AMITY INSTITUTE OF ENGLISH STUDIES & RESEARCH

Biographia Literaria
S. T. Coleridge

BA English
Semester 3
Study In Literary Criticism
Dr. Deepali Sharma
 AMITY INSTITUTE OF ENGLISH STUDIES & RESEARCH

INTRODUCTION

 William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge are two major figures of the Romantic Period.
They are the leaders of the Revival of Romanticism. But in spite of their joint
contribution, they do not hold the same views on the nature, function and creation of
poetry and poet.

 Their attitude differs from each other. Their ideas show their different dispositions.
Wordsworth throws much light on the nature and function of a poet in his Preface to the
Lyrical Ballads. He is highly conscious of the distinction between a common man and a
man of genius. This leads Wordsworth to analyse the qualities of a poet. Similarly,
Coleridge expresses his own ideas of poet in his best-known critical piece, Biographia
Literaria. He shows some qualities of a poet similar to and different from those of
Wordsworth.
 AMITY INSTITUTE OF ENGLISH STUDIES & RESEARCH

Wordsworth versus Coleridge

 Wordsworth says that a poet is a man speaking to men. He is a man like other men. He has a
social function to perform. He writes not only for his own pleasure but also for communicating his
emotions and feelings to others. He tries his best to communicate them to the public. In this respect,
Wordsworth says The poet thinks and feels in the spirit of human passions. His language
should be the same to the language of common man. Thus, the critic represents himself as a real
lover of man. For Wordsworth there is no difference between a poet and a common man.

 Coleridge believes that the poet's soul is the appropriate place of poetic activity. A poet has
poetic genius. He modifies the feelings, thoughts, emotions and images of his own mind. He is a
great modifier of different emotions. He employs his soul in the poetic process. All the feelings,
emotions thoughts and images of his soul are fused by his imagination or poetic process. So, a poem
is a reflection of the fused elements of the soul. According to Coleridge, a poet is a great
philosopher. No man can be a poet without philosophic knowledge.
 AMITY INSTITUTE OF ENGLISH STUDIES & RESEARCH

Wordsworth versus Coleridge

 Wordsworth thinks that a poet is affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present. He
can share the emotional experiences of others. He can identify himself with the emotions of others and can
express the emotions of others easily. Moreover, a poet has a great power of communication. He can
communicate even those thoughts and feelings which arise in him without any immediate external
excitement.

 According to Coleridge, imagination and emotion are two principal qualities of a poet. A poet is a person who
has excessive ability to manage different qualities. He is a person who is gifted with a special ability to feel
emotions. Apparently, the mind of a poet seems to be disordered. But inwardly, it is always in an ordered
condition. The poet is adjusted with the universe. The universe never comes out from its proper order. In the
same way, the poet's mind never districts from its track. It is always in a proper order. The imaginative
activity of the poet does not come out of its routine work. Imaginative activities of the poet follow the ordered
direction of his mind. Coleridge thinks that poetry is a recurrence of God's creative act. For this reason,
the effort of the poet is the poet's adoration of God. The poet recreates the glory of God.
 AMITY INSTITUTE OF ENGLISH STUDIES & RESEARCH

Subjectivism and Objectivism

 According to Wordsworth, a poet must feel the pulse of the common man. He is the poet of common humanity.
In this respect, we mention Edmund Spenser who is called the poets' poet in the Elizabethan Age. When we go
through his poetry, we feel that he does not write it for ordinary man but writes only for the poets and the elites.
In the Neo-classical Period, we see that the poets composed poems in describing the decorated drawing room,
coffee houses etc. Personifications of abstract ideas are salient features of the eighteenth century. There is no
room for common people in their poetry. Wordsworth disapproves such tendency of the poets. He says But
poets do not write for poets alone but for men. Poets must write for common men in common or rustic
language.

