Judyth A.V.

Baker 1
A Romantic Legacy

Defining and Using Imagination:

A Legacy of Romanticism to the Modern World
Judyth A. Vary Baker

imagination- Traditionally, the mental capacity for experiencing, constructing

or manipulating ‘mental imagery’ (quasi-perceptual experience). Imagination
is also regarded as responsible for fantasy, inventiveness, idiosyncrasy, and
creative, original and insightful thought in general, and, sometimes, for a
much wider range of mental activities dealing with the non-actual, such as
supposing, pretending, ‘seeing as’, thinking of possibilities, and even being
mistaken. See representation.
Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind

The definition of Imagination, as seen above, seems to represent elements of concept, as

well as existing as a term. The word is commonly encountered in the literature, descriptions or
studies of Romanticism, or the Romantic Literary Movements, that developed and bloomed in
the early-to-mid nineteenth century. The student who is the product of the newer millennia,
however, may have a different understanding of “imagination” than that envisioned by the
Romantics, just as the word “Romantic” itself may not adequately prepare today’s naive student
for the nature of the content of the poetry and literature of the nineteenth century that they might
explore, hoping to appropriate Shakespearean or Drydenesque expressions with which to
entrance their lovers. It is important that “imagination” and “Romanticism” be understood as it
was by the Romantics. For that reason, I have added the term “satire,” (which I haven’t seen used
a great deal in the literature in connection with “imagination” and “Romanticism).in order to
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better orient and connect the modern student’s thoughts to what was a driving force behind the
literary productions of the Romantics.
Although it is seems reasonable to assume that the Romantic definition of “imagination”
seems to have evolved as a result of long thought based on then-modern ideas and ideals of the
nineteenth century, and the influence of prior great lights who had pondered and labored to
formulate their own definition, it seems that the great eighteenth century ideals that were
expressed at that time were based upon the same philosophical definitions for “imagination” that
--later— were looked upon by our young Romantics as fodder to foment literary rebellion, even
though:
“(While) The common thesis of eighteenth-century optimists was...
The proposition that this is the best of possible worlds;....(which) gave rise
to the belief that the adherents of this doctrine....(were) insensible to all the
pain and frustration and conflict which are manifest through the entire range
of sentient life... far from asserting the unreality of evils, the philosophical
optimist in the eighteenth century was chiefly occupied in demonstrating their
necessity (Lovejoy 319).”

Lovejoy adds that “the logical exigencies of the optimistic argument involved...ideas pregnant
with important consequences for both ethics and aesthetics, since they were to be among the
most distinctive elements in what perhaps best deserves to be named ‘Romanticism’ (319).”
The definition of Imagination, in fact, as it was slowly formulated, explored, and finally used
by many Romantics, probably needs to be studied along with the contextual consideration of
satire, and of the ideals behind the rebellious writings of the Romantics, in order to see how the
ideas of the eighteenth century concerning Imagination were refined, and then redefined, perhaps
to help buttress those philosophical arguments which they created to substantiate and legitimize
their rebellion, which was, broadly speaking, arrayed against eighteenth century sentimentalism
and superficiality. The general result of this rebellion was a “Romantic” idealism which
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fascinated not only their generation, but those to come. I think we have inherited from the
Romantics our present notions of Imagination, which continue to have an impact upon the
definition of imagination with which the layman and the psychologist must deal today.

I have been reading a little of Coleridge and Hazlitt, and was struck by some of Hazlitt’s
love letters, which for me epitomize the ‘romantic’ in “Romanticism” while alerting me to the
elements of both imagination and satire which he employed so well in Liber Amoris. Marilyn
Butler, who analyzes the way the Romantics often presented thinly-masked, biting and satiric
autobiographic self-images in her essay “Satire and the Images of Self in the Romantic Period:
the Long Tradition of Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris,” commented that

“..an age’s self-image may not be as distinct as posterity’s view of it. The so-
called Romanticists did not know at the time that they were supposed to do
without satire...it is easy to exaggerate the break with the recent literary past, or
with that portion of it we now designate Augustinian. Byron’s well-known tribute
to Pope may have been controversial; Scott’s even better-advertised tribute to
Dryden was less so...(210).”

