# Creativity and imagination Berys Gaut **Opening (not a real abstract):** The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, Are of imagination all compact. One sees more devils than vast hell can hold; That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt. The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.1 Shakespeare, one might suppose, knew what he was talking about. In so closely linking the poet’s creative act to imagination he was giving expression to a belief long maintained in Western culture. It is a view most famously celebrated by the Romantic poets (and, as we shall see, by Kant, their rather unlikely progenitor). Shelley tells us that ‘Poetry, in a general sense, may be **Authors:** [[Berys Gaut]]