 Coleridge thinks that a poet should feel the essentiality of objectivism. The poet needs objectivism to form a
poem. To transfer a human interest from our inward nature, objectivism is needed. Objectivism helps the poet
create "willing suspension of disbelief" and poetic faith in his writing. Subjectivity may be granted by a poet. But a
true poet has the power to go beyond the limits of subjectivity. True and skilled poets do not need the
influence of subjectivity. Personal involvement is not needed in the case of a skilled poet. However, Coleridge
does not object to subjectivity. He wants to detach the poet from his personal feelings. He wants to direct the
 AMITY INSTITUTE OF ENGLISH STUDIES & RESEARCH

IMAGINATION
 The end of the Enlightenment period led to the emergence of Romanticism which was an era when
reason and rationality gave way to new ideas that managed to transform how expression was
manifested. Poetry was also a field which was transformed and redefined by this new climate and the
way it was perceived changed as well.

 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge with a firm grasp of what writing good poetry
meant they also had a vision on how it should be communicated in order to affect the world in
becoming a more ethical and ideal place. Both poets shared a great admiration for nature and its
enormous complexity and beauty and drew inspiration from it, transcending boundaries of plain
logical perception by filtering their stimulations through the filter of their imagination. Their
ambition was to create poetry that would open the eyes of the world to the marvel of life and creation
thus elevating the spirit to a higher moral level and thus making the world better through their poetry.
 AMITY INSTITUTE OF ENGLISH STUDIES & RESEARCH

IMAGINATION
 Wordsworth drew inspiration from experience and then contemplating on that experience in a tranquil
state, managing to express it through language in the most imaginative and descriptive way while for
Coleridge, moments of the sublime often communicated in his work, came from that same process of
creation. In Wordsworth’s poem I wandered lonely as a cloud the poet mentions the couch on which he
laid, in order to relive the intense experience, he had and produce poetry through that repetition which
would illuminate the source and exact nature of those feelings.

 Coleridge, being deeply religious reflected on nature through this religiousness while for Wordsworth it
was more of a fascination about the grandness in the complexity of nature and how that aroused the mind
of the poet and led him to attain the sublime. Coleridge’s poem To Nature clearly depicts how he revered
the beauty around him and how he could absorb it and elevate it into a higher spiritual level thus relating
it to the divine. The poem reveals the Deep, heartfelt, inward joy coming from the surrounding nature
and the love and devotion that existed in Lessons of love and earnest piety which nature can teach.
 AMITY INSTITUTE OF ENGLISH STUDIES & RESEARCH

IMAGINATION
 Surrounded by nature, Coleridge felt everything emitting love and devotion to a higher power,
the source of all life. While he admits that not everyone would be able to view things as he did,
the conviction of the poet was that the spirituality found in nature and its elements was something
that could elevate the psyche closer to God. In Coleridge’s own words however, it is clear that
imagination held the vital role of the ability to perceive, be stimulated and create through poetry.
He defined primary imagination in his Biographia Literaria, as

the living power and prime agent of all human perception and as a repetition in the finite of the
eternal act of creation of the infinite I AM.

 Imagination is considered “a power of the mind, a creative faculty of the mind,” the mind itself
does it when in use, and this process of the mind used for thinking, scheming, remembering,
creating, fantasizing and forming different opinion.
 AMITY INSTITUTE OF ENGLISH STUDIES & RESEARCH

Primary and Secondary Imagination

 The root definition of the term indicates the self-reflexive property of imagination,
emphasizing the imagination as a private sphere. In Chapter XIII of Bigraphia Literaria,
Coleridge writes:

The imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary.

 According to Coleridge, Imagination has two forms; primary and secondary. Primary
imagination is merely the power of receiving impressions of the external world through the
senses, the power of perceiving the objects of sense, both in their parts and as a whole. It is a
spontaneous act of the mind; the human mind receives impressions and sensations from the
outside world, unconsciously and involuntarily, 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. In this way clear and coherent perception becomes possible.
 AMITY INSTITUTE OF ENGLISH STUDIES & RESEARCH

Primary and Secondary Imagination

 The term “primary imagination” comes from the poet’s classification of imagination in three levels with
primary as the highest one, the one that could lead to the sublime through the creation of novel ideas
and ideals.

 Secondary imagination was defined by Coleridge as a conscious imagination that does not however
have the power to lead to perfection in creation. He also uses the term “Fancy” as the lowest of all
forms of imagination that only has the power to transform already existing ideas and not the creation of
new ideas through expression.

