On Imagination

“An Essay on Man: Epistle II” by Alexander Pope (1733)

Pope is one of the British Neoclassical poets whom Wheatley admired and whose poetics she studied. Here, he offers an important counterargument to Wheatley’s celebration of the imagination and the power it has to command and direct both the intellect and the heart. Pope dismisses the imagination (what he terms “enthusiasm”) as dangerous and inelegant and deems those who find refuge in its made-up worlds bitter and weak willed.

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats (1819)

Reflecting Wheatley’s fragile faith in the sheer power of the imagination to craft protective spaces that resist the erosion of time and defy the real-time world, Keats contemplates an elegant urn that he sees in a museum and realizes how the characters depicted on the urn have long since died. Yet, having been captured by the artist, they enjoy a kind of immortality.

“I Dwell in Possibility” by Emily Dickinson (c. 1862)

Another New England poet with whom Wheatley shares a great deal, Dickinson here reflects on the power of her imagination to conjure artificial worlds that are as sturdy, reliable, and “there” as the real world.