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Home  »  The World’s Best Poetry  »  Imagination

Bliss Carman, et al., eds. The World’s Best Poetry. 1904.

Poems of Fancy: I. The Imagination

Imagination

William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

From “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Act V. Sc. 1.

THE LUNATIC, the lover, and the poet

Are of imagination all compact:

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,

That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,

Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.