One of the basic features of lyrical imagination is the tendency to maniacal exaggeration. Poetry must be exorbitant. The cosmogonic and mystical fantasies of the Rig-Veda and the lofty genius of Shakespeare mee3t in the most daring images, for Shakespeare had passed through the whole tradition of classicism and yet retained the full impetus of the archaic vates.
The desire to make an idea as enormous and stupefying as possible is not peculiar to the lyric; it is a typical play-function and is common both in child-life and in certain mental diseases. Somewhere in the Shaw-Terry correspondence there is a story of a small boy rushing in from the garden shouting: “Mummy, mummy, I’ve found a carrot as big – as big as God!” Elsewhere a patient tells a psychiatrist that they are coming to fetch him in a carriage. “No ordinary carriage, I dare say?” “Of course not – a golden carriage.” “How is it drawn?” “By forty million diamond stags!” Similar preposterous qualities and quantities are usual in Buddhist legend. This megalomaniac tendency has always been observable among editors of myths and the lives of saints.Hindu tradition shows the great ascetic Cyavana at his Tapas exercises sitting in an ant –heap entirely hidden except hidden except for his eyes, which shine out of it like fiery coals. Visvamitra stands on the tips of his toes for a thousand years. Such playing with the marvellous in number and degree underlies a great many giant or dwarf stories, from the earliest myths to Gulliver. In the Snorra Edda Thor and his companions find a small room leading off from an enormous bed-chamber, and in that they pass the night. Next morning it turns out that they had been sleeping in the thumb of the giant Skrymir’s glove.
167 In every case we are dealing with the same play-habit of the mind. Involuntarily we always judge archaic human's belief in the myths they create by our own standards of science, philosophy, or religious conviction.