Imaginary Gardens
with Real Toads in Them

Process, Poetry, and Imaginative Feelings
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Photo by Thomas Oxford on Unsplash

This page is inspired by a poem called "Poetry" by Marianne Moore and, more particularly, by two phrases in the poem: "literalists of the imagination" and "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." Faith in God includes being a "literalist of the imagination" who experiences fresh possibilities for healing and wholeness as being as "real" in their ways as are real toads in imaginary gardens. The toads are already real as possibilities; our task is to help them become actualities. It is often said that God is the poet of the world. We are poets, too. When goodness emerges in the world, it begins with shared imagination: human, ecological, and divine.

- Jay McDaniel

Poetry

Marianne Moore - 1887-1972
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​I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
   it after all, a place for the genuine.
      Hands that can grasp, eyes
      that can dilate, hair that can rise
         if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
   useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the
   same thing may be said for all of us—that we
      do not admire what
      we cannot understand. The bat,
         holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
   a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base--
   ball fan, the statistician—case after case
      could be cited did
      one wish it; nor is it valid
         to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
   however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,
   nor till the autocrats among us can be
     “literalists of
      the imagination”—above
         insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have
   it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion--
   the raw material of poetry in
      all its rawness, and
      that which is on the other hand,
         genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

​Marianne Moore's "Poetry"

by Robert Pinsky in Slate

​Click here for entire essay.

I've never been completely sure what I think about Marianne Moore's celebrated poem "Poetry." Apparently, Moore had similar feelings—revising the poem many times across the span of five decades.

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One of the most striking moments in the poem is the phrase "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," a formulation Moore sets off with quotation marks even though, as far as I know, no one has ever identified a source. I suspect that Moore invented the image but, finding it a little too pat or studied, tempered and complicated her line by pretending it was a quotation.

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Moore, as I understand her project, champions both clarity and complexity, rejecting the shallow notion that they are opposites. Scorning a middlebrow reduction of everything into easy chunks, she also scorns obfuscation and evasive cop-outs. Tacitly impatient with complacency and bluffing, deriding the flea-bitten critic, unsettling the too-ordinary reader, she sets forth an art that is irritable, attentive, and memorably fluid.

​Literalists of the Imagination:

Real Toads in Imaginary Gardens


​a process response to Marianne Moore's "Poetry"

Literalists of the imagination see real toads in imaginary gardens. Their critics might say that the toads aren't real, but the literalists know that the toads are real, albeit as possibilities not actualities. 

At one level literalists of the imagination are misguided. They take literally what others interpret figuratively. They are dreamers.

And yet these literalists realize, more than others, that possible toads are real, too. Such toads may not make decisions; they may not have emotions of their own. In this sense they lack actuality. But possible toads can be felt and known in the imagination quite apart from whether or not they are. I

In process thought a possible toad in an imaginary garden is a real possibility and in that sense a real toad: an object of imaginative feeling. Literalists of the imagination feel such objects with an intensity, a palpability, that parallels feelings of the actual world.

To be sure, literalists can be deluded in destructive ways. Our world has far too many conspiracy theorists who are literalists of the imagination, and their theories do great harm to many.  But literalists of the imagination can also do great good if their imagined objects are, in fact, real possibilities for healing and wholeness. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a "dream" well worth taking seriously: a dream of beloved community. This kind of community was, for him, a real toad in imaginary garden.

In Whitehead's philosophy imaginative feelings are propositions or "lures for feeling" that are integrated with physical feelings of the actual world. The feeling is imaginative because the predicate of the proposition is derived from some other source than the physical feeling. The physical feeling provides what Whitehead calls the logical subject, and the other source provides what he calls the predicative pattern. Together they form a contrast which elicits what he calls an intuitive judgment. The subjective form (emotional tone) of the judgement can be "belief" or "disbelief" or "suspended judgement."

Imagine seeing an actual toad on the sidewalk and then creating in your mind an imaginary garden with an imaginary toad. You feel the imaginary toad with the same emotion (belief) that characterized your feeling of the actual toad. You "believe" that the imaginary toad is "real" - almost as if it were the actual toad.

At one level you are wrong; you've made a mistake. But imagine further that your "imaginary toad" is not a toad at all, but a beloved community; and you truly believe in its possibility, perhaps based on feelings you've had of actual love in an actual world. Your belief gives you the power to work toward this kind of community. An imaginative feeling like this gives you the strength to work for the good. You are a literalist of the imagination.

In process theology even God is this kind of literalist. Even God has imaginative feelings that feel "real" to God. These possibilities are God's callings, and we humans, at our best, feel them at the same time God feels them. They are "real toads" jointly felt. God's desire is that we, too, become literalists of the imagination.

This kind of literalism is not optimism but rather faith. It is trust that, if we take the real possibilities seriously, they can be actualized in the world. We can turn imaginary toads into real toads. To have faith in God is dwell in possibility as well as actuality. It is to have faith in imaginary gardens that have real toads in them.

- Jay McDaniel

God and the Imagination
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I believe that divine imagination is filled with wild possibilities for what we process thinkers call "creative transformation." In fact, my theology suggests that God is the source of freshness, the reservoir of novelty, the loving and imaginative Spirit that resides in all creation. But few among us dare to engage such a Spirit of far-fetched dreams and improbable visions, for it can seem risky or unpopular or simply too outlandish for our stunted imaginations. And yet, when we do act on these persuasive lures from divine imagination, we catch a glimpse of the surprising resilience of goodness. It is the story of Easter all over again. Goodness never leaves us forever; it just gets reborn in fresh forms.

My own spiritual imagination suggests that we are co-creators with a divine architect to build and re-build a world of love, justice, and beauty. But we can never restore the world exactly, for we are always inspired by fresh imagination bubbling out of the present moment. This is the meaning of creative transformation: not a wrecking ball of all that is past, but a loving repair of what is broken, transformed into fresh realms of evolving beauty.

- Patricia Adams Farmer

About Marianne Moore. Click here.
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"Marianne Moore was an American modernist poet, born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in 1887. She is known for her unique style, which often combined elements of free verse, formalism, and colloquial language. Her poetry frequently addressed themes of nature, animals, and the human experience, and she often incorporated vivid, intricate imagery and metaphorical language. Moore's work was highly regarded by her contemporaries, including T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams, and she received numerous awards and honors throughout her lifetime, including the Pulitzer Prize. Moore was also an editor, serving as an associate editor of The Dial, a literary magazine, and she was a vocal advocate for poetry, championing the importance of poetic language and its ability to convey complex emotions and ideas. She passed away in 1972 but her legacy continues to inspire and influence poets today." - chatGPT