The problem of belief in literature.

Abstract

The writing of imaginative literature is a creative activity and a function of what Coleridge calls the “Esemplastiv Imagination” ; a unifying process, creating a synthesis out of the welter of sense perceptions,associations, ideas, attitudes, volitions, and imaginative experiences of the human mind. As Shakespeare says, the poet gives to “airy nothing”,in the sense of vague and confused feelings and thoughts, “a local habitation and a name”.