Friday, January 29, 2010

Biographia Literaria

In the second excerpt from Chapter 4 "[On Fancy and Imagination . . .]" and the excerpt from Chapter 13, how does he define fancy and imagination, and what distinctions does he make between them?
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Coleridge feels that “fancy” and “imagination” are two fully separate concepts, though they are often confused for the same idea. Imagination he felt was “the living power and prime agent of all human perception” though it also came in a secondary form that seems to be on a slightly more conscious level. This secondary Imagination sort of takes what you process from the real world and messes with it, “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to recreate”. It’s striving to make things perfect, “to idealize and to unify”. While Fancy he seems to think is recalling things, but changing them by your own means. “The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time; and blended with… Choice.” Though Fancy too requires reality to base things off of.
By these terms, I’m curious where he feels his own works fall. Taking him and Wordsworth and example, I feel that Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner falls into Fancy. He is purposefully changed events that he might not recall directly, but he has a good basis for their forming. Wordsworth I feel just in general is more towards the Imagination area with his work. Something like “The Prelude” that has such a strong basis in life and reality, but it likely gently shifted and added to by the means of imagination, which Wordsworth admitted to when he showed concern for his recollections truly getting across his feelings of the events he described in his past in Book First.

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