Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Notion of Fancy and Imagination

 

Ritu Rani

 

Imagination creates power to perceive unity in the multiplicity of our experience; the creative genius is the ability to create new unity out of existing things. Imagination is not apart from nature. It is present as a power in nature from the beginning of the creation. Imagination is the ability to make a picture in mind, the part of mind that does it.

 

The romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1722- 1834), although he wrote no single treatise on the imagination, is considered the central figure in its modern development. S.T Coleridge a famous and prominent romantic writer brought something new to his age and something new for the coming ages to explore. Famous for his creative works like The Rime of Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan Coleridge is also known for his precious view on works of William Shakespeare and other literary faculties like primary and secondary imagination. Coleridge owed his interest in the study of imagination to Wordsworth. But Wordsworth was interested only in the practice of poetry and he considered only the impact of imagination on poetry; Coleridge on the other hand, is interested in the theory of imagination. He is the first critic to study the nature of imagination and examine its role in creative activity. Secondly, while Wordsworth uses Fancy and Imagination almost as synonyms, Coleridge is the first critic to distinguish between them and define their respective roles.  He drew on most of the major work that preceded him, including the biblical, classical and medieval sources as well as the most important thinkers like Kant and contemporaries like Schelling. Coleridge offered no system to support his views of imagination, but the insight and argument scattered throughout his works finally yield a coherent and important work of literary theory and criticism is his Biographia Literaria (1817), in which he acknowledges his debts to such thinkers as Kant and Schelling. Biographia Literaria  which has another title as Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of MY LITERARY LIFE and OPINIONS. It is known as autobiography in discourse by S.T. Coleridge. The work is long and seemingly loosely structured, and although there are autobiographical elements, it is not a straightforward or linear autobiography rather meditative. The work was not intended to be a long work rather was planned as a mere preface to his creative works as Lyrical Ballad explaining and justifying his own style and practice in poetry.  The work grew to a literary autobiography, including, together with many facts concerning his education and studies and his early literary adventures, an extended criticism of William Wordsworth’s  theory of poetry as given in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads (a work on which Coleridge collaborated), and a statement of Coleridge's philosophical views.

 

His locus Classicus on imagination, chapter 13, distinguishes between primary and secondary imagination. Primary imagination is merely the power of receiving impressions of the external world through the senses, the power of perceiving the objects of sense, both in their parts and as a whole.

 

 

 

It is a spontaneous act of the mind; the human mind receives impressions and sensations from the outside world, unconsciously and involuntarily, imposes some sort of order on those impressions, reduces them to shape and size, so that the mind is able to form a clear image of the outside world. In this way clear and coherent perception becomes possible. It is the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary is an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will. It dissolve, diffuses dissipates in order to re-create. The lesser faculty of fancy is only a mode of memory, dealing with fixities and definities with sensible realities rather than with “ideas.” This view of imagination is clearly similar to Schelling’s: primary imagination is the faculty by which all human beings shape their experience of the world into meaningful perception; secondary imagination is the artist’s ability to create new shape and meaning out of existing material. He thinks that this secondary imagination is at the root of all poetic activity. It is the power which harmonizes and reconciles opposites. Coleridge calls it a magical, synthetic power. This unifying power is best seen in the fact that it synthesizes or fuses the various faculties of the soul – perception, intellect, will, emotion – and fuses the internal with the external, the subjective with the objective, the human mind with external nature, the spiritual with the physical. Through this unifying power nature is colored by the soul of the poet, and soul of the poet is steeped in nature. ‘The identity’ which the poet discovers in man and nature results from the synthesizing activity of the secondary imagination.

 

On the other hand Coleridge’s view of imagination is intimately related to his conception of idea and symbol. An idea is a suprasensible reality incarnated in sense images; it is the product of all the human faculties – reason, understanding, sense – working under unifying power of imagination. An idea cannot be conveyed but by the imagination. This exploration of imagination can be seen in the work by P.B Shelley’s The Defence of Poetry, keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes, ode to Nightingales, Ode to Fancy etc. John keats says to Benjamin Bailey in a letter on 22 November 1817 that he was certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination – what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth whether it existed before or not – for he has the same idea of all  passions as of love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential beauty and the imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream – he awoke and found it truth.

 

As Coleridge writes in the Statesman’s Manual (1816), symbols are the living educts of the imagination; of that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious  in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths, of which they are the conductors. Coleridge’s differs from Kant’s, in that the ideas thus incarnated including such ideas and immortality, are not merely regulative as in  Kant but are truly constitutive of reality.

 

According to S.T Coleridge, Fancy is lower than the secondary imagination, which is already of the earthly realm. Fancy is the source of our baser desires. It is not a creative faculty but a repository for lust. Imagination is the faculty by which we perceive the world around us. It works through our senses and is common to all human beings; secondary imagination is the poetic vision, the faculty that a poet has to idealize and unify. Rejecting the empiricist assumption that the mind was a tabula rasa on which external experiences and sense impressions were imprinted, stored, recalled, and combined through a process of association, Coleridge divided the "mind" into two distinct faculties of fancy and imagination. During a state of ecstasy, in fact, images do not appear isolated, but associated according to laws of their own which have nothing to do with the data of experiences. The imagination is contrasted with fancy, which is inferior to it, since it is a kind of which enables a poet to aggregate and associate metaphors, similes and other poetical devices. He thinks it has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association. In nutshell, we can say that Coleridge has viewed or explored a good a good idea on fancy and imagination. Most critics after him who distinguishes fancy from imagination tended to make fancy simply the faculty that produces a lesser, lighter or humorous kind of poetry and to make imagination the faculty that produces a higher, more serious and a more passionate poetry.

 

REFERENCES:

1.       Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms.7^th ed. New Delhi: Thomson, 2006. Print.

2.       Brett, R.L.  Fancy and Imagination. New York: Methuen, 1969. Print.

3.       Macdonald, George. Works of Fancy and Imagination. Oxford: Oxford U P, 1871. Print.

4.       Sampson, George. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature. New Delhi: Cambridge U P, 2009. Print.

5.       Vallins, David. Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism: Feeling and Thought .London: Macmillian, 2000. Print.