- Started as Literary Autobiography but ended up discussions about Kant and Schelling.
- It is considered as one of the interesting books of English criticism.
- Accusation of Coleridge borrowing from Germans but most of the ideas were original
- In a philosophical understanding he talks about Nature and Self
When both join it leads to the act of creation of I AM ( God). Like Coleridge, they know and recognize the interdependence of subject and object. ( The Germans)
The Germans
thought and feeling in their original identity and not as an abstraction
Fancy and Imagination
Fancy is arbitrary and aggregating. It is an associative process. Imagination is a creative one. In perception, the imagination imposes form and order upon the material of sensation and half creates what it perceives, so in art, it works upon the raw material of experience. It gives this raw material a new form Bnd shape. The secondary imagination is essentially vital. To Coleridge, the best example of the operation of the imagination in his times was the poetry of Wordsworth. Coleridge was influenced by German thought but had enough originality to emerge as a major thinker in his own right. His influence as a critic has been remarkable, much greater than that exercised by Wordsworth’s criticism
Coleridge’s view of Poetry and the Poet
Coleridge points out that “poetry of the highest kind may exist without meter and even without the contradistinguishing objects of a poem”.
Even John Shawcross writes;
“This distinction between ‘poetry’ and ‘poem’ is not clear,
and instead of defining poetry, he proceeds to describe a poet,
and from the poet, he proceeds to enumerate the characteristics
of the imagination”.
This is so because ‘poetry’ for Coleridge is an activity of the poet’s mind, and a poem is merely one of the forms of its expression, a verbal expression of that activity, and poetic activity is basically an activity of the imagination.