Imagination is not to avoid reality, nor is it description nor an evocation of objects or situations, it is to say that poetry does not tamper with the world but moves it - It affirms reality most powerfully and therefore, since reality needs no personal support but exists free from human action, as proven by science in the indestructibility of matter and of force, it creates a new object, a play, a dance which is not a mirror up to nature but -

As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.

Perfect as is the wing of a bird, it never could raise the bird up without resting on air. Facts are the air of a scientist. Without them you never can fly. Without them your "theories" are vain efforts.

Words are the mind's wings, are they not?

Words Are Wind

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

Informer: My friend, I am asking you for wings, not for words. Pisthetaerus: It's just my words that gives you wings. Informer: And how can you give a man wings with your words? Pisthetaerus: They all start this way. [...] Informer: So that words give wings? Pisthetaerus: Undoubtedly; words give wings to the mind and make a man soar to heaven. Thus I hope that my wise words will give you wings to fly to some less degrading trade. (tr. O'Neill 1938, Perseus)

Words are mighty, words are living: Serpents with their venomous stings, Or bright angels, crowding round us, With heaven's light upon their wings: Every word has its own spirit, True or false, that never dies; Every word man's lips have uttered Echoes in God's skies.

Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom.
How do they learn it?
They fall and falling,
they're given wings.

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

For the birds who own nothing — the reason they can fly.

Words have weight.

By words the mind is winged.

Words are wind.

I understand the power and the alarm of words –
Not those that they applaud from theatre-boxes,
but those which make coffins break from bearers
and on their four oak legs walk right away.