Willing suspension of disbelief is the reader's or audience's conscious choice to set aside doubts about a poem's invented world, odd imagery, or impossible events so the work can be experienced on its own terms. Coleridge used the phrase to describe how imagination lets us accept what would not be believable in ordinary life and still respond emotionally and intellectually.
Poets rely on this response when they write dreamlike scenes, speaking animals, ghosts, gods, or other departures from realism.
Example
The moon climbed down the stair of night,
and every rose began to sing;
I knew it could not truly be,
yet followed where the lines would bring.