21 Coleridge's Theory of Imagination and Fancy

University of Education Lahore
Department of English
Course Title: Literary Criticism
Programme: MA English
Course Code: ENGL-3120
Instructor Name: Asjad Mehmood

Topic:
Coleridge’s Theory of Imagination and Fancy
Objectives of the Session
• Definition of imagination and its impact

• Coleridge’s theory of Imagination
• Three heads of theory
• Definition by Coleridge
• Two kinds of Imaginations
• Fancy and Imagination and the differences between them.
Imagination
• A power responsible for visual images

• Ideal combinations of characters and objects
• Sympathetic projection of the artist into character and situation
• The faculty which creates symbols of abstract conceptions
• The poetic equivalent of mystical intuition
• A shaping power inherent in man
Plato and Aristotle
• Plato:
• distrusted phantasia (imagination)
• a function of the lower soul responsible for illusions and opinions
• Recognised its capacity transending reason for mystical vision
• Aristotle:
• Highest capacity as furnishing the schemata of thought
Middle Ages, Renaissance
Middle Ages
• Imagination is a psychological description of a reproductiove
and combinatory function often with distrust prevailed.
The Renaissance
• disturbing the life of reason
th
• 17 century stressed wit at the expense of imagination
• Dryden: “it is fancy that gives the life touches”
th
18 Century, Romantics
• Addison’s Pleasure of the Imagination (1712)
• He confirmed his treatment to visual images in the fine arts
• Joseph Warton preferred Spenser for his “creative and
glowing imagination”
• Romantics provoked imagination and mysticism again
• Active work on imagination
Coleridge’s Theory of Imagination
• The union of heart and head

• Essential poetry
• Continuous undercurrent of feeling which evoked his
genuine admiration in a great poet
• Coleridge about Wordsworth:
• “repeated meditation led me felt suspect that fancy and imagination
were two distinct and widely different faculties instead of being two
names with one meaning… Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley
a very fanciful mind”
Continues….
• The first conception of theory is “imagination and fancy are

two different faculties.
• It became a cardinal element in Coleridge’s principles of criticism
Three heads of theory:
• What he means by Imagination
• Two kinds of Imagination
• Fancy and Imagination
What he means by Imagination
• In chapter xiii of Biographia Literaria Coleridge defines

imagination as:
• a faculty that “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate or
where this process is rendered impossible …… it struggles to
idealize and unify”
• In Chapter xiv, “this power, first put in action by the will and
understanding and retained under their irremissive, though gentle
and unnoticed, control, reveals itself in the balance or
reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities….”
Eleven pairs opposites
Imagination reconciles
Sameness with Difference
General with Concrete
Idea with Image
Representative with individual
Familiarity with Novelty
Order with emotion
Judgement with enthusiasm
Artificial with natural
Continues…..
Imagination subordinates
Column A Column B
Art to nature
Manner to matter
Admiration of the poet to sympathy with the poet
Column A will come under the head of the “subject, the human”
Column B, under that of “object, nature”
Scott James’ comments on Coleridge’s
definition
• Imagination is more than mere feelings, emotions, passion
• It gave satisfaction to the reason
• It is a union of opposites
• It bridged the gulf unbridgeable by the intellect – between
perception and understanding
• The power which the poet had excercised in revealing “the
beautiful and permanent forms of nature.
• Esemplastic: unifying power
Two Kinds of Imagination
Primary Imagination
• Basic imagination, present in all human beings
• A great ordering principle,
• Enables us to discriminate, to order, to separate and to synthesize
• Brings order out of chaos, by making its parts intelligible
Two Kinds of Imagination
Secondary Imagination
• A rare phenomenon, belonging to the artists
• More conscious effort
• Projects and creates new harmonies of meaning
• A poetic activity which dissolves, diffuses in order to recreate….
To idealize and unify.
• Found in only few gifted people
Fancy and Imagination
• In Chapter xiii, Coleridge defined fancy and the difference

between fancy.
• Fixities and definites
• Fancy is no other than a mode of memory emancipated from
the order of time and space
• It receives all its materials ready made from the law of association.
• Re-assembling of existing bits and pieces.
• There are three differences between fancy and imagination
First Difference
• Fancy • Imagination
• Limited process based on the • Vaster field
law of association. It brings the
• It brings experiences from
experiences of the past to the the past to the present and
present then takes it to the future
• Can help us apply the present
experiences to the past.
Second Difference
• It works all in “copying” • It works in “imitation” which
of nature is creative act.
• Only copying a fragment • Recreation of nature
of nature • Secondary imagination works
• Fancy can only perceive the in divine order. It makes the
dead, mechanical aspects of the external, internal, and fashions
nature based on bare sensation, new images.
memory and associated ideas • It recreates, idealizes and unifies
• It plays with fixities and
definites only.
Third Difference
• Fancy is the fitting together in a • It is a unifying power
design of small pieces of
• Of imagination, reveals itself
coloured glass in balance or reconciliation of
• Its images have no connection opposites, of discordant
natural or moral but are yoked qualities.
together by the poet by
• It generates or produces a
means of some coincidences. form of its own.
• Fancy constructs surface
decorations out of new
combinations of memory and
perceptions.
Basil Willey’s comments on Fancy and
Imagination
• Example from Chemistry:
• Fancy is like mixture of salt and saws of iron,
• Imagination is like compund of Sodium and Chlorine
I.A Richards Comments on Fancy
and Imagination
• In his book, Coleridge on Imagination, he explains the difference
through following quotations from Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis:
• Fancy
Fully gently now she takes him by the hand.
A lily prison’d in a gaol of snow,
Or ivory in an alabaster band,
So white a friend engirds so white a foe
I.A Richards Comments on Fancy
and Imagination
• Imagination
Venus and Adonis
Look! How a bright star shooteth from the sky,
So glides he in the night from Venus’ eye.
References
rd
• Literary Criticism by Prof. Mumtaz Ahmad, 3 Edition

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University of Education Lahore

Course Title: Literary Criticism

Course Code: ENGL-3120

Instructor Name: Asjad Mehmood

• Definition of imagination and its impact

• A power responsible for visual images

• The union of heart and head

• The first conception of theory is “imagination and fancy are

• In chapter xiii of Biographia Literaria Coleridge defines

• In Chapter xiii, Coleridge defined fancy and the difference

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