Coleridge refutes the platonic concept that art is merely an imitation of nature, and therefore twice removed from reality. Coleridge holds the view that art is not an imitation but an imaginative re-creation of nature. As such, art is a product of imagination. In other words, art is the union of the soul with the external world or nature. It represents nature as thought, and though as nature. Therefore it is more than the object it imitates. It is so because the artist's soul is added to it. Art is the fusion of the artist's soul and the object viewed by him. The artist adds something from his own imaginative faculty. He illumines what is dark, and raises high what is low. Thus, art is the balance or reconciliation of opposites or discordant qualities. The contraries are reconciled in art. They signify the universalising power of art.
There is the union of heart and head in every work of art. Coleridge agrees with Wordsworth that 'art embodies the union of deep feeling with profound thought'. In this process of reconciliation imagination plays the vital role. Therefore in Coleridge's view art is not an imitation of any object of nature. The object of nature only ignites the soul of the artist, and then the artist's soul creates something that never existed anywhere in the past, nor will it ever do in the future.
