Samuel Taylor Coleridge s Definition of Primary imagination, Secondary

Imagination, Willing suspension of disbelief, Organic wholeness of a poem and

Fancy

Samuel Taylor Coleridge on a trip the European continent lost his early
sympathy with political radicalism and became interested in German
philosophy, especially the 18th-century idealism of Immanuel Kant and the
17th-century mystical writings of Jakob Boehme, and in the literary criticism
of the 18th-century dramatist G. E. Lessing. These studies made Coleridge
the most influential English interpreter of German romanticism. Coleridge
returned to England in 1806. Between 1808 and 1819 he gave his famous
series of lectures on literature and philosophy; the lectures on Shakespeare
were partly responsible for a renewed interest in the playwright. Endowed
with an intellect of the first order, and an imagination at once delicate and
splendid, Coleridge planned to compose various epic poems, and a complete
system of philosophy, in which all knowledge was to be co-ordinated.
However, he fell far sort of his target. He has, however, left enough poetry of
such excellence as to place him in the first rank of English poets, and enough
philosophic, critical, and theological matter to constitute him one of the
principal intellectually formative forces of his time. His knowledge of
philosophy, science, theology, and literature was alike wide and deep, and
his powers of conversation, or rather monologue, were almost unique.
Major Critical works: The evolution of fundamentally new critical principles in
literature is the main achievement of Coleridge's Biographia literaria (1817).
Coleridge also wrote a large amount of practical criticism, much of which
helped to elevate the reputations of Renaissance dramatists and poets
neglected in the 18th century.
Biographia Literaria, Lectures on Shakespeare

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

According to Coleridge, Imagination has two forms primary and secondary.
In the 13th chapter of Biographia Literaria, Coleridge talks of fancy and
imagination.
Primary imagination: It is merely the power of receiving impressions of
the external world through the senses, it perceives objects both in their
parts and as a whole. It is an involuntary act of the mind: the human mind
receives impressions and sensations from the outside world unconsciously
and involuntarily it imposes some sort of order on those impressions,
reduces them to shape and size, so that the mind is able to form a clear
image of the outside world. It is in this way that clear and coherent
perception becomes possible.
Secondary Imagination: The primary imagination is universal and is
possessed by all. The Secondary imagination makes artistic creation
possible. It requires an effort of the will and conscious effort. It works upon
what is perceived by the primary imagination: its raw material is the
sensations and impressions supplied to it by the primary imagination. It
selects and orders the raw material, and reshapes and remodels it into
objects of beauty. It is ensemplastic and it dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in
order to create. The Secondary Imagination is at the root of all poetic
activity. It is the power which harmonizes and reconciles opposites, and
Coleridge calls it a magical synthetic power. It fuses the various faculties of
the soul-the subjective with the objective, the human mind with external
nature, the spiritual with the physical or material.
The primary and secondary imaginations do not differ from each other in
kind. The difference is only of degree. The SI is more active, more as a
result of volition, more conscious and more voluntary than the primary one.
Fancy: Imagination and fancy differ in kind. Fancy is not a creative power at
all, but is a mechanical process which receives the elementary images which
come to it ready made, and without altering these, fancy reassembles them

into a different order from that in which it was received. It only combines
what it perceives into beautiful shapes, but does not fuse and unify. It is a
kind of memory that arbitrarily brings together images, and even when
brought together, these images continue to retain their separate and
individual properties. They receive no colouring and or modification from the
mind.
Willing suspension of disbelief: During the perusal of a poem or the
witnessing of a play, there is neither belief nor disbelief, but a mere
suspension of disbelief.
Organic wholeness of a poem: Coleridge established that the poem is an
organic whole, and that its form is determined by its content and is essential
to that content. Thus metre and rhyme are not merely pleasure superadded, not something superfluous which can be dispensed with, not mere
decoration, but essential to that pleasure which is true poetic pleasure.