Wordsworth and Coleridge on Imagination

Kathleen M. Lynch, in her paper Wordsworths Imagination: Three Critical Approaches and
The Prelude, says, "Imagination is an idea that Romantic poets substantially interpret. The
Imagination is not a simple concept, and it is more than a motif in Romantic poems." In this
essay, I intend to discuss Wordsworth's and Coleridge's ideas of Imagination.

Wordsworth deals with Imagination in his Preface to the 1815 edition of the Lyrical Ballads
where draws a distinction between Fancy and Imagination. Wordsworth says that Imagination,
"Is but another name for absolute power/And clearest insight, amplitude of mind,/And Reason
in her most exalted mood." He goes as far as relegating reason to an inferior position. He
considers Imagination to be that faculty which transforms sensory perceptions and makes the
poet conscious of human immortality and his kinship with the eternal.

Wordsworth purports that the poet is a man who thinks long and deeply, and so he can treat
things which are absent as if they were present. In other words, the poet contemplates in
tranquility the emotions which he has experienced in the past and through Imagination can
visualize the objects which gave rise to those emotions initially.

Wordsworth opposes the associationist theories of David Hartley. Hartley and other
associationists believed that the human mind receives impressions from the external world,
which are therein associated together to form images. In this way, the mind merely reflects the
external world. But according to Wordsworth, the mind does not merely reflect passively, it
actively creates. The poet does not only present image of men and nature but he also shapes,
modifies and transfigures that image by the power of his Imagination. Thus Imagination is
creative; it is a shaping or plastic power. The poet is then not a mere mechanical reproducer of
outward reality, but a specially gifted individual, who, like God, is a creator as he adds
something to nature and reality.

However, Wordsworths distinction between Fancy and Imagination is not so subtle and
penetrating as that of Coleridge which I will discuss in the second half of this essay. According
to Wordsworth, both Imagination and Fancy, evoke and combine, aggregate and associate,
but the material which they evoke and combine is different, and their purpose in evoking and
combining is different. They differ in their purpose, and in the material on which they work. The
material on which Fancy works is not so susceptible to change or so pliant as the material on
which Imagination works. Wordsworth believes that Fancy makes things exact and definite,
while Imagination leaves everything vague and indefinite.

Wordsworth uses language to mediate between his interior world and the world of external
reality. He uses the rhetoric and imagery of the outer, universally known world in order to best
express his thoughts; at the same time, what made them worth expressing were that they were
separate from that same outer, universally known world. Imagination works upon the raw
material of sense impressions to illustrate the working of external truths. It makes the poet
perceive the essential unity of man, God and Nature.
For instance, in Book VI, Cambridge and the Alps, Wordsworth and his companion set out to
climb the Swiss Alps. However, they are twice met with disappointment. First they see Mont
Blanc and are underwhelmed by its appearance. Later, & they are eager to cross the Alps at
Simplon Pass, but when they ask a peasant for directions, he reveals that they have already
unwittingly passed the crossing point they were so looking forward to seeing. Almost
immediately after that incident, Wordsworth explains that he was able to recognize the power
of the Imagination, the unfathered vapour that changed how he saw the situation. After he
overcomes his disappointment, Wordsworth is capable of seeing the world differently. In a
way, the Imagination edits his view of reality through later reflection.

Imagination, for Wordsworth, is a transforming and transfiguring power which presents the
usual in an unusual light. Also, Imagination is the minds eye through which the poet sees into
the heart of things as well as into the past, the remote, and the unknown. It is Imagination
which enables the poet to render emotional experience, which he has not personally
experienced, as if, they were personally felt emotions. The power of Imagination enables the
poet to universalize the particular and the personal, and arrives at universal truths. Henry
Crabbe Robinson described the process in the following words, The poet first conceives the
essential nature of his object, and then strips it of all casualties and accidental individual dress,
and in this he is a philosopher; he re-clothes his idea in an individual dress which expresses
the essential quality and has also the spirit and life of a sensual object. And this transmutes the
philosophic into a poetic exhibition.

However, Wordsworth is also aware of the difficulties of using language to express his
Imagination. In the 1850 version of The Prelude, Wordsworth laments that language cannot
fully incorporate the idea of the Imagination, as he struggles to find the words to describe his
meaning "through sad incompetence of human speech. Poststructuralist critics say that as
Wordsworth struggles to find the words to describe his meaning, he sees a parallel in his larger-
scale struggle to bring his inner thoughts to the outside world. He deems Imagination to be of
higher import, denoting operations of the human mind upon those objects and processes of
creation or composition, governed by certain fixed laws.

