The Prophetic Element of the Divinely Inspired Poet

In his inaugural address to The Pascal Lectures on Christianity and published as The End of Christendom (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1980), Malcolm Muggeridge states:

So much has been achieved by human intelligence that we have got lost in it. Whereas this other dimension that [William] Blake calls the imagination and that Pascal calls faith is the thing that we most desperately need. I am certain that in eternity when we understand, and no longer see through a glass darkly but face to face, we shall find that all our efforts to convey the reality of our existence are just so much children’s scribble in the light of what it really is. The scribbles that have come nearest to conveying it are those of the artists rather than those of the philosophers or the theologians or the scientists. (p. 6-7)

This echoes to some degree what I have tried to explain to others about the prophetic element of the inspired poetry of the True Poet. When writing poetry, the True Poet enters a state of inspiration that allows him to write (even at a young age, in an immature state as far as experience is concerned) about life and from a perspective and with wisdom that he has not directly acquired by having lived through and he is able to write about these ideas and situations and wisdom as though he had already lived through them. Rupert Brooke provides an example of this by capturing a potential, dreadful state of love in his poem, Kindliness. Muggeridge goes on to say:

These three people, Pascal, Blake, and Dostoyevski, illustrate perfectly what I have long believed to be the case, that history consists of parables whereby God communicates in terms that the imagination rather than the mind, faith rather than knowledge, can grasp. (p. 9)

In one of the tales that included his character, Merlin explained foretelling the future as “remembering forward.”

It seems to me that the True Poet, inspired, is able write about experiences he has not lived and to do so convincingly and especially in a way that eventually proves him correct, by using this seeming wizardry that Blake and Pascal attribute to the divinely inspired imagination.