---
title: "Piano used to write Imagine"
date: "2022-11-17T16:44:03+00:00"
modified: "2026-03-27T14:52:24+00:00"
url: "https://heritage.humanists.uk/object/piano-used-to-write-imagine/"
post_id: 7301
categories: ["Arts"]
tags: ["Art", "Humanism", "Music", "Philosophy"]
---

# Piano used to write Imagine

> Imagine there’s no heaven  
> It’s easy if you try  
> No hell below us  
> Above us, only sky
> 
> John Lennon, *Imagine* (1971)







Writing in the *New Humanist* in 1996, [Nicolas Walter](https://heritage.humanists.uk/nicolas-walter/) described John Lennon’s *Imagine* as ‘probably the best-known humanist text today’. Though its vision of a world without religion, national borders, or materialism provoked significant controversy from its release in 1971, the song remains a powerful and international peace anthem, and the piano on which it was composed an enduring symbol. Although not everyone would agree that a world without countries, religion, and possessions would be a necessarily better or a happier one, many humanists would accept that these each have the power to breed conflict and division, distracting from our common humanity. In *Imagine,* we are encouraged instead to picture ‘all the people/ Sharing all the world’. *Rolling Stone* called the song ‘22 lines of graceful, plain-spoken faith in the power of a world, united in purpose, to repair and change itself’: a humanist vision of human agency and cooperation. Without the threat or promise of an afterlife, it is for human beings to try to build a happier, fairer, and more peaceful world in the here and now.







Today, the unassuming Steinway Model Z upright piano is a reminder of the power of creativity, imagination, and collective effort for a better world. And though Lennon died young, his inspirational words and music live on. In 2020, Lennon’s wife and collaborator Yoko Ono was finally credited as a co-writer on *Imagine* – something he himself had called for ’because a lot of the lyric and the concept came from Yoko’. In this, another layer of inspiration and collaboration has been revealed as part of the piano’s story.















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Image: **©** The Goss-Michael Foundation