The distinction between fancy and imagination was a key element in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's theory of poetry, as well as in his
general theory of the mental processes.
To Coleridge, that is, the fancy is a mechanical process which receives the elementary images—the "fixities and définîtes" which come to it ready-made from the senses—and, without altering the parts, reassembles them into a different spatial and temporal order from that in which they were originally perceived.
The imagination, however, which produces a much higher kind of poetry,
dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create.
Coleridge's imagination, that is, is able to "create" rather than merely re-
assemble, by dissolving the fixities and definites-the mental pictures, or im-
ages, received from the senses—and unifying them into a new whole.
And while the fancy is merely mechanical, the imagination is "vital"; that is, it is an organic faculty which operates not like a sorting machine, but like a living and growing plant.
As Coleridge says elsewhere, the imagination "generates and
produces a form of its own," while its rules are "the very powers of growth and production."
And in the fourteenth chapter of the Biographia, Coleridge adds
his famous statement that the "synthetic" power which is the "imagina
tion ... reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the
idea, with the image..." The faculty of imagination, in other words, assimilates and synthesizes the most disparate elements into an organic whole—that is, a newly generated unity, constituted by an interdependence of parts whose identity cannot survive their removal from the whole.
Comments