In the matter of Coleridge, his well-known revisions chart the changes and fluidity in
Romantic evolution of ideas, ideals, imagination. Says Stillinger, who gives us a whole book of
Coleridge’s revisions:

“If Coleridge had written each of his poems once and once only, there would be
no problem. As it is, we think that he did, and hence arise many
oversimplifications and errors in our approach to his poetry. Chiefly these are the
idea that for each of the poems there is but a single definitive text; the idea that
the single definitive text of each poem must necessarily be a late one (in practical
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terms because there is none other in sight, in theoretical terms because such has
been the tendency of generalizations about textual authority for most of the
present century); and then the conclusion from these that Coleridge produced his
late texts early in his poetic career. (9-10).”

I have chosen these two quotations to illustrate two tendencies which we have, as human
beings who happen to read: one, to identify a movement in literature as well-defined by its
proponents and adherents during its existence, particularly at the hey-day or height of the
manifestation of its existence, to those who follow (and who always have such remarkable
hindsight), and secondly, that we tend to believe that the products of such a movement were
created, for the most part, as if sculpted from stone. But, as Stillinger makes clear, “In the
theoretical framework of my study, (Coleridge) produced a new definitive version, the “final”
text that he intended to stand at the moment, every time he revised a text (10).”
And why did Coleridge revise his work?
Many poets do so: I revise my own work because I change, and what I’ve written no longer
weighs or feels or says quite what I meant, or I no longer wish it to say what I once wished it to
say, or, perhaps, I have gained a greater sensitivity or ability to communicate what could not be
said well at the prior instance (sometimes revisions weaken original work, though!).
Of perhaps all our Romantics, Coleridge has left for us the most sophisticated analysis of
what he was about in the matter of writing, editing, criticism and the composition of poetry.
And, happily for us, he submerges himself into a long discussion – one might call it almost a
tirade, in its exhaustive energy and vehemence – about imagination.
Coleridge does not hesitate to take us on a philosophical and theological journey of great
complexity in his attempt to fully explore the topic of imagination.
From a letter dated June 23, 1834:
“You may conceive the difference in kind between the Fancy and the Imagination
in this way, that if the check of the senses and the reason were withdrawn, the first
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would become delirium, and the last mania. The Fancy brings together images
which have no connexion natural or moral, but are yoked together by the poet by
means of some accidental coincidence....(while) (t)he Imagination modifies
images, and gives unity to variety; it sees all things in one, il peu nell’ uno. There
is the epic imagination, the perfection of which is in Milton; and the dramatic, of
which Shakespeare is the absolute master (http: Imagination in Coleridge 3).”

Coleridge’s theorizing may be clear to some: to my mind, he’s abstruse and convoluted in
his thinking, and a variety of interpretations of what he meant about Imagination exists. What
seems to be clear is that for Coleridge there are two sorts of Imagination, a primary and a
secondary kind. Even so, this distinction between ‘pure imagination’ and ‘secondary
imagination’ is apparently not clear enough to allow all other critics to agree with the analysis
offered by Robert Penn Warren, according to notes from the source quoted directly above, as
displayed in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, where PennWarren

“argues that The Ancient Mariner is a poem of ‘pure imagination” in the sense
that its subject is the poetic, or Secondary, Imagination itself. Whalley (1946-7)
believes that: “whether consciously or unconsciously” the albatross is “the symbol
of Coleridge’s creative imagination.” House (1953) opposes the rigidity of Penn
Warren’s symbolic analysis and argues that the poem is “part of the
exploration...part of the experience which led Coleridge into his later theoretic
statements (as of the theory of Imagination) rather than a symbolic adumbration
of the theoretic statements themselves” (84, 113).

