“The power of poetry is, by a single word perhaps, to instill that energy into the mind which compels the imagination to produce the picture.”

The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge gave a series of lectures on Shakespeare in 1811-1812. In this particular lecture, Coleridge says that he considers The Tempest to be “among the ideal” plays because it “appeals to the imagination.”  Coleridge believes that Shakespeare does this by inserting “some touch or other which … Read More

“The sort of strenuous reading and writing program I advocate — four to six hours a day, every day — will not seem strenuous if you really enjoy doing these things…”

kingNot since Charles Dickens has a writer had so many readers “by the throat,” observed a British review of this classic by Stephen King. Having sold more than 350 million books, King could be considered an expert at many things, perhaps chiefly at developing and maintaining a vivid imagination. The … Read More

“The problem is not so much that the world limits your imagination, as your imagination limits the world.”

knausgaard cropped 3This is the third of six volumes of memoir about the world and the imagination of Karl Ove Knausgaard.  It’s a new kind of writing that defies categorization and is driven be the desire to explore the truth. For Knausgaard, “the truth” includes the things that he is ashamed of … Read More