Diction of Fancy and Imagination with the reference of Coleridge Theory

Diction of Fancy and Imagination with the Reference of Coleridge Theory

Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

        Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on October 21, 1772. His birth place was Ottery St. Mary, Devon, England. His father Reverend John Coleridge was vicar of the parish and headmaster of Henry VIII’s Free Grammar School. After his father’s death he was sent to Christ’s Hospital. That was a charity school. Whenever Coleridge appreciated by his teacher, he also wrote this in his schooldays in Biographia Literaria:

I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time, a very severe master [...] At the same time that we were studying the Greek Tragic Poets, he made us read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons: and they were the lessons too, which required most time and trouble to bring up, so as to escape his censure. I learnt from him, that Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes. [...] In our own English compositions (at least for the last three years of our school education) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words... In fancy I can almost hear him now, exclaiming Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? your Nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose! [...] Be this as it may, there was one custom of our master's, which I cannot pass over in silence, because I think it ... worthy of imitation. He would often permit our theme exercises, ... to accumulate, till each lad had four or five to be looked over. Then placing the whole number abreast on his desk, he would ask the writer, why this or that sentence might not have found as appropriate a place under this or that other thesis: and if no satisfying answer could be returned, and two faults of the same kind were found in one exercise, the irrevocable verdict followed, the exercise was torn up, and another on the same subject to be produced, in addition to the tasks of the day.

 He was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher. His literary movement was Romanticism.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his friend William Wordsworth was the founder of the Romantic Movement in England. He wrotes the poems like The Rime of Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan. These both poems were remarkable work done by him. He also had given his work in the genre of prose writing. His major prose work is Biographia Literaria. His critical work on Shakespeare was highly influenced to the reader. He also helped German culture. He firstly introduces German Idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture.

                If we focused on his personal life, we found that in his adult life he suffered from crippling bouts of anxiety and depression. And some guess that he suffered from Bipolar disorder. But still his condition was unrecognized during his whole life. Coleridge was living near and travelling with William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. Coleridge got married in 1795. Coleridge was deeply in love with Sara Hutchnson. He was also addicted to the opium (a kind of a drug). So for his better health he had to move with the surgeon James Gilliman. In his rest of the life he was living in London. Coleridge died on 25^th of July, 1834 at the age of 61.

Imagination:

                                Imagination is the basic and most important creative faculty in a poet. It is next to impossible to write a poem without an imagination. Threw imagination a poet observes different forms and objects in human life and their nature. So it can be defined more beautifully. With the help of imagination it melts and spread into a “Sweet Solution”. So it is called “Shaping and unifying power”.

                                Coleridge has divided Imagination in two Major forms: The first one is Primary Imagination and second one is Secondary Imagination.

(1)     Primary Imagination:

The primary imagination is the form of imagination. It is natural form of imagination and it focuses on the basic criteria of the imagination. It is used only one sense and that is the sense of perception. This form basically observes the activity of person. It is very much near to the world of reality. This form of imagination is also observes the real forms of persons, places, things and subject of nature. And then Primary imagination combines them in one form but that is only in the tangible or real form.

(2)    Secondary Imagination:

Another form of the imagination is Secondary imagination. Secondary imagination is the more important form of imagination. It is a conscious form of imagination. It is made up of different elements. So it is a composite faculty of the soul, using all faculties like perception, intellect, will emotions and spirituality. Secondary imagination works on the all types minor and major aspects of imagination. It directly in touch with the soul of imagination that is why it is more active and more comprehensive faculty than the primary imagination. When the secondary imagination is rising up in the mind, in its process of shaping and modifying, the mind and nature used to act against each other. The reason of that is the mind is acting on a nature to become one with nature and in the same way the nature is acting on the mind to become one with mind. Thus, the primary and secondary forms of imagination have the same faculty of re-creation with a difference of only “degrees” or “range of comprehension” and not in essentials.

                The primary imagination is universal, it is controlled by all. The secondary imagination may be possessed by others also, but it is the unique and typical characteristic of the artist. The Secondary imagination plays the major role in the creation of secondary imagination. Just because of the secondary imagination it is possible for artist to create. Through this imagination artist can take his imaginary level to the other standard. Secondary imagination is more active and conscious in compare of the primary imagination; it requires an effort of the will, volition and conscious effort. The primary imagination sands raw material like sensation and impressions to the secondary imagination. And then it  works upon it. By an effort of the will and the intellect the secondary imagination selects and orders the raw material and re-shapes and re-models it into objects of beauty. It is ‘simplistic’, i.e. “a shaping and modifying power”. Its ‘plastic stress’ re-shapes objects of the external world and steeps them with a glory and dream that never was on sea and land. the secondary is a peculiar privilege enjoyed by the artist. It is an active agent which, “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to create”.

