Tag Archives: John Keats

A Way of Seeing

A Way of Seeing: Perception, Imagination, and Poetry by John Allison, the 2003 first edition paperback from Lindisfarne, is part of the collection at the Reading Room.

John Allison A- Way of Seeing from Lindisfarne

“We usually think of imagination as a fanciful, whimsical faculty that has little to do with reality and truth. This beautifully written little book by the poet John Allison shows how ordinary imagination can be intensified to become an organ of cognition — a path of development to real knowing.

John Allison shows how poetry — poetic knowing and seeing — can reveal aspects of the world invisible to science. Three lucid chapters describe the path to true imagination, where attention is the key. First we must practice is, then we must become aware of the processes involved in it. Learning to experience ‘poise,’ we must come to terms with the shadow — all that says ‘No’ in us. The combination of attention, equanimity, and assent opens the world in a new way.

Allison then examines how poets have actually developed and practiced the kind of ‘deep seeing’ that ‘image work’ involves. For this he draws on Shakespeare, Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Goethe, Novalis, Ruskin, Hopkins, Rilke, and Octavio Paz.

The book concludes with a sequence of the author’s own poems that exemplify the philosophy and practice he has been unfolding.” — back cover

 

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II. His Ruling Symbols from The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry in Ideas of Good and Evil by William Butler Yeats.

“In ancient times, it seems to me that Blake, who for all his protest was glad to be alive, and ever spoke of his gladness, would have worshipped in some chapel of the Sun, and that Keats, who accepted life gladly though ‘with a delicious diligent indolence,’ would have worshipped in some chapel of the Moon, but that Shelley, who hated life because he sought ‘more in life than any understood,’ would have wandered, lost in a ceaseless reverie, in some chapel of the Star of infinite desire.” [via]

II. His Ruling Symbols from The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry in Ideas of Good and Evil by William Butler Yeats.

“It may have been this memory, or it may have been some impulse of his nature too subtle for his mind to follow, that made Keats, with his love of embodied things, of precision of form and colouring, of emotions made sleepy by the flesh, see Intellectual Beauty in the Moon; and Blake, who lived in that energy he called eternal delight, see it in the Sun, where his personification of poetic genius labours at a furnace.” [via]