Biographia Literaria

For Coleridge, as for philosophers since Plato, perception is intrinsic to fathoming human life. As Edmund Burke wrote:

“The mind of man possesses a sort of creative power on its own; either in representing at pleasure the images of things in the order and manner in which they were received by the senses, or in combining those images in a new manner, and according to a different order. This power is called imagination.” (Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 1757.)

Though in the conclusion of Biographia Literaria Coleridge resists being associated with metaphysics, he praises Wordsworth’s “mysticism” and admits that “metaphysics and psychology have long been my hobby horse” (29). It is this interest in something akin to what Locke termed “introspection” that invests poetry with such importance for Coleridge. His famous vision in “Kubla Khan” of the poet being “drunk the milk of paradise” similarly suggests an intimate connection between the divine, ultimate reality, and poetry. The Christian God referenced in the conclusion as “an infinite yet self-conscious creator” noticeably takes the form of a poet (72).

For Coleridge, imagination referred to consciousness as a plastic function essential to the perception of reality. More precisely, he defines Imagination as the “esemplastic power,” a coinage he derives from the Greek verb for “to shape” and from Schelling’s “Ineinsbildung,” meaning the incorporation of opposites (31). Toward the end of Chapter 12, Coleridge arrives at Thesis 10, which content “that the act of self-consciousness is for us the source and principle of goal of possible knowledge” (91). Coleridge clarifies this further when he writes that Imagination is the “living power and prime agent of all human perception” and “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am” (102). A secondary form is a derivative of the first, differing only in degree. Imagination, or consciousness, is thus how we come to know things and the source and substance of truth.

It may seem contradictory to modern readers for Coleridge to associate imagination with the accurate perception of reality. We remain heavily influenced by empiricism. For Coleridge, “inward” (226) contemplation, far from being unscientific, offers recourse to the center of reality:

“the natural philosopher directs his view to the objective […] on the other hand, the transcendental or intelligential philosopher is anxious to preclude all interpellation of the objective into the subjective principles of his science” (84).

Anxious to defend his deductions against empiricism, Coleridge asserts: “if it be said that [transcendental philosophy] is idealism, let it be remembered that it is only so far idealism, as it is at the same time, and on that very account, the truest and most blinding realism” (87). This is where life and literature meet in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria.

It is Coleridge’s conception of the Imagination that lies at the heart of his aesthetic ideas. He elaborates them in Chapter 9, which deals with the “deduction of the imagination, and with it the principles of production and of genial criticism in the fine arts” (88). Just as Coleridge defines his philosophy in counterpoint to empiricism, he is also keen to emphasize the “contradistinction” between the Greek “phantasia,” the Latin “imaginato,” and “fancy” (30). While imagination is vital and shapes, fancy pertains to associations between fixed matter (95). Another binary apparent in his thinking is elaborated on in Chapter 18, when he writes: “existence is distinguished from essence by the superinduction of reality” (132). Whereas “natural philosophy” pertains simply to the sensory world, “transcendental philosophy” and poetry access “essence” via Imagination (132).

It is in this point that Coleridge’s theory of poetry most directly counters Wordsworth’s. Coleridge argues that in great poetry, “the operation consists in the excitement of surprise by the juxtaposition and apparent reconciliation of widely different or incompatible things” (145). Coleridge offers examples, including the famous conceit in John Donne’s “The Sun Rising.” Thus, Coleridge’s philosophical deductions about Imagination are intrinsically linked with his ideas about poetic form. Where Wordsworth advocates a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” (Wordsworth, William. “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.” 1801.) Coleridge contradicts him by arguing that meter generates and regulates excitement: “meter in itself is simply a stimulant of the attention, and therefore excites the question: why is the attention to be thus stimulated?” (135). For Coleridge, the answer is found not in “mechanical […] morphosis” but in poesis and Imagination (132).