di Coleridge
Imagination:
Primary: understand reality and elaborate it to communicate;
Secondary: create new worlds.
Importance of imagination
Coleridge stressed the role of imagination. He distinguished between “primary” and “secondary” imagination.
He described “primary imagination” as a fusion of perception. It was also the power to give chaos a certain order. “Primary imagination” – joining the world of thought with the world of things.
“Secondary imagination” – dissolves, diffuses, in order to re-create. It was the poetic faculty, which not only gave a shape and order to a given world, but built new worlds.
Importance of nature
Coleridge did not view nature as a moral guide or a source of consolation and happiness. His strong Christian faith did not allow him to identify nature with the divine. He rather saw nature and the material world in a sort of neo Platonic interpretation. The material world is nothing but the protection of the real world of Ideas on the flux time.
