T. S.

Coleridge

1. Definition of imagination
This excellence, which in all Mr. Wordsworth's writings is more or less predominant and which constitutes the
character of his mind, I no sooner felt than I sought to understand. Repeated meditations led me first to suspect
(and a more intimate analysis of the human faculties, their appropriate marks, functions, and effects, matured my
conjecture into full conviction) that fancy and imagination were two distinct and widely different faculties, instead of
being, according to the general belief, either two names with one meaning, or at furthest the lower and higher
degree of one and the same power. It is not, I own, easy to conceive a more apposite translation of the Greek
phantasia than the Latin imaginatio; but it is equally true that in all societies there exists an instinct of growth, a
certain collective unconscious good sense working progressively to desynonymize those words originally of the same
meaning which the conflux of dialects had supplied to the more homogeneous languages, as the Greek and German:
and which the same cause, joined with accidents of translation from original works of different countries, occasion in
mixed languages like our own. The first and most important point to be proved is, that two conceptions perfectly
distinct are confused under one and the same word, and (this done) to appropriate that word exclusively to one
meaning, and the synonym (should there be one) to the other. But if (as will be often the case in the arts and
sciences) no synonym exists, we must either invent or borrow a word. In the present instance the appropriation had
already begun and been legitimated in the derivative adjective: Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very
fanciful, mind. If therefore I should succeed in establishing the actual existence of two faculties generally different,
the nomenclature would be at once determined. To the faculty by which I had characterized Milton we should
confine the term imagination; while the other would be contradistinguished as fancy.

The IMAGINATION, then, I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be 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 I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet still as
identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It
dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all
events, it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed
and dead.

FANCY, on the contrary, 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; and blended with, and modified by that
empirical phenomenon of the will which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory it
must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.

2. The idea of the organic form
[MECHANIC VS. ORGANIC F O R M ]
The subject of the present lecture is no less than a question submitted to your understandings, emancipated from
national prejudice: Are the plays of Shakespeare works of rude uncultivated genius, in which the splendor of the
parts compensates, if aught can compensate, for the barbarous shapelessness and irregularity of the whole? To
which not only the French critics, but even his own English admirers, say [yes]. Or is the form equally admirable with
the matter, the judgment of the great poet not less deserving of our wonder than his genius? Or to repeat the
question in other words, is Shakespeare a great dramatic poet on account only of those beauties and excellencies
which he possesses in common with the ancients, but with diminished claims to our love and honor to the full extent
of his difference from them? Or are these very differences additional proofs of poetic wisdom, at once results and
symbols of living power as contrasted with lifeless mechanism, of free and rival originality as contradistinguished
from servile imitation, or more accurately, [from] a blind copying of effects instead of a true imitation of the
essential principles? Imagine not I am about to oppose genius to rules. No! the comparative value of these rules is
the very cause to be tried. The spirit of poetry, like all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe itself by
rules, were it only to unite power with beauty. It must embody in order to reveal itself; but a living body is of
necessity an organized oneand what is organization but the connection of parts to a whole, so that each part is at
once end and means! This is no discovery of criticism; it is a necessity of the human mind and all nations have felt
and obeyed it, in the invention of meter and measured sounds as the vehicle and involucrum5 of poetry, itself a
fellow growth from the same life, even as the bark is to the tree.

No work of true genius dare want its appropriate form; neither indeed is there any danger of this. As it must not, so
neither can it, be lawless! For it is even this that constitutes its geniusthe power of acting creatively under laws of
its own origination. How then comes it that not only single Zoili,6 but whole nations have combined in unhesitating
condemnation of our great dramatist, as a sort of African nature, fertile in beautiful monsters, as a wild heath where
islands of fertility look greener from the surrounding waste, where the loveliest plants now shine out among
unsightly weeds and now are choked by their parasitic growth, so intertwined that we cannot disentangle the weed
without snapping the flower. In this statement I have had no reference to the vulgar abuse of Voltaire,7 save as far
as his charges are coincident with the decisions of his commentators and (so they tell you) his almost idolatrous
admirers. The true ground of the mistake, as has been well remarked by a continental critic, lies in the confounding
mechanical regularity with organic form. The form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a
predetermined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material, as when to a mass of wet clay we
give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes as
it develops itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its
outward form. Such is the life, such the form. Nature, the prime genial9 artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is
equally inexhaustible in forms. Each exterior is the physiognomy of the being within, its true image reflected and
thrown out from the concave mirror. And even such is the appropriate excellence of her chosen poet, of our own
Shakespeare, himself a nature humanized, a genial understanding directing self-consciously a power and an implicit
wisdom deeper than consciousness.
3. The main works and genres (uvod T.S.Coleridge u Northon Anthology)

4. Coleridge as a critic (Biographia Literaria)
And in Biogra-phia Literaria and elsewhere, Coleridge raised the stakes for literary criticism, making it into a kind of
writing that could address the most difficult and abstract questionsquestions about, for instance, the relations
between literary language and ordinary language, or between poetry and philosophy, or between perception and
imagination.

5. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - content of the poem; genre; allegory and symbols; archetypes (archetypal
criticism)


6. Coleridge's conversation poems; Coleridge's meditative poetry (transcedental and mystical pantheism)

The Eolian Harp - was one of thirty-six such effusions that Coleridge included in a 1796 volume of verse; revised and
retitled, it became what he called a "conversation poem"the designation used since his day for a sustained blank-
verse lyric of description and meditation, in the mode of conversation addressed to a silent auditor. This was the
form that Coleridge perfected in "Frost at Midnight" and that Wordsworth adopted in "Tintern Abbey."


7. the use of supernatural elements and the exploration of the unconscious in Coleridge

Analysis: Kubla Khan