Fancy and Imagination by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher is known for his close friendship and poetic collaboration with William Wordsworth. He is also considered as the founder the English romantic movement along with Wordsworth.  

 The Biographia Literaria an autobiography in discourse by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which he published in 1817. It was one of Coleridge’s main critical studies. In this work, he discussed the elements of writing.

Poetry is indeed a creative activity according to Coleridge. It is the product of imagination. Fancy and imagination are considered as the two manifestations of the creative pursuit. It is the product of an artistic mind and not at all a copy of the original. It makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar. 

 

 

Fancy

Coleridge regards fancy to be the inferior to imagination. It is according to him not a creative power like imagination rather It only combines different things into different shapes. According to him, it is the process of “bringing together images dissimilar in the main, by source”. 

e.g.

 “The dews of the evening most carefully shun; Those tears of the sky for the loss of the sun.” - Bill Vaughan

"Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,"

 

"I see a lily on thy brow,

 With anguish moist and fever-dew,

And on thy cheeks a fading rose

 Fast withereth too."- La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad

 

"When snow like sheep lay in the fold

And winds went begging at each door,

And the far hills were blue with cold,

And a cold shroud lay on the moor,"  -

In Memory of Jane Fraser - Geoffrey Hill

 It is mechanical and accumulation of facts and documentation of what is seen.

It is concerned with the mechanical operations of the mind. It largely deals with definite and static images and doesn’t modify them.

 

 

Imagination

it denotes the working of poetic minds upon external objects or objects visible to the eyes. Imaginative process sometimes adds additional properties to an object or sometimes abstracts from it some of its properties. Therefore, imagination thus transforms the object into something new. It modifies and even creates new objects.

According to Coleridge, imagination has two types: Primary (subconscious) and Secondary(conscious).
• According to him the primary imagination is “the living power and prime agent of all human perception”.(A God like quality, can create new things) Primary is perceiving the impressions of the outer world through the senses. It is a spontaneous act of the human mind, the image so formed of the outside world unconsciously and involuntarily. It is universal and is possessed by all.

While, the secondary imagination is the poetic vision, the faculty that a poet has “to idealize and unify”. It is an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will. It works upon the raw materials that are sensations and impressions supplied the primary imagination. It is the secondary imagination which makes any artistic creation possible and root of all poetic activity. It is considered as shaping and modifying power.

Coleridge calls secondary imagination a magical power; it fuses various faculties of human soul- will, emotion, intellect, perception. It fuses internal and external, the subjective and objective.
The primary and the 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 than the primary one. The primary imagination is universal while secondary is a peculiar privilege enjoyed by the artist.

example from the poem ode to nightingale by John Keats:

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

         Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

But on the viewless wings of Poesy,

         Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:

Already with thee! tender is the night,

         And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,

                Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;

                        But here there is no light,

         Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

                Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

         Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,

But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet

         Wherewith the seasonable month endows

The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;

         White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;

                Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;

                        And mid-May's eldest child,

         The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,

                The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

   Down to a sunless sea.

 

 

The distinction between Fancy and the Imagination

The distinction made by Coleridge between Fancy and the Imagination rested on the fact that fancy was concerned with the mechanical operations of the mind while imagination on the other hand is described the mysterious power. “The Primary Imagination” was for Coleridge, the “necessary imagination” as it makes images and impressions of what it receives through the senses. It represents man’s ability to learn from nature. The  primary imagination  was common to all people. Whereas “The Secondary imagination” on the other hand, represents a superior faculty which could only be associated with artistic genius. A key and defining attribute of the secondary imagination was a free and deliberate will.
Thus imagination creates new shapes and forms of beauty by fusing and unifying the different impressions it receives from the external world. Whereas Fancy is a kind of memory; it randomly brings together images, and even when brought together, they continue to retain their separate individual properties.