‘Water of time’
Long before modern neurology confirmed it, the English poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850) intuited that our sensory perceptions are not passively recorded, but that we construct the experience as we experience it [1]. He, who used to write his poems in the garden of Dove Cottage, defined the essence of poetry as an “emotion remembered in tranquility” [2]. His great contribution to modern aesthetics will be the enhancement of the imagination, which arises when the physical eye is deactivated and contemplates with “that power that owes nothing to sight” [3]. It is then that the poet is able to see beyond appearances and explore his inner worlds.
