...extremely licensed,0 and doth truly refer to the Imagination; which, being not tied to the laws of matrer, may at pleasure join that which nature hath severed,...and divorces of things: 'Pictoribus atque poetis, &c.'0 It is taken in two senses, in respect of words or matrer. In the first sense it is but a character...

...everything but the laws of matter.43 This leaves a whole second realm free: poesy, imagination, "which, being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure...so make unlawful matches and divorces of things." The narrower science is, the freer is poetry, approaching in its freedom something like the divine...

...restrained, but in all other points extremely licensed, and doth truly refer to the Imagination; which, being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure...and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things [. . .].'." The key word here is 'unlawful'. The very creativity which Sidney found to distinguish...

...provinces of sense and reason (121). Poetry 'doth truly refer to the imagination, which, not being tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that...and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things' (89). After Bacon, there appears to be much concern in effecting the right balance between imagination...

...the Renaissance imagination in almost the very terms Johnson was later to use to condemn it: '[the imagination], being not tied to the laws of matter,...and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things' ('Poetry' 461). It was the unexpected, the anti-natural, the paradoxical on which, say, the emblem...