It might be useful, then, to take a glance at Imagination’s root definitions, as those distant but
great philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, thought of it. After all, the Romantics seemed to have
looked at the classic definitions, too. Basically, the Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind gives us a
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handy distillation of the definition of imagination as proposed by that philosopher of

philosophers,
“Aristotle...(who) tells us that “imagination [phantasia] is (apart from any
metaphorical sense of the word) the process by which we say an image
[phantasma] is presented to us” (De Anima. 428a 1-4). It has been questioned in
recent times whether the Greek words phantasia and phantasm are really
equivalent to “imagination” and’(mental) image” as heard in contemporary usage.
However, there can be little doubt that, until very recent times, theoretical
discussion of phantasia, its Latin translation imaginatio, and their etymological
descendants, continued to be rooted in the concepts introduced by Aristotle and
the problems arising from his rather elliptical explanation of them” (http:1).

And for a long time, it might be argued, people really didn’t stray very far from this earliest
known standardized definition for Imagination:

Very arguably this is true of all Western philosophical schools: Stoics, Epicureans
and Neoplatonists quite as much as avowed Aristoteleans; Muslims as much as
Christians; and, come to that, Empiricists quite as much as Rationalists” (http:1).

While “the connection between imagination and perception is the more fundamental,” it
should also be pointed out that it is also ‘postulated’ that a difference exists between common
sense [sensus communis] and phantasia, either of which can generate phantasmata,

“but when their immediate cause is an object directly before us the tendency is to
refer to them as percepts, and to the process as perception; when memory of
previously observed things is the source, reference will more likely be to memory
and imagination. Thus imagination came to be particularly associated with
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thinking about things that are not actually currently present to the sense: things
that are not really there” (2).

Though this is an oversimplified overview, it does roughly correspond to the situation as I

have investigated it, and it only took a few lines of reading time to tell it to you.
Today, the ideas behind the words ‘fantasy’ and ‘imagination’ are likely to evoke these sorts
of thoughts:
“...we sometimes find modern writers making a distinction between “memory
imagery” and “imagination imagery”, or even restricting the use of “imagination”
(and, a fortiori, “imaginary”) to thoughts about things that have never (or never
yet) been actually experienced....(f)or some reason, words...such as “fantasy”,
“fancy”, or “phantasm”, seem to...connote unreality even more strongly than
“imagination” and its cognates...” (2).

And then we have Descartes, who links everything scientifically to flesh, brain and
matter, the rational mind connected, it seems, to the body via the “Cartesian imagination/sensus
communis” at the “pineal surface,” “the lynchpin that holds together the two metaphysical worlds
of Cartesianism. As it had done for Aristotle, the imagination/sensus communis mediated
between the bodily senses, and the {now incorporeal) rational mind” (3).
When the Romantics came along, the ideas of Philostratus (among others) were given
fresh life as

“discussion concerning imagination shifted away from cognitive theory and

epistemology, and towards its role in original, creative thinking, especially in the
arts” (3). In other words, imagination was given value, along with passion, and
even Coleridge [despite all his attempts to formalize his definitions along
philosophic lines] “relied heavily on Kant and post-Kantian German idealism (and
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Plotinus....)...(with) results (from a philosophical perspective) fragmentary and l
argely incoherent” (4).

This brings us to the twentieth century, and Sartre (who seems to have respected the idea
of imagination), stands against an array of

“analytical philosophers (who)....seem to doubt whether the imagination even

exists. Gilbert Ryle declared, in The Concept of Mind, that “There is no special
Faculty of Imagination, occupying itself single-mindedly in fancied viewings and
hearings” 91949), and this soon became the widely accepted viewpoint” (4).