                Imagination is a more truly creative power.   Rather than being simply a faculty for rearranging materials fed to it by the senses and the memory, the Imagination is a shaping and ordering power, a "modifying" power which colours objects of sense with the mind's own light:

Ah! From the Soul itself must issue forth A Light, a Glory, and a luminous Cloud           Enveloping the Earth! And from the Soul itself must there be sent A sweet & potent Voice, of it's own Birth, Of all sweet Sounds the Life & Element!7

            Imagination and fancy are little bit different from each other. Fancy is not a powerful element. Fancy just combines the things are comprehend into beautiful in shapes. Fancy does not merge n join the things. Fancy, on other side has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definite. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory liberate from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word choice. But equally with the ordinary memory the fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association. The difference between the two is the same as the difference between a mechanical mixture and a chemical compound. In a mechanical mixture lot of ingredients brought together. They are mixed with each other, but they do not lose their individual properties. In a chemical compound, the different ingredients combine to form something new. The different ingredients no longer exist as separate identities. They lose their respective properties and fuse together to create something new and entirely different. A compound is an act of creation; while a mixture is merely a bringing together of a number of separate elements. The imagination, however which produces a much higher kind of poetry,

                Coleridge explained this property of the "Imagination" as "Esemplastic," to "shape into one" and to "convey a new sense." Coleridge in the tenth chapter of Biographia Literaria described this ability of the imagination as "Esemplistic." Noting that esemplistic was a word he borrowed from the Greek "to shape," Coleridge explained that it referred to the imagination's ability to "shape into one, having to convey a new sense." He felt such a term was necessary as "it would aid the recollection of my meaning and prevent it being confounded with the usual import of the word imagination." Derived from Greek words meaning "into" and "one" and "mold," and coined by Coleridge in 1817, the word simplistic means "having the function of molding into unity; unifying." The picture derived from the word is of someone, probably a poet, taking images and words and feelings from a number of realms of human endeavour and thought and bringing them all together into a poem he writes. This requires a huge effort of the imagination, which we might call the "simplistic power of the poetic imagination." A decade after its first appearance a writer could remark, "Nor I trust will Coleridge's favourite word simplistic...ever become current." Not only did the subject subsume the object it can also be argued that Imagination subsumed the role of Fancy within the creative work. Thus while Coleridge argued that the poet relied on both Fancy and Imagination when inventing a poem, and that the poet should seek a balance of these two faculties.

This secondary imagination is at the root of all poetic activity. So the quality of the poem improves with the use of secondary imagination. It is the power which blends and merges opposites. Coleridge calls it a magical, synthetic power. This unifying power is best seen in the fact that it increases or unites the various faculties of the soul. They are like perception, intellect, will, emotion. And blend it with one another; the internal with the external, the subjective with the objective, the human mind with external nature, the spiritual with the physical. With the help of unifying power nature is colored by the soul of the poet, and soul of the poet is drenched in nature. The poet discovers “The identity” in man and nature results from the integrate activity of the secondary imagination.

“Dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects are essentially fixed and dead.”

The difference made by Coleridge between Fancy and the Imagination rested on the fact that Fancy was very much related with the mechanical operations of the mind, those which are responsible for the inactive gatherings of data and the storage of such data in the memory. Imagination, on the other hand, described the "mysterious power," which extracted from such data, "hidden ideas and meaning." It also determined "the various operations of constructive and inventive genius.”

According to Coleridge Fancy was employed for tasks that were “passive” and “mechanical”, the accumulation of fact and documentation of what is seen. "Always the ape," Fancy, Coleridge argued, was "too often the adulterator and counterfeiter of memory." The Imagination on the other hand was "vital" and transformative, "a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation." For Coleridge, it was the Imagination that was responsible for acts that were truly creative and inventive and, in turn, that identified true instances of fine or noble art. The significance of the Imagination for Coleridge was that it represented the sole faculty within man that was 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"—a divine principle believed to underlie all reality—the romantic theorist sought to establish a harmonious relationship between the ideal world of the subject and the real world of the object. Baker has demonstrated that Coleridge was convinced that the Imagination acted as "a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am," and that it not only reinforced the notion that perception was active and creative, it established the cosmos as an organic entity. For Coleridge, the most important aspect of the imagination was that it was active to the highest degree. The creative act called the whole soul of man into activity. As Baker has argued: "the creative act, on the contrary, is a godlike-act-of-power and causing-to-be, imagination being the divine potency in man. The creative act by which the poet writes the poem is similar to the creative act by which God ordered the world out of chaos; if the poet's creative act is not a creation ex nihilo, it is a process of organic becoming through which the materials are transformed into something absolutely new, and also very likely, strange."

                The origin of the opposition between primary and secondary imagination is vaguely Kantian. Fancy is a limited or false parallel of Secondary Imagination. Coleridge criticises Wordsworth's near-equivalence between imagination and fancy; fancy merely combines; Wordsworth's fancy is Coleridge's wit, which is a pure play of the intellect, of concepts, without the passion of poetry. Primary Imagination can be related to Kant's Understanding, while Secondary or Poetic Imagination is nearer to Kant's Reason. In Kant's theory, the role of the Understanding face to experience was an active one: it sets its own forms and categories on experience, synthesizes the impressions into phenomena and elaborates judgements. "Every human being, thus, is, so far as he perceives anything at all, a creator and an idealizing agent" (Wimsatt and Brooks 393). Coleridge establishes and analogy between the imaginative capability of the poet and the creativity of the "infinite I Am." The parallel between the creativity of the poet and that of the cosmos makes us think of Schelling, but in Coleridge's account there is an emphasis on the consciousness an deliberation of the cosmic creativity, so that the word "God" is perhaps more appropriate here.

                Most critics after Coleridge who distinguished fancy from imagination treated to make fancy simply the faculty that produces a lesser., lighter, or humorous kind of poetry, and to make imagination the faculty that produces a higher, more serious, and more passionate poetry. And the concept of “imagination” itself is as various as the modesof psychology that critics have adopted (associationist, gestalt, Freudian, Jungian), while its prosessesvary according to the way in which a critic conceives of the nature of a poem (as essentially realistic or essentially visionary, as a verbal construction or as “myth”, as “pure poetry” or as a work designed to produce effects on an audience).

                Thus, Coleridge have given the concept of Fancy and imagination and also explained about this very well. He focused on imagination more than fancy and also divides them into different sections.