METRICAL COMPOSITION

• Coleridge throws light on the difference between the language of metrical composition and that of prose.He is of the opinion the Wordsworth views about language are impracticable.

• The power of making the selection implies the previous possession of the language selected,the reproduction of words only,but order in which they are used.

• This order is defective in the case of the uneducated person because he lacks the prospective ness of mind which enables one to foresee the whole of what one is to convey.

• Coleridge illustrates from Wordsworth poems how common words are used,but not in the order in which the rustic would use them.

• Coleridge elaborates Wordsworth’s sentence,there neither is,nor can be any essential difference between the language o prose and metrical composition.

• He points out that the language of prose differs in itself according to the purpose for which it its used the prose of argumentative works differs from the language of conversation.

• In Italy and Greece they have not set aside a separate body of words for poetry,but the same words and phrases are put under new grabs by declining and conjugating them in a particular way.

• Coleridge considers the exact significance of the words essential difference as used by Wordsworth.The word essence can mean one of the two things,the inmost principle of a thing which particularizes it,the point of difference or distinction between two modifications of the same subject.Wordsworth has used the word in the latter sense.It maybe that in some cases,what is beautifully expresses in metre,may stand equally beautiful when stated in prose in the same words.But generally it is not so.

• Coleridge reflects on the origin and effect of metre.He contends that in both cases for the unfitness of each(language of prose and that of poetry) for the place of other frequently will and ought to exist.

• He advances five points to explain this.First Coleridge ascribes the origin of metre to the spontaneous effort of the mind to hold in check the working of passion and to control emotion.But because metre blends delight and emotion into one,it is as good as being the natural language or emotion,though strictly speaking,it is artificial.

• Secondly as afar as a metre acts in and for it self,it tends to increase the vivacity and susceptibility both of the general feelings and of the attention.thus metre worthless in itself gives greater vivacity to the main poetic idea and thus resembles yeas.Before the invention of printing metre had an additional claim,namely,as its association to memory,but an additional claim,namely its association to memory,but now fitness of the idea must govern the diction.The poet writes in metre because he thinks that a language different from that of prose would be appropriate for the subject.

• Thirdly metre is the proper form of poetry and poetry is imperfect and defective without metre.

• Fourthly human beings instinctively seek unity by harmonious adjustment and metre is helpful in this respect.

• Lastly,he appeals to the practice of the best poets,of all countries and in all ages,as authorizing the opinion that in every import of the word essential,there may be,is and ought to be an essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.

• Lastly,he appeals to the practice of the best poets,of all countries and in all ages,as authorizing the opinion that in every import of the word essential,there may be,is and ought to be an essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.

THEORY OF IMAGINATION

• Coleridge’s contribution to literary criticism is his theory of imagination.He was the most apt interpreter of romantic poetry in which imagination played the supreme part.

• In Biographia Literaria,he tells us that he felt but little sympathy for the writings of Pope and his followers.He was dissatisfied with the artifice of the new classical school,and with the quest for mere novelty and the desire of exciting wonderment..

• He liked the poems of Bowles and Cowper,the precursor of the Romantic Movement in English poetry,who combined natural thoughts with natural diction:the first two who reconciled the heart with the head.

• The phrase,The union of heart and head,strikes the keynote of coleridge’s theory of imagination.He believes that without this there can be no essential poetry.His remark that not the poem which we have read,but that to which wee return,with the greatest pleasure,possesses the genuine power and claims the name of essential poetry reminds us of Longinus.

• Coleridge finds that it was the continuous undercurrent of feeling,which evoked his genuine admiration in it and the lack of it which disguised him with those who sacrificed the heart to the head or both heart and head to paint and drapery.

• Before meeting Wordsworth,Coleridge had already formed these ideas.During the first year of their friendship.In one dramatic moment,there was awakened in him a conviction which determined his critical attitude.

• Commenting on Wordsworth’s writings in Biographia Literaria IV,he writes.This excellence which in all Wordsworth’s writings is more or less predominant and which constitutes the character of his less predominant and which constitutes the character of his mind.He no sooner left,than he sought to understand.

• Repeated mediations led me first to suspect that fancy and imagination were two distinct and widely different faculties instead of being,according to the general belief,either two names with one meaning or at furthest,the lower and the higher degree of one and the same power.

