On Imagination

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1773

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

“On Imagination” is executed in a form that reveals the conflict at the emotional heart of Wheatley herself.

As with the iconic works of the Neoclassical era that the young Wheatley studied—most notably John Dryden, John Milton, and Alexander Pope—the poem, given its weighty subject matter, nothing less than the workings of the imagination itself, expresses its argument in the expected chiseled restraint of the heroic couplet. For most of the poem, the poet maintains decorum appropriate to the most respected poetry of her era by expressing the grandeur of the imagination in lines that are patterned and regular.

Although the stanza length varies, the heroic couplet maintains the poem’s formal coherence: pairs of lines with end rhymes most often executed in iambic pentameter, that is, lines with 10 syllables, or five two-beat units per line.

The exception is the closing stanza. As if to signal her resistance to the constraints and rules of this European model and express her yearning for freedom, the last stanza, while sculpted and measured, rejects the tight format inherited in the heroic couplet.

The rhymes are more scattered moving to the defiant closing couplet that dares not to rhyme at all; line length is skewed, and rhythmic patterns shift from five to four two-unit beats, all under the confident control of the poet herself. The form then declares its own quiet independence as Wheatley declares her own private emancipation. Even as the poem concedes that the imagination cannot stand up to the real world, even as the poem documents the surrender of the imagination, the form slyly celebrates the poet’s liberation.

Personification

Like love, jealousy, and ambition, the imagination is a difficult and abstract concept to define. How exactly does the imagination work? How does it direct a sensitive and responsive individual to create something that speaks to so many others and ultimately endures for centuries?

Personification is a rhetorical strategy in which a writer helps share an understanding of some difficult and often mysterious abstract, in this case the “Fancy” (Line 9), by giving that abstract entity characteristics that are recognizably human.

Wheatley uses personification techniques to demystify the energy of the imagination and the experience of the poet within its compelling urgency. Here, for instance, the imagination becomes human, a person able to create artifacts with its “potent […] hand” (Line 4); at another point, the imagination is personified as some elegant and awe-inspiring bird, able to soar around and ultimately far above the concrete real world to find subjects worthy of being translated into art. The imagination roves—its “wand’ring eyes” (Line 10) cast about reality. The fancy soars as if on wings like some powerful bird, soaring above the ordinary world. Ultimately, the poet draws on the familiar cultural figure of the queen to suggest the imperial power of the imagination and how, from its “throne” (Line 37) and with its “sceptre” (Line 36), the imagination rules the intellect and the heart.

Using the technique of personification, the poem makes vivid and immediate what is otherwise an abstract entity.

Diction

Diction refers to the language that poets use to convey their thoughts. Thirty years or so before the first-generation British Romantics would introduce the idea that poetry should reflect the speech of ordinary folks, Neoclassical poets aimed to create highly artificial lines that dazzled, impressed, and generated admiration for the mastery of language itself. Poets disdained the vocabulary and sentence structures of ordinary speech as unrefined. Poems elevated language into a kind of sumptuous impressiveness that testified to the skill of the poet-artisan and in turn made reading poetry an experience of aesthetic pleasure.

“On Imagination” reflects this protocol. The poem uses apostrophe, a convention in which the poet directly addresses an abstract entity, in this case the imagination itself. The vocabulary is elevated—it uses “refulgent” (Line 5) instead of “bright,” “pinions” (Lines 17, 41) instead of “wings,” “mental optics” (Line 19) instead of “sight,” “empyreal” (Line 16) instead of “heavenly,” and “tempests” (Line 51) instead of “storms.” The poem uses the lofty second-person address (“thy”) in addressing the imagination, and it uses idiosyncratic capitalization to emphasize critical terms. In addition, the poem draws on numerous mythological allusions—Helicon, Sylvanus, Flora, Tithonus, and Aurora. The poet also takes liberties with syllable constructs to maintain the integrity of the poem’s rhythm: “wond’rous” (Line 3), “lov’d” (Line 10), “th’” (Lines 17, 23, 41), “thund’ring” (Line 17), and “o’erflows” (Line 46). This artificial diction creates a sense of epic grandeur and import about the poem’s subject.