The Importance Of Imagination In The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow

809 Words2 Pages

Joe Modell
Mr. Watson
English III Honors
11 September 2017
Imagination Analytical Essay Imagination is one of the most unique and fascinating elements of the human mind. It is essentially using one’s mental abilities and memories to create specific imagery. This imagery helps people to be innovative, conceptualize, and come up with clever solutions to solve difficult problems. Imagination allows people to go outside of reality in order to envision ideas that they could not visualize otherwise. Without imagination, there would be very little originality and ingenuity. Unfortunately, people are slowly becoming less imaginative because of mind-numbing activities, society’s lack of encouraging creativity, and an educational system that emphasizes …show more content…

The improbable plots and unlikely characterization showed how much they used creativity. According to a Romanticism article, “The Romantics tended to define and to present the imagination as our ultimate ‘shaping’ or creative power, the approximate human equivalent of the creative powers of nature or even deity” (“Romanticism”). They believe that imagination is an essential and amazing ability that humans possess. Romantic authors often included examples of imagination and creativity within their works. In the short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” the supernatural plot and improbable characters illustrate the imagination of Romanticism writers (Irving). Washington Irving must have used a significant amount of creativity to come up with a story that involves a headless ghost riding a horse. He thought outside of his reality and environment in order to create an impossible and fascinating character. The Romantics favored imagination and creativity because they realized how invaluable it truly …show more content…

Creativity and imagination are no longer being heavily encouraged by most people. According to Rachael Rettner:
In a 2010 study of about 300,000 creativity tests going back to the 1970s, Kyung Hee Kim, a creativity researcher at the College of William and Mary, found creativity has decreased among American children in recent years. Since 1990, children have become less able to produce unique and unusual ideas. They are also less humorous, less imaginative and less able to elaborate on ideas, Kim said. ("Are Today's Youth Less Creative & Imaginative?")
This shows how much society has changed since the 1900’s. Modern-day children are worse in almost every aspect of creative thinking when compared to previous generations. Society is hurting children’s imagination by not being supportive of outside time and social connections. With modern electronic devices, kids seldomly need to leave the house in order to be entertained. The lack of play time and social interactions severely hamper the development of children’s creativity. In summary, society is developing into something that lacks encouragement of creativity, and that is a major

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