From the Introduction: “The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be 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 I AM” (301).
“What Kant called the productive imagination, Coleridge renamed the primary: that mental faculty by which we create the world of our perceptions at each moment of consciousness. Just as God created the noumena, man creates the phenomena” (301).
Art for Coleridge is the secondary imagination, an echo of the primary (301).
Coleridge’s major genres of poetry and prose:
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| IMMEDIATE OBJECT
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| PLEASURE TRUTH _______________________________________________________________________
| SUPERFICIAL FORM: | RHYME AND/OR METER | Poem Mnemonic PROSE | Novel History or science
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From the text: people who criticize Shakespeare are like people filling a “three-ounce phial at the waters of Niagara—and determines positively the greatness of the cataract to be neither more nor less than his three-ounce phial has been able to receive” (304).
“Instead of deciding concerning their own modes and customs by any rule of reason, nothing appears natural, becoming, or beautiful but what coincides with the accidents of their education” (304).
“The form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a predetermined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material [….] The organic form, on e other hand, is innate; it shapes as it develops itself from within, and the fullness of its development is is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form” (305).