Biographia Literaria

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In chapters thirteen and fourteen of Biographia Literaria, Coleridge draws a distinction that English criticism has never fully set down since. Fancy, in his account, is a mode of memory freed from ordinary rules of time and space but still working only with fixed, ready made images, arranging and associating what it is given without changing it. Imagination, by contrast, comes in two forms. The primary imagination is simply the living power behind all human perception, present in every act of seeing the world at all, which Coleridge calls a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary imagination is what a poet exercises deliberately: an echo of the first, coexisting with the conscious will, that dissolves, diffuses and dissolves experience again in order to recreate it, struggling always to unify what it works on even when the material resists. The distinction gave nineteenth and twentieth century criticism a working vocabulary for judging when a poem is doing more than decorating a stock idea with fixed ornament, and it shaped how later critics, the American New Critics among them, argued for organic form, the idea that a good poem is not a container for a paraphrasable idea but a single unified thing that could not exist any other way. Coleridge himself borrowed heavily from German idealist philosophy, Schelling above all, in building the distinction, and scholars have long debated how much of chapter thirteen is translation rather than his own argument. The distinction he left behind outlasted that argument.