I’ve wanted to share this text for a while, but I couldn’t find it online anywhere. I thought about just quoting the parts I like, but I felt like quoting most of it. So now I’ve typed out the whole text, a chapter out of the book The Use of Imagination by William Walsh (Chatto & Windus, 1959).

Even if you don’t agree with all Lawrence’s ideas (and in the latter part there is admittedly a rather questionable proposition for the realization of his philosophies), you can still even just appreciate the elegance of his expression, his clarity of vision, and the poetry of his words.

The book is a collection of essays exploring what some of the biggest names in literature have to teach us about imagination. The book is written for educators, but the insights are universal. This chapter is on D. H. Lawrence’s insights. The chapter is called The Writer as Teacher…

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D. H. Lawrence on wonder. From “Hymns in a Man’s Life” – Evening News, 13 October 1928:

Nothing is more difficult than to determine what a child takes in, and does not take in, of its environment and teaching. This fact is brought home to me by the hymns which I learned as a child, and never forgot. They mean to me almost more than the finest poetry, and they have for me a more permanent value, somehow or other.

It is almost shameful to confess that the poems which have meant the most to me, like Wordsworth’s Ode to Immortality and Keats’s Odes, and pieces of Macbeth or As You Like It or Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Goethe’s lyrics, such as Uber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh, and Verlaine’s Aynte poussela porte qui clancelle — all these lovely poems which after all give the ultimate shape to one’s life; all these lovely poems woven deep into a man’s consciousness, are still not woven so deep in me as the rather banal Nonconformist hymns that penetrated through and through my childhood.

Each gentle dove
And sighing bough
That makes the eve
So fair to me
Has something far
Diviner now
To draw me back
To Galilee.
O Galilee, sweet Galilee,
Where Jesus loved so much to be,
O Galilee, sweet Galilee,
Come sing thy song again to me!

To me the word Galilee has a wonderful sound. The Lake of Galilee! I don’t want to know where it is. I never want to go to Palestine. Galilee is one of those lovely, glamorous worlds, not places, that exist in the golden haze of a child’s half-formed imagination.

And in my man’s imagination it is just the same. It has been left untouched. With regard to the hymns that had such a profound influence on my childish consciousness, there has been no crystallising out, no dwindling into actuality, no hardening into commonplace. They are the same to my Man’s experience as they were to me nearly forty years ago.

The moon, perhaps, has shrunken a little. One has been forced to learn about orbits, eclipses, relative distances, dead worlds, craters of the moon and so on. The crescent at evening still startles the soul with its delicate flashing. But the mind works automatically and says: ‘Ah, she is in her first quarter. She is all there, in spite of the fact that we see only this slim blade. The earth’s shadow is over her’. And willy-nilly, the intrusion of the mental processes dims the brilliance, the magic of the first apperception.

It is the same with all things. The sheer delight of a child’s apperception is based on wonder; and deny it as we may, knowledge and wonder counteract one another. So that as knowledge increases wonder decreases. We say again: Falimiarity breeds contempt. So that as we grow older, and become more familiar with phenomena, we become more contemptuous of them.

But that is only partly true. “It has taken some races of men thousands of years to become contemptuous of the moon, and to the Hindu the cow is still wondrous. It is not familiarity that breeds contempt: it is the assumption of knowledge. Anybody who looks at the moon and says, ‘I know all about that poor orb’ is, of course, bored by the moon.

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Photograph: Danita Delimont/Getty Images/Gallo Images.

Poet Simon Armitage in The Guardian:

I try to get in a bit of a walk most days. Most times it’s a toss up between going for a walk and staying in and writing a poem, but it often leads to the same thing. I go on to the moors – we live on the edge of the Pennines and Saddleworth moor, and it can be quite bleak and quite dangerous. Sometimes I go off-piste, but there are issues around here with land ownership so sometimes I stick to the roads and the routes and sometimes I wilfully transgress, which gives me a kick.

Some people have said there’s a relationship between poetic meter and the fall of your foot – and possibly your heartbeat might be thought of as an iambic beat when it’s amplified by walking. Often when I go for a walk I come back with a poem. There’s a sense of creativity about it, and a sense of wellbeing that you are getting the organs and lungs and the blood moving. You never come back from a walk feeling worse – sometimes you come back feeling colder and wetter though, especially up here.

I’m sure that somewhere in the back of my mind I see it as a therapeutic activity. I know it can be good for a hangover. Some people believe strongly that art in general can put you in touch with yourself and through it you start feeling worthwhile and valuable, and there might be some kind of chemical trigger that aids recovery and keeps illness at bay. If a walk leads to a poem, maybe there’s a relationship there.

I am 47 now and sometimes I think “How many more fantastic days out on these moors are there?’ Sometimes it can be an expedition just to go up there, but when it’s sunny and clear and crisp like yesterday it’s exhilarating, and that gets right down to the far tributaries of your lungs that normally are breathing warm radiator air and it does heighten your sense of wellbeing.

More writers on walking: In Praise of the Daily Walk.