POETRY AND IMAGINATION

From Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria

A poem in the narrower sense is "that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth, and from all other species it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part"                                                          Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A legitimate poem is one: "the parts of which mutually support and explain each other"; all in their proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose and none influences of metrical arrangements.

A poem is always a work of a man employing the secondary imagination and so achieving the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities (notion of organic unity) imagination and fancy: this distinction is tied on the nature of organic unity. Imagination is fitted to achieve true unity of expression.

Fancy constructs surface decoration out of new combinations of memories and perceptions.

The extract by Coleridge affirms that during the years when Coleridge and Wordsworth were neighbours, they often discussed about poetry.

They agreed that the two cardinal points of poetry were:

1) Its power of exciting the sympathy of the reader

2) Its power of giving the interest of novelty.

The first power could be obtained by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, the second by the modifying colours of imagination.

They also came into their mind the idea of composing two sorts of poems:

A - poems where the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural

B - poems where subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life.

The first kind of poem should describe events which were supernatural as if they were real, the second kind should describe ordinary things and by the modifying colours of the "inward eye" (imagination) present them in an unusual aspect.

This ideas were basic for the production of Lyrical Ballads, where Coleridge's task was oriented towards people and characters supernatural while Wordsworth's was to give the charm of novelty to things of every day.

To do this Coleridge was to elicit a semblance of truth by a "willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith" and Wordsworth had to awake the mind's attention to "the lethargy of custom" and direct it to the wonders of the world.

All that can only happen to "people who can see and feel".

The poet is then described as he who "brings the whole soul of man into activity" and he diffuses a tone and spirit of unity.