Walker 1

Veronika Walker

ENG323, Dr. Vedder

Term Paper

May 4, 2010

Biographia Literaria: Coleridge’s Treatise on Fancy, Imagination,

and Wordsworth’s Popularity

Author Martin S. Day, in his History of English Literature, refers to the greatest prose work of the Romantic period as “…one of the world’s most significant treatises on the nature of poetry and the poet” (367). Written by the young but supremely intellectual Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria outlines both his own theories on poetry and on the particular traits of poetic “genius.”

But more than just a discussion of his opinions on the nature of writing itself, Biographia Literaria also explains Coleridge’s own role as a transitional poet between Classical and Romantic ideals. As the man who helped to shape and inspire the brilliant Romantic, William Wordsworth - of whom it is often said “[was] Coleridge’s greatest work” (Day 357) - Coleridge developed much of the Romantic ideas known as Nature poems, the sublime, and the view of the poet as one with a connection to divine inspiration (or “the muse). But to say that Coleridge is a pure Romantic is somewhat misleading. Coleridge’s theories have a decidedly Neoclassical bent to them as well, a tribute, as it were, to the Classical roots from which he and his friend, Wordsworth, often received instruction. Coleridge proposed that the duty of poets is to please aesthetically, but also consider their moral responsibility to blend man’s love of beauty with his scientific and philosophical mind. In Coleridge’s treatise, he unites the Neoclassic with the Romantic for a harmonious definition of poetry and the poet: they possess “this power” which they must “put in action … [and] retain under their control….”Wordsworth himself achieved this perfect unity in the eyes of his younger counterpart, making him worthy of the name of “genius.”

Coleridge and Wordsworth disagreed on the mechanics and appropriate wording of the poetry meant for the general public, but there was a deeper, underlying theory that differentiates these two greats, even though it is unclear whether this was the basis of their mid-career argument. Coleridge, unlike his prolific friend, wrote little, but he wrote entire treatises right into his poems, explaining in all his literature the appropriate balance between Classicist theories of craft and talent, and Romantic theories of inspiration and imagination. In Coleridge’s work, the reader is confronted with the greatest question that puzzled the Neoclassicists and the Romantics, and still perpetuates debate and discussion to this day: is the poet a craftsman or an artist, a hard worker or a receiver of divine inspiration? Coleridge proposes that he can, and should, be both. As Day puts it, “He subscribes fundamentally to the ancient” (aka. “classic”) “concept of beauty as harmony” (368), thus forcing him to blend the ideas of the previous era and his own together to create a harmonious definition of poetry. Coleridge thus explains this balance in two ways: first, by proposing and discussing his theory on fancy versus imagination, and which of the two tools make for a timeless poet; and secondly by demonstrating for his readers what his theories looked like in action, through the power and popularity of his good friend and poetic mentor, William Wordsworth.

Before Coleridge explains why Wordsworth is so just a fit for the honor of what he calls “original genius,” Coleridge first seeks to define the source from which a poet works, which can come from one of two places. These are usually described as “fancy,” but, as Coleridge seeks to differentiate, “fancy” is entirely different from the real place from which the ideas come - a place called “the imagination.” Using these words synonymously, according to Coleridge, is a grave mistake, because they depict two very unique areas of the creative mind, and, hence, can be used to distinguish between those who possess “talent” and those who possess “genius” (476).

Fancy, by Coleridge’s definition, is that part of the creative mind which is available to all persons, that area that “play[s] with…the fixities and definites” of everyday life. These “fancies” are ideas that all people possess, every day, whether they are aware of them or not. As Day deciphers Coleridge’s meaning of fancy as “the mere shuffling of sense data and memory by talent, producing castles in Spain and unicorns” (368). Fancy helps us to create our reality because it gives us a memory and allows us to “modify [our sense of the world] by that empirical phenomenon of the will which we express by the word CHOICE [sic]” (Coleridge 478). In other words, fancy gives us a memory and we choose how we wish to remember and interpret it. It helps us to create our reality, our understanding of the world. It may not be a true or correct interpretation of the circumstances, but fancy combines our memories with our decisions to interpret situations in a particular way.

