Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Poetry

Coleridge considered two kinds of imagination: the primary imagination is part of unconscious, was the ability to perceive reality giving chaos a certain order and the material of perception a certain shape. The secondary imagination was voluntary, this is an act that can only do the poet, in fact he dissolves, dissipates, in order to recreate. The artistic principle isn’t “art as mimesis” but the artists have to recreate it. Primary imagination is equivalent to Wordsworth’s spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, while Wordsworth’s emotion-copy, which is produced after tranquil contemplation, is parallel to Coleridge’s secondary imagination. The idea of primary and secondary imagination on fancy is contain in the Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. Fancy is mechanical ability the poet have to use metaphor, alliteration. Fancy is used in The Rime of the ancient mariner. He wrote facts, which read but he changed the whole story. Coleridge added the power of associating them into a new striking unity. Fancy is a new way to talk about something that already exists. Coleridge did not view nature as a normal guide. He saw nature and the material world in a sort of neo Platonic interpretation: the material world is nothing but the projection of the real world of the Ideas on the flux time.