'd never been attracted to her before, but in the dream I was, and when I woke up I was still attracted. The beauty I'd imagined had changed the way I really felt. We even ended up dating. How'd it go? Let's just say that was the last time I let my imagination set me up.

Keats explores this phenomenon in some of his poems. In "The Eve of St. Agnes," Madeline, a young heroine, is dreaming of her lover Porphyro when the real Porphyro wakes her up. Madeline finds that her imagination has changed the way she feels about the real Porphyro, who's now a little disappointing:

"Ah Porphyro! said she, "but even now

Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear...

How changed thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear!"

She implores him to act more like the man she'd been dreaming of:

"Give me that voice again, my Porphyro,

Those looks immortal, those complainings dear!"

In Keats's ballad "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," a traveler comes across a "haggard" and "woe begone" knight, whose reality has been shattered by a beautiful woman who lures men in and traps them. She seems to exist somewhere between reality and a dream:

"I saw pale kings, and princes too,

Pale warriors, death pale were they all;

they cried--La belle dame sans merci

Hath thee in thrall.

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,

With horrid warning gaped wide,

And I awoke and found me here,

On the cold hill's side."

Why is this important? When we explore how the imagination impacts real life, we explore the potential power of art. Because instead of coming from a dream, couldn't the imaginative spark come from a novel, a poem, or even a movie? It's something to think about. That is, when you're not thinking really hard about the promotion and the Jaguar you want.

For more on Keats, take a look at John Lundberg's Poem of the Week blog

Comments

[Collielady]

Here's an alternative mental exercise:

Focus on all we HAVE and the needs will diminish while wants all but disappear.

[Norge]

Enjoyed Keat's work.

[godlessclif]

" They will explain themselves - as all poems should do without any comment."
John Keats to his brother George, 1818

But oh we love to talk about them!
To explain what they do to us.

[kellygrrrl]

silly, John, dreaming of a Jaguar is so passe

now, a Gulfstream G550, that's dreamin'

and *POOF* oh, goody, fire up the jets, honey, we're off

[SamThornton]

Or, as the late Mother Goose once opined:

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
If turnips were watches, I would wear one by my side.
And if "ifs" and "ands"
Were pots and pans,
There'd be no work for tinkers!

[rabun666]

This is not a new concept especially for the pretend christian-churchianity-religionists and their phony preachers, the Biblical Harlots, with their false doctrines, which are the fornications of the Bible. They beg from their congregations of fools that for each $ they donate their god will reward each $1 ten fold.They do this on TV. The fools believe this and the concept is not lost on con artists of every kind. The manifestation of the imagination is not restricted however and those things imagined and not wanted are manifest as well. That's why the proverb which advises to not think about what you don't want to have happen means. For the most part the concept has been used most successfully by con artists to separate others from their money with preachers being the most flagrant con artists to use this technique. In all likelihood those who think they will be rewarded 10 fold by god because of what some preacher told them to give Him money have also imagined being conned out of their money and this is what has manifested, being conned out of their money.

[unimpossible]

"except I don't know how to do it."

KNOW thy SELF ... and BE thy SELF ... NOW

[AitchD]

It helps to look at Keats's craft in La Belle Dame sans Merci, how he transforms the ballad stanza while pointing to the transformed knight in the first three stanzas.

The first two lines of each stanza point to the knight's condition in overwrought language:

O what can ail thee, knight at arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake
And no birds sing

and

O what can ail thee, Knight at arms,
So haggard, and so woebegone?
The squirrel's granary is full
And the harvest's done.

But the third and fourth lines of those stanzas point to the external and natural world in blunt, unpoetic words, although the effect is astounding and rightfully famous.

This technique in the first two stanzas must suggest to us the two kinds of worlds: the natural, external world present to our senses, and that other world, interior, sentimental, intellectual, emotional, artistic -- the imaginative world. We sometimes simplify: the physical and the nonphysical. These juxtaposed kinds of images, presented early and repeated, remove any doubt about their emphasis here in the poem. The third stanza appears similar with its continued address to the knight, but no question is asked this time, and all four lines lose the previous rhetorical separateness:

I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever dew,
And on thy cheek a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

Now Keats has added symbol, he has reduced the artificial versification, eliminated the blunt and plain English, and most startling, he has transferred the natural world from the surroundings to the knight. The speaker sees real things now, but the language is different. The imagination has been engaged -- the speaker's and ours -- a transformation has taken place, and we are both prepared for the knight's reply about his own transformation.

Keats would delve much further into the location of the imagination in his Ode on a Grecian Urn, which he perhaps literally entered -- that is, the location of the imagination, when he developed that ode's fourth stanza. Yikes, I just got shivers again!

[lisakaz]

Having visited the Keats museum in Rome, I LOVE the fact that you have found reason to cite him (I don't know the film). I sure would like to imagine a happy ending for myself, except I don't know how to do it.

[silentlotus]

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Indigo Silence

The
Indigo
Of silence
Draws me near
Its kiss is innocence
The beyond is
Here

silent lotus

©from the archive Listening To Love
www.silentlotus.net
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