The Pleasures of Imagination by Joseph Addison

Hello Readers!

Frank Kermode, author of The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction wrote in the beginning of the book citing William Blake,

"[...] then the Last Judgment begins, & its vision is seen by the imaginative eye of every one according to the situation he holds."

- W. Blake

Why do we imagine things? Why do we rescue our soul from the reality and plunge ourselves into fantastic world? Does our imagination hold any control in our real life?

Well these are the questions which are open for interpretations and can be answered in various ways.

To quote two paragraphs from the original text,

"Our imagination loves to be filled with an object, or to grasp at anything that is too big for its capacity. We are flung into a pleasing astonishment at such unbounded views, and feel a delightful stillness and amazement in the soul at the apprehension of them." (Addison, 19)

"The mind of man naturally hates everything that looks like a restraint upon it, and its apt to fancy itself under a sort of confinement, when the sight is pent up in a narrow compass, and is shortened on every side by the neighborhood of walls of mountains. On the contrary, spacious horizon is an image of liberty, where the eye has room to range abroad, to expatiate at large on the immensity of its views, and to lose itself amidst the variety of objects that offer themselves to its observation. such wide and undetermined prospects are as pleasing to the fancy, as the speculations of eternity or infinitude, are to the understanding." (Addison, 19)

Thank You!

Work Cited

Addison, Joseph. Essays on the Pleasures of the Imagination. 1828.

J.M., Das B. Literary Criticism. 1993.

Kermode, F. The sense of an ending: Studies in the theory of fiction with a new epilogue. Oxford University Press, USA, 2000.