Imagination for Coleridge is the creative faculty possessed
by poets. This shaping power of
imagination enables the poet to configure the work as a unified whole. Both primary and secondary imagination—the former
is involuntary where as the latter is a conscious form—have the same faculty of
recreation. Fancy on the contrary is
made of memory emancipated from the order of time and space, modified by the
empirical phenomenon of the will. Coleridge
makes poetic genius identical with imagination, and poetic talent with fancy.