On The Imagination, Or Esemplastic Power: I have now read
this excerpt five times straight and am still struggling with a basic
comprehension of what Coleridge is saying; however, that being said, I’m going
to attempt to discuss some of its ideas in terms of “This Lime-Tree Bower My
Prison.” From what I understand (or think I understand) from Chapter 13,
Coleridge views primary Imagination as the base of all human perception –
secondary imagination then exists as an “echo” of this perception. There is some
sense of recreation yet with lack of unification (I don’t know – feel free to
help me out in the comments)
We
discussed “This Lime- Tree Bower My Prison” today in class in terms of a
literal imagination; Coleridge is physically stuck in a Bower and therefore
relies on his imagination to create a scene of his friend’s walk. I found
footnote 4 particularly humorous: “Despite Coleridge’s claim, Charles Lamb
eminently preferred London over what he called “dead Nature.”” The entirety of
the poem consists of Coleridge’s image of Charles finding a peace and release
of pain in nature. He pictures him sitting in the city “pining and hungering” for
nature until he finally is able to experience the influx of sensory information
that nature provides. Despite this image, the footnote tells us that that is
most likely not the case. Coleridge has this sense of “human perception” or
recreation of a scene that has become so vivid yet it lacks any grounding in
reality. Coleridge seems to discuss the “fancy” with a somewhat negative
connotation. It is the concrete and “definites,” perhaps the literal human
perception. This then makes me think about what Zach said in class about this
poem reminding him of Wordsworth in the Alps. Perhaps if Coleridge had gone on the walk and experienced
these “fixities,” it would have been a disappointment and he would no longer be
able to experience any type of “imagination;” It’s somewhat ironic that the
human perception he seems to desire is not actually human perception at all but
merely the human mind.
Collin's comments on the Imagination passage below are helpful. He's right that Coleridge is trying to link (through the power of his language and faith, rather than through any psychological evidence, I'd say) what we normally take to be perception and imagination, while separating it from something he calls fancy. The primary imagination is actually perception--how we see the world--and this is guaranteed to be truthful and powerful because it is a "repetition ... of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM." That is, when we see the world, we are participating in the same process of vital creation as God's creation of the Universe. It's hard to understand what sense this might have, except that it has the effect of authorizing perception, and making it vital, not just a passive taking in, but an active ordering of the world. The secondary does more of the reordering, but is still a kind of perception, a way of seeing the world. It sees into the life of things, as it were. In "Eolian Harp," the primary imagination sees and hears the sea, the secondary finds and feels the underlying "one life" of the spirit. That is, it doesn't make it up--that's what fancy does. I think the passage is interesting for what it says about a desire for perception to be active and super-powerful. Think of Emerson's "transparent eye-ball," a kind of vision that sees spirit and truth and God in the world around you.
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