Imagination is a peculiar cognitive faculty that is linked to the artistic gaze. The artist’s ability is not simply a gift, rather a complex skill which enables one to find new connections between things. I call this function ludic imagination, because I have discovered deep ties between it and the play sphere. Playing seems to be the way in which man understands his relationship with the world through a process of cognitive dislocation, displacement from the literal sense, in order to embrace a sense of poetry such as metaphor, irony and hyperbole. Poetic modalities are full of agon, alea, ilinx, mimicry (Caillois). What unites playing and poetry is the symbolic attitude and the ludic imagination and this mode is rooted in a ‘cosmic childhood’ (Bachelard) not just because man's way of being starts in playing, but because it is the symbolic child that could remain throughout the various stages of the individual's life span. Ludic imagination is a kind of knowledge, an imagina