The Virtual Coffeehouse

I actually have a bumper sticker on the back of my car with a quote by Albert Einstein which says, "Imagination is more important than knowledge". I feel that both works contain messages that touch upon a very similar idead to that of the Einstein quote. Pater emphasizes the importance of desire for knowledge and the need to question and theorize in order to make the most of the elements that touch our lives - be it art, literature, or general current events. At the same time, he also discusses the importance of creating one's own perceptions/ideas regarding new information that a person comes in contact with. However, forming a personal understanding of new information is impossible without the ability to think divergently or creatively... After all, some of the best innovations in just about any field take place when someone is able to think outside the box. If a person solely uses the knowledge that he/she has about something without considering other options, what are the chances of creating something new? Similarly, Rossetti points out that once a sonnet is written, there are many ways to interpert it depending on how the reader chooses to see the words. The same set of words can be applied to completely different circumstances (such as life and death, day and night) - that is the beauty of a piece of writing. Even thinking about our own interpertations of poetry when we do annotations for homework - everyone seems to have a different way of looking between the lines. What is important to remember is that there is no way for us to go back and ask the writers what they meant to convey (i.e. to gain knowledge), rather we have to rely on our own perception of the words to compose an idea regarding a possible message (that is, use our imagination).