Next, I will focus upon Coleridge's ideas of Imagination. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's interest on
the subject of Imagination can be credited to William Wordsworth, however the latter is
interested only in the impact of Imagination on poetry. Whereas Wordsworth considers
Imagination as an indiscrete entity, Coleridge, on the other hand, discusses in detail the theory
of Imagination. He studied the nature of Imagination and also examines its role in creative
activity. He further subdivides Imagination as Primary and Secondary, and earmarks them for
their respective roles, which I'll discuss in detail below. Ina Lipkowitz, Lecturer in MIT's
Literature Department describes Coleridges treatment of the subject as "characterized by
greater depth, penetration and philosophical subtlety" in the chapter "Inspiration and the
Poetic Imagination: Samuel Taylor Coleridge" of her work, Studies in Romanticism.

Coleridge focuses mainly on Imagination as the key to poetry. He divides Imagination into two
components: Primary and Secondary Imagination. In Biographia Literaria, he writes, "The
Primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and
as a repetition in the finite of the eternal act of creation of the infinite I Am. The Secondary I
consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet still identical with the
Primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its
operation."

The Primary Imagination, Coleridge propounds, is universal and possessed by all. The Secondary
Imagination, on the other hand, is the peculiar and typical trait of the poet. Secondary
Imagination is more active and conscious than Primary Imagination; it requires an effort of the
will, volition and conscious effort; and it makes artistic creation possible. However, it should be
noted that Secondary Imagination is not entirely extrinsic to the effect of Primary Imagination.
It works upon the raw material which are the sensations and impressions supplied to it by the
Primary Imagination. The Secondary Imagination selects and orders the raw material and re-
shapes and re-models it into objects of beauty. Coleridge describes it as an active agent which
"dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to create.

The distinction that Coleridge draws between Imagination and Fancy is more refined than that
of Wordsworth. Fancy, Coleridge believes, is not creative. It is a kind of memory concerned with
the mechanical operations of the mind such as the passive accumulation of data. It brings
together images into beautiful shapes, and even when brought together, they continue to
retain their separate and individual properties. They receive no coloring or modification from
the mind.

The difference between the two is the same as the difference between a mixture and a
compound in Chemistry. In a mixture, the ingredients are brought together and mechanically
put together. Although they are mixed up, each ingredient in the mixture keeps its own
properties. In a compound, the different ingredients combine to form something new. The
different ingredients no longer exist as separate identities. A compound is an act of creation;
while a mixture is merely a bringing together of a number of separate elements.

Coleridge talks about two passages from Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis to illustrate Fancy,
"Full gently now she takes him by the hand,/A lily prisoned in a goal of snow,/ Or ivory in an
alabaster band,/ So white a friend engirds so white a foe."

This is indeed an aesthetic imagery, but Coleridge propounds that in these lines, the images are
drawn from memory, and they do not interpenetrate into one another. He then quotes the
following lines from the same poem to illustrate the working of Imagination: "Look! How a
bright star shooteth from the sky/So glides he in the night from Venusl eye."

The fantastical imagery of a star shooting from Venus's eye is an absolutely new, and strange
imagery. This imagery is created by an autonomous willful act of the mind of the poet that has
no analog in the natural world. It can be said as a manifestation of the synthesizing activity of
the Secondary Imagination.

Coleridge also makes use of Secondary Imagination in his poem, Kubla Khan: "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 lines represent the creation of a
previously non-existent setting. This segment creates entirely new scenes in the reader's mind.
Coleridge also uses highly imaginative images to create juxtaposition in the poem. He writes, "A
sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice!". The "reconciliation of opposites" manifests itself in
lines such as these. The adjective "sunny" implies warmth, whereas "ice" is cold. Together, they
hint at an oxymoronic darker side to the superficially idyllic pleasure dome. Considering the
bigger picture, Kubla Khan's pleasure dome is a juxtaposition as well. The leader of the Mongols
is not thought of as a kind or benevolent man. This discordance can be read as Coleridges use
of Imagination in the inherent construction of the poem.

The significance of Imagination for Coleridge is that it represents the sole faculty within man
that is able to achieve the Romantic ambition of reuniting the subject and the object, the world
of the Self and the world of Nature. By establishing the creative act as mimicking the "organic
principle" or "one", the Romantic theorist seeks to establish a harmonious relationship
between the ideal world of the subject and the real world of the object. For Coleridge, the most
important aspect of the Imagination is that it is active to the highest degree. The creative act
calls the whole soul of man into activity. James Volant Baker argues in The Sacred River that
according to Coleridge's theory of the Imagination, the creative act "is a godlike-act-of-power
and Imagination is hence the divine potency in man". This is akin to the Creative aspect in
Wordsworths theory of Imagination . Hence, Imagination becomes a unifying power that
synthesizes the various faculties of the soulperception, intellect, will, emotionand fuses the
internal with the external, the subjective with the objective, the human mind with external
nature, the spiritual with the physical.

On a concluding note, I will like to quote Rene Wellek who says, The only important difference
between Wordsworth and Coleridge is that Wordsworth does not clearly see Coleridges
distinction between Imagination as a holistic and fancy as an associative power and does not
draw the sharp distinction between transcendentalism and associationism which Coleridge
wanted to establish.