In his work Biographia Literaria Coleridge discusses the following titles:
1.
Primary Imagination
2.
Secondary Imagination
a.
Organic Wholes,
b.
Symbols, and,
c.
Concrete Universals
Primary Imagination
In the primary imagination, that infinite
self-consciousness of God is echoed in our finite self-consciousness. Now artists who make use of this creative
power are divine ventriloquists: poet prophets who receive direct inspiration
from above and respond passively with the song or the poem.
Secondary Imagination
Coleridge hails the secondary
imagination rather as the true source of poetry. Whereas the primary imagination is passive,
the secondary imagination is active.
The goal
of secondary imagination = to dissolve,
dissipate and diffuse in order to recreate.
What it does = the secondary imagination takes the raw material given it
by inspiration, and breaks down that raw material and then reshapes it into a
new and a vital form.
The esemplastic power (= shaping power) of the
secondary imagination enables poets to create three things: a) Organic Wholes,
Symbols and Concrete Universals.
Organic Wholes
Working from the philosophical
aesthetic theories of Aristotle, Kant and Schiller and many others, Coleridge
fashioned an organic theory of poetry.
He viewed a poem as an almost living organism in which the whole not
only contains each part but each part contains within itself the whole. Just as
the seed within an apple contains within itself the potential not only for
another apple but for an entire growth of apple trees, the part contains the
whole within it. That is true organic
theory.
Coleridge’s definition of what a poem is
includes the criterion that it gives equal pleasure in the whole as it does in
each part. In an organic whole there is
a dynamic incarnational relationship between its form and its content. Ideas and images are fused. Dissimilitude is resolved into similitude.
How can we know a poem is truly an
organic whole? Examine whether anything
can be added or taken away from it. If either
of this action is possible then the poet has failed to achieve a complete fusion
of parts and whole.
Symbols
Unlike many theorists before him
Coleridge previlaged symbols over allegories for he felt symbols come closer to
the ideal of the organic whole. In an
allegory an abstract notion is merely translated into a picture language. For instance in the middle ages an allegory
of the inner struggle between good and evil could be of a devil on one shoulder
and an angel on the other shoulder. It is
a picture language that tries to capture something abstract.
Coleridge felt in an allegory there is
no essential link between the idea and the picture. One simply stands in for the other. But n a symbol the abstract notion is seen in
and through the physical symbol.
In the symbol SPECIFIC
AND GENERAL, TEMPERAL AND
ETERNAL, and, CONCRETE AND
UNIVERSAL meet and fuse in an almost mystical, incarnational
way. This is why Coleridge privileged symbol
over allegory.
Concrete Universals
Coleridge again echoing Aristotle and
Kant uses the phrase Concrete Universals to denote the highest forms of
organic wholes and symbols. Within
the microcosm of the poem a universal idea has been fully realized in a
concrete form. The Concrete Universals effect
a full fusion of an abstract non-physical idea and a specific special
image. Just as Christ via essemplastic
power of incarnation became both fully man and fully God.
The mystical reciprocal relationship
that forms within such poems, such concrete universals is timeless. It is as if the concrete image had been
carried up into the realm of idea, even as the idea descends and dwells within
the image. In other words a concrete
universal is coming down and at the same time the concrete is moving up and losing
itself in the universal.
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