Success Quote by Rita Dove

Dove’s line is a quiet rebuke to the way we quarantine “imagination” in the arts like it’s a charming but nonessential hobby. Coming from a poet, it could read as special pleading; instead, she widens the frame and makes a pragmatic claim: imagination is basic infrastructure for progress. “Without imagination we can go nowhere” isn’t romantic fog. It’s an argument about motion. You don’t get to “somewhere” - a discovery, a theory, a new technology, a new social arrangement - by following a map that doesn’t exist yet.

The craft of the quote is in its pivot. She concedes the stereotype (“restricted to the arts”) only to dismantle it with lived evidence: “Every scientist I have met…” The anecdotal phrasing matters. She’s not citing studies; she’s invoking a cross-disciplinary intimacy, a poet’s permission to speak about other domains because she’s been in the room with them. The subtext: the arts don’t borrow legitimacy from science; they share a foundational cognitive tool.

Dove’s final clause, “has had to imagine,” smuggles in necessity. Not “likes to,” not “benefits from,” but “has had to” - imagination as labor, not ornament. In the context of late-20th-century culture wars over STEM versus humanities, and persistent funding narratives that treat art as expendable, Dove’s sentence defends poetry by refusing to defend it directly. She argues for imagination as the common engine of rigor: the leap from data to hypothesis, from observation to model, from what is to what could be.