Northrup Frye: Imagination Trumps Experience

No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us.  Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself.  It seems to be very difficult for many people to understand the reality and intensity of literary experience.  To give an example that you may think a bit irrelevant: why have so many people managed to convince themselves that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare's plays, when there is not on atom of evidence that anybody else did?  Apparently because they feel that poetry must be written out of personal experience, and that Shakespeare didn't have enough experience of the right kind.  But Shakespeare's plays weren't produced by his experience: they were produced by his imagination, and the way to develop the imagination is to read a good book or two.

--Northrup Frye, from his The Educated Imagination
(emphasis, mine)

Let's all "read a good book or two" . . . this week.  And the same the following week.  Imagine what greatness, what expansion of experience, what increased depth and breadth of imagination . . . therein awaits.