Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Imagination

Coleridges main contribution to literary criticism is his theory of Imagination. In the

Biographia Literaria , he explained the terms imagination and fancy. It was Wordsworths
poem Guilt and Sorrow which made him conclude that imagination and fancy were two
distinct faculties.
According to Coleridge, Imagination has two forms: primary and secondary.
The primary imagination is merely the power of receiving impressions of the external world
through the senses. It is an involuntarily act of the mind. The human mind receives impressions
and sensations from the outside world, unconsciously and involuntarily. It imposes some sort of
order on those impressions, gives them shape, so that the mind is able to form a clear image of
the outside world. It is in this way that clear and coherent perception becomes possible. The
primary imagination is universal and it is possessed by all.
The secondary imagination may be possessed by others also, but it is the peculiar and distinctive
attribute of the artist. It is the secondary imagination, which makes artistic creation possible.
Secondly imagination is more active and conscious in its working. It requires an effort of the
will, and conscious effort.
The secondary imagination works upon what is perceived by the primary imagination. Its raw
material is the sensation and impressions supplied to it by the primary imagination. By an effort
of the will and the intellect, the secondary imagination selects and orders the raw material and reshapes it into objects of beauty.
Secondary imagination is the power, which harmonizes opposites. It synthesizes 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 the external nature, the spiritual with the
physical and material.
The primary and secondary imaginations do not differ from each other in kind. The difference
between them is one of degree. The secondary imagination is more active, more conscious and
more voluntary in its working than the primary one. The primary imagination is universal; it is
basic imagination, found in all human beings, while the secondary imagination is artistic
imagination, it is a special privilege enjoyed by the artist.
Imagination and fancy differ in kind. These are activities of two different kinds. Imagination
creates new forms of beauty by unifying the different impressions it receives from the external
world. Fancy is not a creative power at all. It is a kind of memory. It brings together images and
even when brought to gather, they continue to retain their individual properties. For Coleridge,
Fancy is the drapery of poetic genius, but Imagination is its very soul, which forms all into one
whole.
The difference between imagination and fancy is same as the difference between a mixture and a

compound. In mixture, a number of ingredients are mixed up, but they do not lose their
individual properties. They still exits as separate items. In a compound, the different ingredients
combine to form something new. They lose their respective properties and fuse together to create
something entirely different. Similarly, where fancy is working, images lie separate; where
imagination is at work, images are used into one.
Conclusion
Coleridge is the first critic to distinguish between Imagination and Fancy. He is the first critic to
study the nature of imagination and examine its role in creative activity. The distinction between
imagination and fancy could not become popular, yet Coleridges theory is important. It is
important because he was a poet of great technical refinement, and he used his experience for his
theorizing about poetry.