The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!"
[Footnote: _Midsummer Night's Dream_, v, i, 7-22.]

Shakspere, it will be observed, does not hesitate to use that dangerous
term "the poet!" Yet as students of poetry we must constantly bring
ourselves back to the recorded experience of individual men, and from
these make our comparisons and generalizations. It may even happen that
some readers will get a clearer conception of the selection and synthesis
of images if they turn for the moment away from poetry and endeavor to
realize something of the same processes as they take place in imaginative
prose. In Hawthorne's _Scarlet Letter_, for example, the dominant image,
which becomes the symbol of his entire theme, is the piece of scarlet
cloth which originally caught his attention. This physical object
becomes, after long brooding, subtly changed into a moral symbol of sin
and its concealment. It permeates the book, it is borne openly upon the
breast of one sufferer, it is written terribly in the flesh of another, it
flames at last in the very sky. All the lesser images and symbols of the
romance are mastered by it, subordinated to it; it becomes the dominant
note in the composition. The romance of _The Scarlet Letter_ is, as we say
of any great poem or drama, an "ideal synthesis"; i.e. a putting together
of images in accordance with some central idea. The more significant the
idea or theme or master image, the richer and fuller are the possibilities
of beauty in detail. Apply this familiar law of complexity to a poet's