We had a discussion centered largely around Shelley, who defines poetry in his Defense as "the expression of the imagination.", which is itself greater than reason. This is coming from the Romantic standpoint, where everything is an emanation of the divine reality. The Romantics were heavily influenced by Neo-Platonism, which arose in the Renaisance(under the foundation of Platonus) as a contimuation of the ideas of the "good" Plato(not the "bad" one who wanted to banish poets from the Republic).

We have the two opposing views of the world, the Romantic and the the realist, embodied in the personages of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. But they are not simply contrasted opposites; they learn from each other and are inextricably bound together, Sancho buying into the Knight's fantasies(or the idea behind them) and Don Quixote displaying great rationality and practicality at moments when you would least expect him to.

I also have decided to check out Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium , which Frye refers to often and which is apparently rather brilliant.

And I rather loved, or was intrigued and heartened by, the notion that the more original a poet is, the more they imitate and borrow. Feeling a malaise of not being able to perfectly come up with something ex nihilo when I write poems, suddenly I'm confronted with the oddly epiphanic notion: mabye this is okay. Just maybe.(really since one of my favorite movies is Baz Lurhmann's Moulin Rouge its rather obtuse of me not to have realized this sooner). Because everything is due to some extant with what has come before, and the more one acknowledges this, the more freed up one is enabled to be. Somewhat paradoxical but there we are?