The Purpose of the Imaginative Journey

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses the concept of the imaginative journey through Samuel Coleridge's poems, "Lime Tree Bower," "Frost at Midnight" and "Cover of Ivory Trail" and Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie." It explains how all of the texts assert the power of the imaginative journey in evoking the poetic, in moving beyond mere appearance, beyond exhausted realism, to provoke new insights into reality and creative processes.

From the Paper:

"The Glass Menagerie invites the reader on an imaginative journey. Williams' surrealist technique of magic lantern slides produces quite hazy, unfixed images, reinforcing Tom's assertion in his opening monologue that the play "is not realistic". Williams suggests a series of titles and images which evoke the evocative and illogical logic of dreams. For example, the images of blue roses at the beginning of scene 2- the projection of this surrealist image prior to any mention of 'blue roses' in the dialogue itself provokes the reader's imagination. However, when the image is finally referred to, the viewer's mind is likely to float back to the poetic image. Hence, Williams subverts the linear narrative and creates a strange, elliptical link between past and present moments. This technique is an attempt to engage the viewer in an imaginative journey to connect with reality in a more penetrating and fresh way and gain a more vivid understanding of things the way they are."

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