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.
00224--What distinction does Coleridge make between FANCY and IMAGINATION? [English Literature free notes]
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.
