Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“What is now proved was once only imagined.”
- Date
- 1790
Meaning of “What is now proved was once only imagined.”
Blake’s proverb compresses a recurring imaginative pattern: possibilities can exist first as conceived ideas before later work, discovery or demonstration makes some of them real or provable.
Where does it come from?
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Proverbs of Hell,” represented by Project Gutenberg #45315 at printed page 16. Gutenberg regularizes the line to “imagined”; Blake’s engraved text is often transcribed with historical spelling and punctuation. The proverb is part of Blake’s deliberately paradoxical infernal-wisdom sequence, not a literal claim that every imagined thing will eventually be proved.