The fundamental concept of internal imagery and functioning imagination as a real process
of mind has received some support from “cognitive psychologists such as....Paivio...Shepard,
and....Kosslyn” as it has become once more ‘respectable as a topic for experimental
psychological investigation” (4). But that doesn’t mean that “imagination” has regained status as
anything more than “a representationally dependent auxiliary to other, more fundamental forms
of mental representation, and current theories of image formation hardly aspire to the central
place in cognitive theory once occupied by the imagination’ (5). This is actually quite a fall from
an almost pre-eminent position of consideration in the cognitive/creative processes as envisioned
by Coleridge and others in the Romantic movement, even when the difficulties that Hume
brought to its definition divided opinions: “According to Hume ‘Tis an established maxim in
metaphysics, That...nothing we imagine is absolutely impossible (Treatise, I,ii,2)” (5). Without
wading through examples that can prove to us how we can imagine some impossible things, and
that the converse of Hume’s observation can lead to prickly non sequiturs, there is some
physiological evidence available now that visual imagery and imagination are neurologically
generated and can, in the future, no doubt be controlled:

“Neurological patients who have lost the retinotopically mapped regions in one
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cerebral hemisphere, leaving them blind in the corresponding half of their visual
field, show certain impaired imaginary abilities in the blinded hemifield...
However, other patients suffering from cortical blindness due to damage in these
areas seem to have relatively normal imagery. Furthermore, some patients with
localized damage in the retinotopically mapped areas experience vivid, well-
formed “visual hallucinations” (i.e. imagery that is outside of conscious control--
they do not typically mistake it for reality) precisely in the affected (blind or
“blindsighted”) parts of their visual fields. This suggests that these brain areas
cannot be essential for visual imagery” (http: Are Theories of Imagery.....6).

The above quotation may offer the reader a glimpse of the mechanistic and rigid way in
which ideas and definitions of “imagination” and “imagery” are currently being approached by
leading investigators of imagery and imaginative phenomena in the late twentieth cenury (the
above quote refers to some of the results of recent investigations of Kosslyn, et al (1992-1997).
There is not much room for any living, breathing corpus of an evolving definition for
imagination here. It has already been decided that everything that emanates from that lump of
complex tissue and fluids known as the ‘brain’ is limited by its physiological characteristics,
parameters, and functions.
It is rather like analyzing Kubla Khan as the mere product of the influence of opium--as if
there will ever be another Kubla Khan!
So worrying about the “definition” of imagination/Imagination just might be a waste of time
for the poet, the writer, the artist. I have sometimes wondered if James Joyce’s outpourings in
Ulysses was a response elicited not only by his knowledge of so many languages ---as if they
struck a freight train crashing against his skull---but also as the result of mercury treatments he is
theorized to have taken in an attempt to cure the syphilis that claimed his eye and the sanity of
his daughter (not, you won’t find more than a few papers on that subject— it’s research I’ve
done, myself, from medical evidence I discovered in the 1970's about Joyce, his wife and
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children, so far as I am aware).

In fact, if “Romanticism” indeed appropriated “Imagination” as a living definition --though
that’s surely a simplified viewpoint--a definition that rested on a full understanding of the past,
and which was being stressed and challenged by the skeptical attitudes of those whose reliance
on science alone would render blossoms, imagination, and baby monkeys alike as only topics to
analyze---then it was possibly the last stand attempt of creative human minds to secure a place of
respect for what the mind could produce, for which the world might not have a place, nor
understand, nor be ready.
It is the very liveliness of Imagination as the Romantics attempted to define it-- aware of its
past meanings--of how Milton and Blake and the ancient philosophers gave Imagination a place
of respect in the dynamics of human thought— along with vibrant arguments over past and
present agreements about what Imagination really stood for (and which it might no longer, for
similar reasons today, stand for), that tends to attract me. It behooves us to see if we agree that
‘imagination” as we think it is today resembles at all the Romantic’s notion about it, or not.
To be able to give a name to that factor that affects your creative thought as does the concept
of “imagination’ should not slay it or render it lifeless: imagination remains with the human race,
recognized or not, so long as people dare to think for themselves. I like what Wordsworth calls
“the imaginative will” because of the empowerment this term gives to the will that is adorned,
amidst its potential for reasonableness, by the focused intellect. Margaret Sherwood says that
Wordsworth, “searching for the single intellectual formula that would solve the complex problem
of existence...(was) reduced by....dogmatic fatalism to depression that was well-night despair:

“The crisis of that strong disease, the soul’s last and lowest ebb....was a
questioning as to the reality of the existence of the human will, of the power of
choice, and of the adequacy of the reason to give grounds for choice....the story of
Wordsworth’s recovery, as recorded in prelude, is one of the great chapters in
human biography. In reaction from temporary submission to (the) doctrine...that
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man (is) the driven victim of external forces...the young poet (became)
...conscious...of creative power within...(and) (h)is faith in “the imaginative will,”
as a creative power, capable of vivifying the human soul at the pure sources of b
eing, he ever after expressed in his poetry and...life” (182-183).