 For Coleridge the use of primary imagination is essential in order to transform nature into great poetry.
Kubla khan, which is considered to be one of the poet’s greatest poems, shows how imagination is
implemented in order to transform natural images in one’s mind and also to create a series of
contradictory images enhancing this way the result of his writing.
 AMITY INSTITUTE OF ENGLISH STUDIES & RESEARCH

Primary and Secondary Imagination

 The primary imagination is universal, it is possessed by all. The secondary imagination may be
possessed by others also, but it is the peculiar and typical trait of the artist.

 It is the secondary imagination which makes artistic creation possible. Secondary imagination is
more active and conscious; it requires an effort of the will, volition and conscious effort. It
works upon its raw material that are the sensations and impressions supplied to it by the primary
imagination.

 By an effort of the will and the intellect the secondary imagination selects and orders the raw
material and re-shapes and remodels it into objects of beauty. It is ‘esemplastic’, i.e. “a shaping
and modifying power”. Its ‘plastic stress’ re-shapes objects of the external world and steeps
them with a glory and dream that never was on sea and land. It is an active agent which,
dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to create.
 AMITY INSTITUTE OF ENGLISH STUDIES & RESEARCH

Primary and Secondary Imagination

 This secondary imagination is at the root of all poetic activity. It is the power which harmonizes
and reconciles opposites. Coleridge calls it a magical, synthetic power. This unifying power is best
seen in the fact that it synthesizes or fuses the various faculties of the soul –

perception, intellect, will, emotion – and fuses the internal with the external, the subjective with the
objective, the human mind with external nature, the spiritual with the physical.

 Through this unifying power nature is colored by the soul of the poet, and soul of the poet is steeped
in nature. ‘The identity’ which the poet discovers in man and nature results from the synthesizing
activity of the secondary imagination. The primary and secondary imaginations do not differ from
each other in kind. The difference between them is one of degree. The secondary imagination is
more active, more a result of volition, more conscious and more voluntary than the primary one. The
primary imagination is universal while the secondary is a peculiar privilege enjoyed by the artist.
 AMITY INSTITUTE OF ENGLISH STUDIES & RESEARCH

Fancy and Imagination

 The first and most important point to be proved is, that two conceptions perfectly distinct are
confused under one and the same word, and—this done—to appropriate that word exclusively to
the one meaning, and the synonyme, should there be one, to the other. But if,—(as will be often the
case in the arts and sciences,)—no synonyme exists, we must either invent or borrow a word. In
the present instance the appropriation has already begun, and been legitimated in the derivative
adjective: Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind. If therefore I should
succeed in establishing the actual existence of two faculties generally different, the nomenclature
would be at once determined. To the faculty by which I had characterized Milton, we should
confine the term 'imagination;' while the other would be contra-distinguished as 'fancy.’
(Chapter-IV)
 AMITY INSTITUTE OF ENGLISH STUDIES & RESEARCH

Fancy and Imagination

 But it was Mr. Wordsworth's purpose to consider the influences of fancy and imagination as they are
manifested in poetry, and from the different effects to conclude their diversity in kind; while it is my object to
investigate the seminal principle, and then from the kind to deduce the degree. My friend has drawn a
masterly sketch of the branches with their poetic fruitage. I wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far
as they lift themselves above ground, and are visible to the naked eye of our common consciousness.
(Chapter-IV)

 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 Imagination 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 recreate: or where this
process is 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. (Chapter, XIII)
 AMITY INSTITUTE OF ENGLISH STUDIES & RESEARCH

Fancy and Imagination

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; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phaenomenon
of the will, which we express by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary
memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of
association. (Chapter XIII)
 AMITY INSTITUTE OF ENGLISH STUDIES & RESEARCH

Fancy
 Coleridge regards fancy to be inferior of the two. It is according to him, not a creative
power. It only combines different things into pleasing shapes and does not like
imagination, fuse them into one. It is an exercise of selection form different objects
already supplied by association, a selection, made for purposes which have not been
shaped but have already been fixed.

 Coleridge says that with fancy there is no creation involved; it is simply a reconfiguration
of existing ideas. Rather than composing a completely original concept or description, the
fanciful poet simply reorders concepts, putting them in a new and possibly fresh
relationship to each other. Coleridge writes that poetry “reveals itself in the balance or
reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities.”