John Keats wrote: Poetry is born of the tensions set up by the poet's ability to be 'in uncertainties and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason'. R.S. Thomas believed more realistically, 'The world needs the unifying power of the imagination. The two things which give it best are poetry and religion. Science destroys as it gives....' Religion is 'embracing an experience of ultimate reality and poetry as the imaginative presentation of such....' 'Without darkness, in the world we know, the light would go unprized; without evil, goodness would have no meaning.' (The Penguin Book of Religious Verse, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1963, pp. 9-11)