A Philosophical Inquiry of Coleridge

In Coleridge’s account of the Imagination and Fancy he cleaves a space between the two, seeming to paint the Imagination as mainly a  functional mental facet rather than creativity. He states that there are two elements to Imagination, primary and secondary, where the primary is “the living power and prime agent of all human perception” and the secondary is “an echo of the former….It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate… it struggles to idealize and to unify” (491). And from both of these he separates Fancy entirely, calling it a whim that “has no other counters to play with but fixities and definites” and  “a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space” (491). With this separation though it seems as though intention has been permanently separated from Imagination and solely exists in Fancy which is strictly linked to the physical world.

The picture of the mind that Coleridge creates, as I interpret this chapter, is a field of perception (primary Imagination) on/with which Fancy operates in tandem with a force (secondary Imagination) seeking to unify the desired with the actual. Thus Imagination operates purely in the subconscious: at once both the ground of perception and the innate method through which perception is manipulated. And this understanding of the Imagination then informs Coleridge’s ideas of thought in “The Eolian Harp” where the narrator states “Full many a thought uncalled and undetained,/ And many idle flitting phantasies,/ Traverse my indolent and passive brain,/ As wild and various as the random gales/ That swell and flutter on this subject lute” (440). His thoughts here are varied and unintended like the wind, and yet also like the wind he is able to make art out of these seemingly random trains of thought. And thus poetry, at least in this comparison, feels accidental, an unintended consequence of a natural process. So I think we then have to ask a question: does Coleridge believe poetry is something attainable without intense manipulation and effort or is it practically untameable?