[COURSE -11] – (ENG – 303): LITERARY

CRITICISM I

TOPIC :–Critically analyse Coleridge’s “Theory

of Imagination and Fancy”.

NAME – ANWESHA ADHIKARY

ROLL NO – 20414ENG014
ENROLMENT NO - 393824
CLASS – SEMESTER – III
COURSE – M.A. ENGLISH, DMC
SECTION – A
SESSION – 2020-2021

SUBMITTED TO – PROF. ANITA MA’AM

DATED: 31/10/2021

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 Critically analyse Coleridge’s “Theory of Imagination and
Fancy”.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the first English critic to base his literary criticism on philosophical
principles which he derived from German idealist thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, and German
Romantics such as Schiller, the Schlegels, and Schelling. He was interested in the creative
process that made it what it was than in the finished product. In his own words he endeavoured
“to establish the principles of writing rather than to furnish rules how to pass judgement on what
has been written by others”. These he sought to discover in “the nature of man” – the faculty or
faculties of the human soul that gave it birth. Coleridge’s views of Imagination, and specifically
of poetic imagination, are elaborated in his Biographia Literaria (1817), published shortly after
his Lay Sermons it is an eclectic work, combining intellectual autobiography, philosophy, and
literary theory though it suffers from a woeful lack of system. Here, in the course of his enquiry
into the powers of the mind, Coleridge came to the conclusion that Fancy and Imagination are
two different faculties and this realization dawned on him while perusing some of the
Wordsworth’s poems in the Lyrical Ballads.

Theory of Imagination and Fancy :

The term imagination and fancy had long been in use before Coleridge, which were often used as
synonyms, differing only in roots of origin – Latin and Greek respectively. Coleridge has
protested against such a synonymization. In the eighteenth century it was originally, often
confused with fancy, but as the imitative faculty in poets was found to manifest itself in two
different ways, it became necessary to draw a distinction between the two. Where the imitation
faithfully imaged the original, it was held to be a work of imagination; and where it was
substituted by something of the poet’s own invention, which bore distant likeness to the
original it was held to be a work of fancy. In the fourth chapter of the Biographia, Coleridge
makes his famous suggestion that fancy and imagination, contrary to widespread belief, are “two
distinct and widely different faculties”: they are not “two names with one meaning, or . . .
the lower and higher degree of one and the same power.” It is not, however, until the
thirteenth chapter, “On the Imagination,” that Coleridge explains his distinction. Just as Kant’s
view of reproductive imagination, Coleridge’s imagination is that special power of the mind
which meditates between subject and object. The final and the fullest statement of nature of
fancy and imagination occur at the close of chapter XIII, which are worth quoting in full:

“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, co-existing 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 re-create; or where this process is

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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 laws of association.”

Here, in the first instance Coleridge defines the primary and secondary imagination and then
fancy and imagination are contradistinguished. Primary imagination simply is the power of
perceiving the objects of sense - persons, places, things - both in their parts and as wholes.
It is primary imagination which makes the ordered perception of objective reality possible,
bereft of which would create a virtual chaos. It is the repetition in the human mind of the divine
act of creation in the external universe. The divine consciousness is objectified in nature and
likewise through the vital agency of the primary imagination we are able to perceive the unity
and system which underline god’s creation. Thus it is clear that the primary imagination is a
general faculty which in a way belongs to all, but by its keener manifestation it helps human
beings to have a vision of sublimity and creates a sense of awe. Moreover, there is no
originality in the primary imagination; it is bound by what we actually experience through the
senses as well as the laws for associating these data.

The secondary imagination is akin to the primary, in so far as, both are vital and perform the
common function of creating order out of the confusion of sense impressions. The secondary
imagination is just the conscious use of this power. It is a composite faculty of the soul
consisting of all other faculties - perfection, intellect, will, emotions while the primary
imagination uses only other first perception - secondary employs all. It is therefore a more
active agent than the primary imagination. Thus secondary imagination is not according to
external world of nature but as the mind conceives them to be. In this process, the mind and
nature act and react on each other. The internal (mind) is made external (object) and the external
(object) internal (subject). Thus the imagination in both its varieties is a living power of the mind
and performs the same function - unification of sense impression into an organic pattern.

Nonetheless, secondary imagination is still dependent for its raw material on the primary
imagination: Coleridge is careful to state that the two types of imagination differ not in kind
but in degree and mode of operation. The secondary imagination must exert its creative
powers on the very perceptions supplied by the primary imagination; it cannot operate
independently of them. For, ultimately, the secondary imagination perceives the world at a
higher level of truth, one that sees beneath the surface appearances of things into their deeper
reality, their deeper connections, and their significance within a more comprehensive scheme
that relates objects and events in their human, finite significance to their symbolic place in the
divine, infinite order of things. Hence the secondary poetic imagination occupies an

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intermediary role between the primary imagination, which unifies the data of sense so that
these can be brought under the concepts of the understanding, and reason, whose ideas
unite those concepts into a still higher unity.

In Coleridge’s formulation, Fancy is a more mechanical mode of creativity: it receives its

materials “ready made from the law of association,” and Coleridge calls it merely “a mode of
Memory.” In other words, Coleridge did not regard fancy as a creative power at all; it is just a
mode of recalling and recombining images that have actually been experienced. The parts of
different things, or the things themselves, are joined to form a new thing, with the component
parts or things undergoing no change whatever. So fancy is “the arbitrary bringing together of
things that lie remote and forming them into a unity”. It is “the faculty of bringing together
images dissimilar in the main by some one point or more of likeness”. The difference between
the Imagination and Fancy is not only of degree but of kind, one is unifying power and the
other is a combinatory respectively. Fancy only juxtaposes images while imagination blends
and fuses them into new organic wholes. Fancy works on fixed and definite objects and ideas
and seeks only to combine them according to the laws of association, but the working of
imagination consists in the creation of inner harmony, proceeding from a central thought or
feeling. Fancy is the product of talent and imagination that of genius. Unlike the primary
imagination, then, fancy is not merely a perceptual agent; rather, it is a creative power but
operates at a lower level of creativity than the secondary or poetic imagination, which has
the power to dissolve perceptions entirely and create new combinations. Again fancy
depends primarily on memory whereas imagination is subjected to will and choice. Elsewhere,
Coleridge calls Imagination a “shaping and modifying power,” and Fancy “the aggregative
and associative power”. Indeed, Coleridge refers to imagination as the “esemplastic” power, a
term he derives from the Greek meaning “to shape into one”. Thus in short, the entire concept of
fancy is mechanical in character while imagination is conceived as a power underlying all
organic perception whether in nature or in art.

The difference in the production of mixture and compound can be compared to Fancy and
Imagination. In a mixture as in the production of fancy, the ingredients, though held together,
retain their original properties in a compound as in productions of imagination they are
dissolved, diffused, dissipated into a new substance altogether. Imagination is a distinguishing
quality of the poetry of Shakespeare and Milton, Fancy that of the poets from Donne to
Cowley. Spenser has "fancy under conditions of imagination. He has an imaginative faculty, but
he has not imagination."

In nutshell, we can say that Coleridge has viewed or explored a good a good idea on fancy and
imagination.

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Works Cited
1. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. 2013.

2. Habib, M.A.R. A Hstory of Literary Criticism. Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

3. Prasad, B. An Introduction to English Criticism. Ed. Brijadish Prasad. Trinity Press, 2018.

4. Ramawadh Dwivedi, Vikramditya Rai. History of Literary Criticism. Doaba House, n.d.

5. Rani, Ritu. "Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Notion of Fancy and Imagiantion."

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