if you really vividly experience a concrete human life, imagine what it's like to live that life, and at the same time permit yourself the full range of emotional responses to that concrete life, you will (if you have at all a good moral start) be unable to do certain things to that person. Vividness leads to tenderness, imagination to compassion.... See more

s stressed, the Kantian aesthetic experience entails a harmonic interplay between the imagination and our understanding. In this process, the imagination generates all kinds of associations invoked by the feelings an object, the literary work in this case, inspires in us.

When separated from practical, prosaic language, poetry — literature — as a medium works according to its own laws. Accordingly, literature does not in the first place have to represent or mean anything, although reference and signification are inescapable: it has to be .