This chapter asserts creative literacy—and, in particular, the reading and writing of poetry—as our most sapient mode of imaginative practice: a methodology by which to shift both language and thought toward a renewed ethics. Drawing on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s theorization of poetic truth as internally verified—and thus distinct from externally imposed epistemes such as legal, religious, and bureaucratic discourses—“An Unmediated Imagination” calls for a defense of reading and writing as modes of self-translation that can enable active resistance to socially inherited indifference. In an era saturated by screen-based hypermediation, what remains at stake may be not only the capacity to think for ourselves, but the willingness to feel—ethically and attentively—and then act. Through close engagements with contemporary poets, including Ilya Kaminsky, Refaat Alareer, Valzhyna Mort, and Noor Hindi, and in dialogue with thinkers such as Maryanne Wolf, Sherry Turkle, and Byung-Chul Han, poetic texts are read here as “mirrors-of-becoming”: catalytic sites in which internal verification enables readers and writers alike to take up newly rehumanized ethical orientations, newer awarenesses of the functions of a social conscience.