"The poet's activity in creating a poem is analogous to God's activity in creating man after his own image."  So said Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the leading British Romantics of the nineteenth century.  Like many of the Romantics, Coleridge understood that this world is more than nuts and bolts, and that the human being is more than the mind and the technology it creates.  In contrast to the material inventiveness of the Industrial Revolution, Coleridge and his fellow Romantics aimed for the creative activity of the heart.  It was the imagination, they averred, that is the most important thing, for it is the imagination that enables a person to soar above her present world and touch what is in the end far more important, the transcendent, maybe even God.
     So the Romantics wrote their poetry, striving to not merely make but create, to bring into being what had not been before, to give life to a presence for which life did not previously exist; in other words, to emulate the creator God.  Although none of the Romantics claimed to be God, most of them grasped his importance in making sense of this temporal world.  They realized that the world's wonder was as much the result of material cause and effect as the irruptive power of an omniscient creator God.  They recognized that even if we eventually identify the precise way in which the universe began, we have only begun to tap the full power of the divine imagination out of which all it has come.  To appear by random occurrence is one thing; to be created is another thing altogether.
     It's a mighty imagination.