Today, we often think of imagination as something individual and insubstantial – a personal process giving rise to notions from ‘subjective’ sources. But traditionally, imagination is something very different: it is a faculty of vision and comprehension rising from deep springs, and one that deserves nurture and training.

Yeats spoke of a ‘singing school’ where the human soul could contemplate ‘monuments of its own magnificence’. He found his own ‘school’ in Indian thought, Theosophy, the Kabbalah, and especially in the art and poetry of William Blake, as well as in Irish legend and tradition. Kathleen Raine in turn, in her studies of Blake and Yeats and her later contact with India, took up this ‘golden string’ enabling her to enrich individual poetic imagination by contact with a universal tradition. This lecture will explore some of these pathways and suggest how ‘the learning of the imagination’ may be valuable in today’s world.

GREVEL LINDOP was Professor of Romantic and Early Victorian Studies at Manchester University. He is the author of six collections of poems and has written biographies of Thomas De Quincey and of Charles Williams (the Arthurian poet and Oxford ‘Inkling’). He is currently writing W.B. Yeats: The Mystical Life, for publication by Oxford University Press. He has taught Buddhist meditation in the Samatha tradition for more than forty years and currently chairs the Temenos Academic Board.

His website is at www.grevel.co.uk

Venue & Admission

St George the Martyr, Holborn, 44 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AH. Doors Open 6.40pm, Lecture Begins 7pm

£10 General Admission or FREE for Temenos Academy Members/Full-time students with student ID card