Imagination

In the context of political and social improvement:

Samuel Johnson in "History of Rasselass" argues that imagination is unproductive, foolish, and essentially wasteful because it diverts from reality. In Sir Philip Sidney's "Defense of Poesy," however, he urges that through imagination poets become the prophets and, in fact, creators of the future. They do this by proposing a BETTER reality and communicating a method clearly through the ageless mode of storytelling. So: is it futile to be an "idealistic dreamer"? Or, by the adjoining of what we imagine and how we live, could we actually become the poets who speak the words of fancy into the fabric of actuality?