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This vigor of flight in the poet, bearing on his wing the reader, whom
he ushers to new, sudden vistas, is a test of poetic genius. Some
poets never carry you to heights, but rather make you feel while
reading them as if you were moving through shut-in valleys: their
verse wants sky. They are not poetically imaginative, are not strung
for those leaps which the great poet at times finds it impossible not
to make. They have more poetic fancy than poetic imagination. Poetic
fancy is a thin flame kindled deliberately with gathered materials;
poetic imagination is an intense flash born unexpectedly of
internal collisions. Fancy is superficial and comparatively
short-sighted; imagination is penetrative and far-sighted, bringing
together things widely sundered, apparently diverse and opposite.
Fancy divides, individualizes; imagination compounds, builds, globes.
Fancy is not so broad or so keen or so warm or so bounding as
imagination; is comparatively tame and cold and quiet. Imagination is
synthetical. Large exhibitions of poetic imagination are rare even in
the greatest poets. At its best it strikes deep into the nature of
things, has a celestial quality which invests it with awe.
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