2014-03-31



From a 1977 interview with Richard Wilbur, as found at the Paris Review:

Interviewer: 
You have said, “I do think that there is nothing more dangerous to the imagination than fantasy.” Many people would equate the two things. Could you elaborate on that? 

Wilbur: 
To me, the imagination is a faculty that fuses things, takes hold of the physical and ideal worlds and makes them one, provisionally. Fantasy, in my mind, is a poetic or artistic activity that leaves something out—it ignores the concrete and the actual in order to create a purely abstract, unreal realm. If we think of fantasy at its least dignified, non-artistic level, this becomes obvious. Sexual reverie very clearly leaves something out, and that something is the physical object of one's desire.



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