In this poem, Elizabeth Barrett Browning lays out a complex and sometimes contradictory vision of imagination. Her speaker fantasizes about the addressee in order to feel close when they are apart, but those fantasies can overtake the reality of the lover's personhood and create distance rather than closeness. Moreover, while imagination lends the speaker a degree of additional agency, it also can feel burdensome and restrictive rather than liberating. In recent years, both popular conceptions and scientific understandings of imaginative life have shifted, highlighting the importance and intricacy of this mental process and the way that it can influence, and be influenced by, perception.
The speaker in Browning's poem is troubled by the way that her imagination can get ahead of her, seemingly spiraling out of control. New studies on imagination reveal that the balance between vivid imagination and disciplined control of imagination plays an important role in creativity. In one study, researchers asked participants to think of creative uses for various objects while their brains were observed by MRI technology. They discovered that both the brain's "default network," used for imaginative processes, and the brain's "executive network," used in controlling attention, were at work during these creative tasks. This research offers evidence that creativity involves both using the imagination, and controlling the imagination by distributing attention. However, early in their task, participants primarily used the default network—meaning that they required a period of freer imagination in order to begin thinking creatively.
Furthermore, Browning's speaker's sense that her imagination can influence and shape her experience of reality reflects a seemingly common experience. A study from Sweden indicates that sensory perceptions of the outside world, rather than existing parallel to imagined experience, can be informed by imagination. For instance, in one experiment, participants watched two objects moving past each other. When told to imagine a sound occurring at the moment they crossed paths, the participants instead perceived the two objects hitting each other. The imagined sound, in other words, prompted the perception of a real collision. Similarly, linguistic and psychological studies show that individuals' perceptions of the words another person utters are shaped by the sounds they are asked to imagine.
However, while the speaker of Browning's poem feels that her imagination can isolate her from the reality she prefers, some studies suggest that imagination does the opposite, actually helping to bring about envisioned future events. In a study at Washington University in St. Louis, participants were asked to complete a task, using a computer monitor display to search for letters on a screen and then press a button. They were told to either imagine their own hands tied behind them, or to imagine holding the computer monitor in their hands. Those who imagined their hands holding the monitor searched more slowly, causing researchers to speculate that they took a more relaxed pace due to feeling as if they had their tools close at hand.
Decades of research have revealed a truth about imagination that Browning happens to also touch on in her own treatment of the topic—namely, that imagination is not an isolated process, and is not meaningfully separate from other forms of mental life. Imagined scenarios, research reveals, have an impact on individuals' experiences, perceptions, and even actions. Moreover, imagination works in conjunction with other types of mental work. The preoccupations of Browning's own speaker are at once highly specific and, in light of this knowledge, universal.
