Coleridge
Imagination and fancy
Coleridge’s concern with imagination was partly due to his studies in German philosophy
and he worked out a theory of his own on this faculty of the mind.
He rejected the empiricist assumption that the human mind was a “tabula rasa” on
which external experiences and sense impressions were imprinted, stored, recalled and
combined. He considered the human mind as essentially creative and active.
He identified two types of imagination and distinguished it from fancy.
FANCY is a mechanical faculty, inferior to imagination and common to all men.
It enables to aggregate and associate images, ideas that come into the mind
ready-made, spontaneously, almost unbidden, simply out of the impressions of the
senses which the memory has stored and retained. Thanks to this mechanical faculty
we can associate images through the use of metaphors, similes and other poetical
devices. It is useful to produce imagery but it does it in a mechanical way.
It constructs patterns out of ready-made material in a kind of mechanical process.
It is on a higher level than perception and memory but below imagination.
Fancy is concerned with mechanical operations of the mind, it is employed for tasks
which are passive, and its productions are “fixed” and “dead”.
“ It is little more than a spectator in the theatre of the mind”
Ideas can be simply associated or linked loosely together by the use of fancy.
PRIMARY IMAGINATION
is a fusion of perceptions and the human individual
power to produce images, our personal way of perceiving
nature. Thanks to this faculty we can not only perceive the
world around us but we can also organize our sensory perceptions into ordered concepts or
images. We can give shape to perceptions creating images not simply associating them.
It is the spontaneous, unconscious creation of new ideas.
While with fancy there is no creation involved but it is simply a reconfiguration of existing
ideas, with imagination we can create new, original, personal concepts or ideas.
It is active and vital (“..living power and prime agent of all human perceptions”)
It is common to all men.
SECONDARY IMAGINATION is a superior faculty which can only be associated with
the artistic genius. It is a faculty through which the poet
can break down what is perceived in order to recreate new
images by an autonomous act of the mind. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to
recreate something new. It is the poetic vision, thanks to which the poet transcends the
data of experience and “creates” new worlds.