This, then, is Coleridge’s definition of “fancy,” serving as a helpful creative element for the poet. Still, the ability to tap into these creative stirrings and produce poetry only makes a poet talented, according to Coleridge. After all, he admits, not everyone can write poetry even though we are all in the possession of the creative ability to produce original material. If a poet wishes to be considered more than merely talented, however, if he wishes to be considered a literary giant, an “original genius,“ then he must possess something even greater. Coleridge demonstrates this lower-class poet in his slight on Abraham Cowley, a man who only possessed a “very fanciful, mind [sic]” (477).

Fancy is only “an echo of [imagination]” (477). Imagination is a gift of the few, an uncontrollable, but “essentially vital” act of the mind (478); when captured, imagination makes the poet who harness and puts into well-crafted words a “genius” (476). Imagination, as defined by Coleridge, is the “living power and prime agent of all human perception…[that] struggles to idealize and to unify” (477-78). Imagination must “recreate” (477), reinvent, retell, see things from a different angle, and when it cannot do this, it still “struggles to idealize and to unify“ (478). As Day once again summarizes, “…Imagination…can balance or reconcile the apparent opposites in experience…” (368). Imagination is unique to those who possess poetic genius; they desire to impress their readership with an opposite view of “objects [that]…are essentially fixed and dead” (Coleridge 478) in order “to represent familiar objects [so] as to awaken…a kindred feeling concerning them…” (476). Imagination, therefore, gives humans the ability to deconstruct the familiarities of life and connect to the universal truths that poets seek to bring to the forefront. In the poet’s mind, says Day, poets of genius tap into their imagination in order to arrive as “[their] unique vision of truth” (Day 368), which, when found, they can then pass on to their readers to help them unify their understanding of the world.

Coleridge believed this kind of poet was difficult to find, reserving this category of poetic intellect and beauty to Thomas Milton and his own literary partner, Wordsworth.

Wordsworth was Coleridge’s prime example of the true poet because of his “original genius” in blending the craft with inspiration, the hard work with the muse. While Neoclassicists would insist on the poet as a prophet who wrestles to get their words under control, the Romantics would, on the hand, would insist that the poet is merely the channel through which the divine speaks. One critic describes these periods as the “reptilian Classicism” and the “mammalian Romanticism,” a common view amongst the Romantics themselves (Frye, 311).

But Coleridge and his counterpart, while they would have agreed with these characteristics of these two periods, believed in the possibility of blending the stereotypes of the poet and, Coleridge, especially, worked to bridge the gap in his poetry. Coleridge backs up his argument for Wordworth’s ability to blend these two eras by pointing out the fact that Wordsworth even in his own time, had no rivals, but instead, blossomed in popularity. “…year after year,” he writes “increased the number of Mr. Wordworth’s admirers” (479), a fact which prompted Coleridge to investigate his friend’s abilities and craft, forcing him to admit he was baffled by Wordworth’s talent and “…sought to understand” (476) what made him stand out in the vast world of literary society.

The reason for Coleridge’s esteem for Wordsworth lies in a particularly stimulating paragraph in Chapter Four of Biographia Literaria. In this paragraph, Coleridge outlines the genius poet, and thus his own friend’s inclusion in this category. The poet, he says, has the ability to “un[ite]…deep feeling with profound thought…To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar…. This,” he says, “is the character…of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from [mere] talents” (Coleridge 476). To be able to move an audience to see the familiar world and familiar object within it in a fresh light, with the same wonder and amazement as a child does, this is what made Wordsworth an incredible poet, in Coleridge’s mind. The supernatural and divine fascinate us because they are unknown, but, Coleridge argues, it is only the mundane and ordinary, when shown in an inspirational light, that reminds people of “the most admitted truths” (476) of the world around them.

Coleridge’s treatise remains vitally important for readers and critics alike as this debate continues: should we define great literature by its mere diction and mechanics, and by the amount of time it takes for a poet to craft at it, forgetting the truths that poetry should seek to focus upon? Or do we instead define it by the philosophy and meaning of the higher - perhaps divine - inspiration that prompts the poet to write in the first place? Or is there, as Coleridge would advocate, a happy medium between strict cadence, meter, fact, and science and the flowing, non-structured, natural and inspired work of the Romantic poet?
Works Cited

Coleridge, Samuel T. “Biographia Literaria.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. 8th ed. Vol. D. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. 474-84. Print.

Day, Martin S. History of English Literature: 1600-1837. Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1963.

Frye, Northrop. "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility." Eighteenth-Century English Literature: Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. James L. Clifford. 7th ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1959. 311-18. Print.