The power of his understanding of the relationship between the creative powers that
Wordsworth felt flowing through him – imagination, and his will to turn this creative force into a
creation by choice – by the exertion of his own will, has motivational value for the writer and the
poet that transcends any technical, scientific definitions of “imagery” and “imagination” that
have been produced from exploring traumatized and bisected monkey (or human) brains.
Imagination was recognized in various, past cultures as possessing its own particular
dimensions, which now will be refined through Wordsworth, who redefines imagination as a
choice which may acted upon by the will.
Today’s students, largely exposed to scientific method and scientific jargon, have not
experienced the making of a major definition in the matter of creativity: it is almost a fearful
thing to call oneself “creative.” To admit having a big imagination is to invite speculation as to
one’s ultimate mental stability: there are already correlations that exist between creativity and
manic depression, creativity and insanity. Unfortunately, the fact that a person in danger of
insanity, or who is mentally unstable, might resort to a creative stratagem in order to survive or
to improve one’s grasp, by the will, of reality, through the act of creation, does not seem to be
understood in that light, and I suggest that this is an unfortunate oversight. As for the rest of us,
the use of imagination as a tool to explore realistic outcomes after making a certain choice
provides a basis for understanding the utilitarian advantages of such a function. The viability of
imagination as a source of attaining logical order in our lives, having explored, via the
imagination, the likely and unlikely consequences of certain choices, is generally ignored. And
of course, that same range of choice, developed as a result of contemplating imagined outcomes
and scenarios, allows the artist, the writer, the poet, the logician and the scientist to make better
creative choices in their respective fields.
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Imagination, even today, might be understood, then, under Wordsworth’s interpretation as a

device or resource— a potential means, one might say-- to obtain or to take advantage of a
strategy with which to cope with events or ideas potentially unendurable, or, to produce new
ones, relative to, or irrelevant to, one’s surroundings, milieu, and environment, with the
understanding that to exert Imagination is to utilize a key element in the successful adaptation, or
expression, of the human being.
The Wordsworthian definition of Imagination empowers. It is a passport to new and
unimagined events, to possible worlds otherwise unable to be entered without permission from
some higher authority, whether deity or dictator. I suggest that the Romantic approach to
Imagination allows the mind a degree of freedom for radical exploration which modern
definitions might eventually deny to us (if we do not wish to be regarded as somehow overly
creative, and, therefore, possibly mentally unstable, etc.).
In all such considerations, the element of satire should not be ignored. Imagination, alone, in
any realization as a movement by Romantic writers/poets worthy of adoption in our own
philosophy, must not exclude the consideration of the role of satire in its implementation. Satire
can mask or disguise the creative product, allowing it to be a sugar-coating for what otherwise
might be a difficult pill for a contemporary world – glutted on scientific thought – to swallow.
So that we might get a better grasp of what “imagination” might have meant to Romantics, rather
than what it now means to us, looking back at them, we need to consider that the role of satire
has been somewhat overlooked, I think, as an influence in the works of the Romantics. I
consider their satirical asides and creations as a response to the social pressures which keep so
many writers and artists pathetically poor. Just as farmers are at the bottom of the heap,
supplying food to all the world, and nevertheless receiving less than anyone else for what they
sell (as that food is processed and becomes more expensive per consumable unit, which the
farmer must purchase back, keeping him poorer), so, too, artists, poets, and writers produce
thoughts and ideas which others eventually adapt and enjoy, while the benefits of their labors,
which employ Imagination, rarely return to them in the form of monetary rewards or respect.
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Romantic Imagination was a dynamic concept that helped spur the fearless production of
works which may have originated as responses to yet earlier works: the whole chain was almost
a living structure, both dynamic and active, composed of a socially interacting set of creative
people, who generally produced their works with vigor until they died. As the Romantics died,
their creative outlook, their definition of Imagination, died with them. Their concept of
Imagination yet struggled for expression, here and there: I see impressionistic painting, stream of
consciousness writing, and other marvelous instances of the Romantic legacy still asserting itself
in the works of the last great believers in imagination.
It is important to understand that explosions of creativity typically are associated with
new things, or new ways of looking at things. It is imagination both stimulates and that is
stimulated in this way, and it is the definition of imagination that was central to Coleridge’s
almost desperate search for understanding the relevance of creativity in the grid-locked universe
described by scientific method. Coleridge’s attempt to define Imagination reaches an apex in
Chapter Thirteen of the Biographica Literaria, a statement so famous I won’t repeat it here, but
of which Thomas McFarland says

