Bliss Carman, et al., eds. The World’s Best Poetry. 1904.
Poems of Fancy: I. The ImaginationImagination
William Shakespeare (15641616)From “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Act V. Sc. 1.
T
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.