The Limits of Imagination

Book excerpt: This subtle, tightly woven study treats the dialectical relation s hip of imagination and reality in three major poets and, through them, in the poetry of the past two centuries. Professor Regueiro traces the modern poet's attempt to balance imagination and reality, his withdrawal from the external and absorption in self-consciousness, and his ultimate recognition of the temporal and the natural as the only realms where the imagination may survive. Through her study of Wordsworth, Yeats, and Stevens, she envisions the modern poet as he comes to recognize the dangers and the limits of the imagination in his dealings wit h the real world and to accept and affirm the tensions that allow poetry to exist.