“Not only is there no preparation for the threefold distinction of Chapter Thirteen
in Coleridge’s previous writings, there is none even in the Biographica...in
Chapter Thirteen...in an astonishing volte face, he writes himself a letter in
which...(he) proceeds simply to dump upon (the reader) the threefold
distinction...”(210).

Indeed, the spontaneous assertion of a threefold property to Imagination may have had its real
roots in Blake’s opinions, according to McFarland: “To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from
Albions covering, to take off his filthy garments, & clothe him with Imagination...” (215)
And yet Coleridge wanted to reconcile mysticism and Imagination, systematically if possible,
with “the dictates of common sense with the conclusions of scientific Reasoning.” For Coleridge
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“...shared the respect of his age for science and scientific theories, the
confidence that human experience could be explained as physical nature
could be explained, that there were laws of human nature as well as laws
of motion....What he required was a means of reconciling the experience
of the oasis [i.e. of visionary insight] with acceptable conceptions of
physical and psychological reality” (216).

Not an ignoble venture.

Coleridge was aware that there is an element of passivity in the idea that Imagination is
merely a by-product of a physical brain undergoing some permutations which cannot at present
(but eventually might always) be controlled. McFarland shows how Coleridge tried to attack
some of the difficulties that arise in relying only upon scientific concepts of imagination. When
Coleridge understands not only Kant, but the objections of the philosopher Tetens, he begins to
breathe more easily. An excerpt of Tetens’ thought will reveal what Coleridge was learning:

“‘Dichkraft can create no elements, no fundamental materials, can make only

nothing out of nothing, and to that extent is no creative power. It can only
separate, dissolve, join together, blend; but precisely thereby it can produce new
images, which from the standpoint of our faculty of differentiation are discrete
representations.’
There is accordingly a Selbstthatigheit— a spontaneous activity--in the
“receptivity of the psyche” ...a perceiving, reproducing and co-adunating power”
(222).

Coleridge, noted McFarland, as especially found in Chapter Eight of his Biographica

Literaria, embraced ideas such as these expressed by Tetens (even more, McFarlane asserts
rather convincingly, than those of Kant), which gave him the intellectual relief he sought from t
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the Newtonian outlook which had so depressed him:

“Newton was a mere materialist – Mind in his system is always passive – a lazy
Looker-on an external World. If the mind be not passive, if it indeed be made in
God’s Image, & that too in the sublimed sense— the Image of the Creator— there
is ground for suspicion, that any system built on the passiveness of the mind must
be false, as a system” (222).

While I cannot embrace Coleridge’s precise religious interpretations, nor, for that matter,
the twofold or threefold vision of Imagination, with which we could occupy the timber of a
whole tree made into paper, McFarlane makes another interesting argument that “the lineage of
the secondary imagination extends not only backwards beyond Kant to Teens, but also beyond
Teens to Leibniz, and finally beyond Leibniz to Plato.”
And that makes all the difference: Coleridge contemplates this unbroken succession of
thought (as I think we, too, might profit from doing), and thus,
“With antecedents of this kind,....Coleridge’s threefold theory of imagination
actually bears less on poetry than it does on those things that always mattered
most to him— as they did to Leibniz and to Kant— that is, “the freedom of the
will, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God” (224-226).

