This paper argues that imagination is not merely a psychological faculty but a poetic one—that is, a formative, world-disclosing power that operates through figuration, narrative, and aesthetic form. Drawing on Romantic, phenomenological, and poststructuralist traditions (Coleridge, Bachelard, Ricoeur, and Iser), the paper traces how imagination mediates between sensation and signification, absence and presence. It concludes that the poetics of imagination is fundamentally an ethics of world-making: the capacity to reconfigure reality through symbolic action.
The imagination does not require a blank canvas; it requires a lens. Poetics is the process of defamiliarization—taking a common chair, a bowl of fruit, or the sound of rain and stripping away its utility. When we stop seeing a door as merely an "exit" and start seeing it as a "threshold" or a "waiting silence," we are engaging in poetic imagination. It transforms the world from a collection of objects into a collection of meanings. 2. The Logic of the Dream poetics of imagination
In the end, the poetics of imagination reminds us that art is not simply a reflection of reality, but a means of creating new realities, new worlds, and new possibilities. As we continue to explore and understand the poetics of imagination, we may uncover new and innovative ways to express ourselves, to connect with others, and to create a more vibrant, diverse, and imaginative culture. This paper argues that imagination is not merely
Wolfgang Iser extends poetics into reader-response theory. In The Act of Reading (1976), he argues that literary texts are structured with gaps (Leerstellen) that the reader’s imagination must fill. These indeterminacies are not defects but engines: each reader produces a different “virtual” object. The poetics of imagination becomes a performance —a game of perspective-taking and anticipation. The imagination does not require a blank canvas;
Your personal "dream-version" of a place is as valid as its GPS coordinates.