In the artist the difference between the time-bound ego and the imaginative state in which great things are done is even more sharply marked than it is in the ordinary man. The artist may be conceited, irritable, foolish or dishonest, but it makes no difference what he is: all that matters is his imagination. We speak of So‑and‑So “the Man,” meaning So‑and‑So when he is not being a poet; but it is only when So‑and‑So is using the imagination which is the “Real Man” and writing poetry that he is a man: the rest of the time he is on the ordinary Generation plane. That is why some of the greatest poets, Homer and Shakespeare for instance, hardly seem to have had a personal existence at all. They are inspired; that is, incarnations of the ability to write. As Blake goes on he becomes more and more impressed by the contrast between a man’s imagination, his real life as expressed in the total form of his creative acts, and his ordinary existence . . .
Hence it is a blunder to limit the meaning of art to what the artist may be presumed to have intended. The artist’s “intentions” are often on levels of consciousness quite unknown to himself. Some of these levels are subconscious and some superconscious: the latter may need the passing of centuries to clarify. The poet’s “Spectre” may be dull, wrong-headed or erratic: the plain meaning of his imagination the poet may perfectly well repudiate as a “man.” He is often a bad critic of his own work and is capable of saying inadequate and misleading things about it. . . .
The poet’s meaning, then, is often quite different from what he may think he thought he meant, and in any case it is cumulative. Few great poets would be able to understand the reason for their fame in the following century. The inference is that all genuine poetry is something quite separate from the person who wrote it. A poem is like a child, an independently living being not fully born until the navel-string has been cut.