Thursday, January 25, 2007

Willing Suspension of Disbelief (for the moment)


"I can't believe that!" said Alice.

"Can't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tome. "Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes."

Aliced laughed. "There's no use trying," she said. "One can't believe impossible things."

"I dare say you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."


Alice Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll



The title, however, comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817).

"In this idea originated the plan of the 'Lyrical Ballads'; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. "

1 comment:

Huckleberry said...

And poetry, of course, as classically understood, is the language of the divine...