"Literature is too big . . ."

-£fc "Literature is too big . . . Elizabeth Sevvell n *r Literature is too big a classifying term for my comfort; and of medicine I know only what everybody knows. I would like to scale down and shift over, into poetry and body ¡mind. Here enters the imagination. That used to be considered as existing and working where that slash goes, weaving body/mind together, and it is from the imagination that poetry draws its life. Do we in some profound sense imagine ourselves into health or into sickness? Possibly poetry, which "brings the whole soul of man into activity," could tell us something about this, even instruct us in healthful ways. . . . sure a poet is a sage; A humanist, physician to all men, one of us says, yet keeps repeating "sure" in that same passage, as if no* sure. If poetry can throw light on the imagination and its ways, that in turn might illuminate how the individual spirit shapes, directs, destroys its mortal appearance; might rub out the outworn notion of mind here, body there; might tell us more about the activities of the brain's right hemisphere, and offer methods for its exploration and that of other such areas where our narrow analytic modes—all we know and all we have been taught to trust in—are plainly inappropriate. Poetry as an active and a limiting discipline could both inspire and set helpful bounds to what follows from this—the need to go back and relearn from those who knew more about imagination and its various workings than we do now. Individuals come to mind, Bruno, Ficino, Paracelsus, and whole cultures that seem to have known how to cure their sick by the methods we know—regimen, drugs, surgery—but knew also how to use dreams, music, being in a place of beauty, attendance at a stage performance of some great tragedy, the doctrine and discipline of high magic. I think poetry could be of help with imaginative method in living and dying—put it that way. Literature and Medicine 1 (Rev. ed., 1992) 39 ) 1992 by The Johns Hopkins University Press ...