Jonathan N. Barron is associate professor of English at the University ofSouthern Mississippi. He has co-edited Jewish American Poetry (forthcoming from University Press of New England), Robert Frost at the Millennium (forthcoming from University ofMissouri Press), as well as a forthcoming collection of essays on the poetic movement, New Formalism. Beginning in 2001, he will be the editor-in-chief of The Robert Frost Review. In the following essay, Barron examines "Eating Poetry" in relation to Surrealism and Deep Image poetry, and compares the eating of poetry to Communion.

In his Biographia Liter aria (1817), the great English Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously distinguished between two mental faculties, "fancy" and "imagination." According to Coleridge, fancy is a rather mundane, even boring mental exercise where one thinks about things that do not exist. In other words, the fancy is not the mental faculty that allows us to conjure for supernatural things...