IMAGINATION

• Coleridge read the faulty elder poets and his contemporaries and found them lifeless or brainless or both.He could not discern in them that continuous undercurrent of deep feeling,which the greater poets had evoked.Then as he himself tells a poem recited by Wordsworth brought home to him in a flash what he had been seeking to realize.Surely it was by some faculty of the soul that things could be so represented as to be thus both felt and understood.

• In Biographia Literaria he defines imagination as a faculty that dissolves,diffuses,dissipates,in order to recreate or where this process is rendered impossible,yet still,at all events,it struggles to idealize and unify.

• We can summarize,Coleridge’s idea of the Imagination in these words.Fot this experience as Coleridge understood it,was more than mere feelings,emotions passion.Its unique quality lay in the fact that it gave satisfaction also to the reason.

• It was a union of opposites.It bridged the gulf-unbridgeable by the intellect-between perception and understanding.The power which the poet had exercised in thus revealing the beautiful.Imagination a unifying creative faculty-this beautiful and beauty making power.

• Coleridge coined a word esemplastic and called Imagination the essemplastic power which literally means the unifying power.

• In Biographia Literaria,Coleridge remarks,that the Imagination is either primary,or secondary.The primary Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite.

• The secondary Imagination is an echo of the former coexisting with the conscious will yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency,and differing only in degree and its mode of operation.

• The Primary Imagination merely represents to the minds its own world as external to itself and it exists in every human consciousness.

• Imagination in its primary manifestation is the great ordering principle or rather an agency which enables us both to discriminate and to order to separate and to synthesize and thus makes perception possible for without it we should have only a collection of meaningless sense data.

• If the act of creation is conceived as being essentially and perpetually the bringing of order out of chaos,destroying chaos by making its parts intelligible by the assertion of the identity of this designer,as it were,then the primary imagination is essentially creative and a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite.

• The secondary imagination is more active capacity belonging to the artist,representing and recreating the external world in its completeness.

• The secondary imagination is the conscious human use of this power.When we imply out primary imagination in the very act of perception,we are not doing so with our conscious will,but are exercising the basic faculty of our awareness of ourselves and the external world,the secondary imagination is more conscious and less elemental but it does not differ in kind from the primary.

• It projects and creates new harmonies of meaning.The employment of the secondary Imagination is,in the larger sense,a poetic activity which dissolves,diffuses,dissipates,in order to recreate;struggles to idealize and unify is essentially vital.

• A poem is always the word for a poet of a man employing the secondary imagination and so achieving the harmony of meaning,the reconciliation of opposites.so primary imagination is the basic imagination found in all human beings,and secondary imagination is the artistic imagination found in a few gifted persons.

• Coleridge makes a difference between fancy and imagination.The fancy is no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space,and blended with,and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will which we express by the word choice.But equally with the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials,ready made from the law of association.

• So we gather that the fancy can only manipulate fixities and definites,which,come ready made from perception.Its products,therefore,are not recreations but mosaic like reassemblies of existing bits and pieces.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FANCY AND IMAGINATION

• Firstly,fancy is a limited process based on the law of association.It brings the experience of the present to the past.The field of imagination on the other hand is vaster.It brings experience from the past to the present and then takes it from the present to the future.

• Secondly,Fancy works in all copying of nature,imagination works in imitation of nature which is a creative act.A real artist is never content to copy nature,because in doing so he will be copying only a fragment of nature,which is beautiful only in its totality and unity.

• The process of recreation of nature can take place only when the imagination is active,fancy can only perceive the dead,mechanical aspects of nature based on bare sensation,memory and associated ideas.

• It is only the secondary imagination of the poet which works in the same manner as the divine imagination works.Imagination is a divine faculty in man,which makes the external,internal,and fashions new images in its own semblance.

• Thirdly imagination is a unifying power,while fancy is the fitting together in a design of small pieces of colored glass.

• Coleriges writes:Of fancy:its images have no connection natural or moral,but are yoke together by the poet by means of some accidental coincidence.

• Of imagination Coleridge says it reveals itself in the balance of reconciliation of opposites,of discordant qualities.

• David Daiches,explaining this difference remarks,Fancy constructs surface decorations out of new combinations of memories and perceptions while imagination generates and produces a form of its own.

• Lastly,he appeals to the practice of the best poets,of all countries and in all ages,as authorizing the opinion that in every import of the word essential,there may be,is and ought to be an essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.