With the advent of the computer, we entered a new frontier: we did not know how to explore
it all – its functions and potential were not defined for us in advance. Of itself, the computer
offered the human mind endless variations using Imagination. Once more, marvelous, creative
things can happen, because we aren't fettered by a totally mechanistic interpretation of
everything that we do. It is a new creative frontier, waiting to be expanded and developed.
It will be tamed faster than any frontier behind it, as we speed up everything we process
through that same medium – science – that now rules most of the domain of our minds with its
interpretations of what is sane, what is not, what is real, what is not, and – no doubt soon to
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come – will dare dicate to us what we might be allowed to create, and what we will dare not. As
evidenced in police states, satire, wit and humor can unlock thought-prisons. Satire, in
particular, provides the creative imagination its last foot-hold on the mountain of which reason is
King. In this King-of-the-Mountain scenario, satire cannot win, cannot wrest away any lasting
laurels for Imagination. But it can challenge the King with a dissident voice.
. Says critic Marilyn Butler: “With the passing of time, critics seem to have become less rather
than more aware of the satirical and intellectual strain in Romantic writing...” (191). That is
because satire’s shafts strike most deeply into contemporary targets, some now so remote to our
imaginations (dare I use the word?) that we no longer see the original target, if even the direction
of the arrows.
That richness of potential for creativity (that a term such as “imagination” might have had on
the minds of those sophisticates and idealists who thought of themselves as exemplars and
pioneering rebels embracing Romanticism) as a holistic and all-pervading philosophy with a
utilitarian function – dealing with a world in which man found himself suddenly aware that he
might be in charge of his universe, that he might be standing alone, and alone responsible for the
events of the world in which he lived, unsure whether or not his actions were be ordained by
God(s) or imposed upon him by happenstance and instinct -- this freedom may be denied us in
our modern day. But not satire. Satire breaks through, sharp and sincere.
Morality and new meaning, when a human being could imagine good and evil as choices that
might be made without interference from a higher moral power – these will not be topics of
debate in a future where everything will be explained by DNA and environment. Nature was
once man’s teacher, and the forces of his own nature his dictator, with the whole wide world
opening before him, ready to explore and conquer. What was imagined could become real. What
seemed to be real did not have to be substantiated by the senses. Today, using imagination – not
mere formulae for success – in a world where scientists declare what we should or should not
think, is the hallmark of an intellectual rebel.
Our challenge, today, is to preserve “Imagination” from any definition at all.
 Judyth A.V. Baker 1
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With this in mind, look once more, please, at the “definition” which was absorbed so rapidly
by you, the reader, at the beginning of this article:

imagination- Traditionally, the mental capacity for experiencing, constructing

or manipulating ‘mental imagery’ (quasi-perceptual experience). Imagination
is also regarded as responsible for fantasy, inventiveness, idiosyncrasy, and
creative, original and insightful thought in general, and, sometimes, for a
much wider range of mental activities dealing with the non-actual, such as
supposing, pretending, ‘seeing as’, thinking of possibilities, and even being
mistaken. See representation.
Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind

Note the last part of this definition: ‘the mental capacity for’ ‘even being mistaken.’ To have
the liberty to err, to be mistaken, to possess the ability to think about “the thing which is not,” as
those all-logical Houyhnhnms of Jonathan Swift’s satirical imagination could not imagine – the
right to be wrong that rests at the center of “Imagination” – this is a right and option we should
guard as our unspeakably valuable creative heritage and treasured legacy from the Romantic
tradition.
 Judyth A.V. Baker 1
A Romantic Legacy

Thanks to Dr. Joseph Riehl (the University of Louisiana at Lafayette) who suggested that
I expand this essay.

Works Cited

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. S.T. Coleridge Notebooks. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christianson,
eds. 4 vols. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990.
_______________________. Biographica Literaria. Chapts. 1-22. 1815. Etext available
at Project Gutenberg; for relevant extracts, see Imagination in Coleridge (below).
Butler, Marilyn. “Satire and the Images of self in the Romantic Period: the Long Tradition of
Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris.” English Satire and the Satiric Tradition. Ed. Claude Rawson.
Padstow, Great Britain: Basil Blackwell, 1984. Pp. 209-225.
Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind, Voice of the Shuttle e-link.
<http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDict/imagination.html>
acquired 9/22/99
Edwards, S. T. “Master Concepts in Literary Study: The Moral Imagination”
<http://www.stedwards.edu/newc/green/moral.htm> Pp. 1-5.
acquired 9/30/99
Hobbes, Thomas. The Leviathan.
<http://osu.orst.edu/instruct/phl1302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-b.html> pp. 6-22
acquired 9/22/99
“Imagination in Coleridge.” E-textual Extracts from University of Ottawa transcripts of The
Letters of S.T. Coleridge. <http://aix1.uottawa.ca/~phoenix/im-51.htm> Pp 2-6.
acquired 7/28/99
 Judyth A.V. Baker 1
A Romantic Legacy
Lovejoy, Arthur O. “Optimism and Romanticism.” Eighteenth Century English Literature:
Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. James L. Clifford. New York: oxford UP, 1959. Pp.
319-343.
McFarland, Thomas. “Theory of Secondary Imagination.” New Perspectives on Coleridge and
Wordsworth. Ed. Geoffrey Hartman. New York & London: Columbia UP, 1972. Pp. 194-
246.
Sherwood, Margaret. “Wordsworth: The Imaginative Will.” Undercurrents of Influence in
English Romantic Poetry. New York: AMS Press, 1934, 1971.
Stllinger, Jack. Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems.
New York & Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Pp. 1-140.
Thomas, Nigel J. T. “Are Theories of Imagery Theories of Imagination? An Active Perception
Approach to Conscious Mental Contact.” In press: Cognitive Science
<http://web,calstatela.edu/faculty/nthomas/im-im/im-im.htm> pp. 1-40
acquired 9/22/99

Some Additional Readings:

Babbitt, Irving. “The Problem of the Imagination.” On Being Creative and Other Essays, New
York: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1932.
Baker, J. V. The Sacred River: Coleridge’s Theory of the Imagination. Baton Rouge;
LA State UP, 1957. (This is not me!)
Baars, B. J. “When Are Images Conscious? The Curious Disconnection between Imagery and
Consciousness in the Scientific Literature.” Consciousness and Cognition, 5, 1996. Pp.
261-264.
Tyler, T. L. “Elements of Plato in Coleridge’s Theory of the Imagination.” Essay for
Professors McGaughey and Dalsant, Dept. Of English, Humboldt University.
<http://www.humboldt1.com/~tyler/writing/essays/literature/plato_in_coleridge.html>
acquired 9/30/99
 Judyth A.V. Baker 1
A Romantic Legacy

Dear Dr. Reality:

Here it is!
I’ve included Internet materials, or parts of them, depending on what the dog didn’t sleep on.
If you want the journal notes, or more annotated bibliographic items than what I originally turned
in, please drop a note in my box. Most of the journal notes are written in my textbook, but
wouldn’t take too long to transcribe or maybe even to xerox. I also have a lot of notes I took in
class, and additional ones, which I’ve been taking all along, which I can present for your
inspection— just say the word— just put a note in my book if you want to see that material, and
I’ll get it to you the next morning.
 Judyth A.V. Baker 1
A Romantic Legacy
Thanks for working with me, and for your patience.
I found out I’ve taken 18 more hours than I needed....could have finished all course work last
spring.....that’s what happens when you’re writing a big book and teaching and having fun--- and
you’ve been advised you to need to sign up for various tough courses that you eventually found
out wouldn’t make unless you showed up......I am the soul of naivete still......!
:-)
Your weary --and enlightened---student, wishing you the best, and glad this isn’t our last
contact..... j.
:-) :-) :-)