Coleridge Quotes: Imagination, Symbol and Poetic Form - Yenra

Imagination recreates

Chapter XIII of Biographia Literaria distinguishes primary imagination, involved in perception, from secondary imagination, which works with conscious will. The quoted clause describes the secondary power. Coleridge then contrasts it with fancy, which handles materials already available to memory and association.

For a first reading, focus on the difference between rearranging available pieces and transforming them into a newly coherent whole. His account also places human creativity within a theological understanding of creation.

Poetic faith belongs to an artistic encounter

In chapter XIV, Coleridge recalls the plan for Lyrical Ballads. His part would give supernatural situations enough human interest and emotional truth to engage a reader’s imaginative assent. The quoted qualification limits the claim to the experience of the work.

Read this alongside his description of Wordsworth’s complementary task: renewing attention to ordinary life. Both projects ask what poetry can make a reader feel and perceive.

A symbol participates in what it expresses

Here “it” refers to a symbol. In The Statesman’s Manual, Coleridge contrasts symbol with allegory and describes the symbol as a living part of a larger unity. The passage also speaks of the eternal becoming perceptible through the temporal.

This is a theological and political work concerned with reading the Bible; its definition carries that setting. When using it to think about literature, preserve the idea of participation. A symbolic detail remains something within the work even as it makes a larger relation intelligible.

The linked scan is the 1816 edition, printed page 37. Edition-specific page numbers matter here: another collection of Coleridge’s prose may place the same passage elsewhere.

A poem puts imaginative movement into practice

The speaker of “This Lime-tree Bower my Prison” begins apart from friends who have gone walking. He imagines their route and what they might see. At this turn, his pleasure in their imagined experience changes the feeling of his own situation.

He then attends to the leaves, shadows and living sounds around the bower itself. The poem’s movement connects imagined companionship with renewed observation of what is actually near him. Its end addresses Charles Lamb, keeping the meditation tied to a particular friendship.

This offers a way to explore the critical ideas through a poem’s sequence. Track how the scene remains physically limited while the speaker’s attention and sympathies expand. The poem gives that change an unfolding form.

Keep the distinctions useful

• Imagination: ask what gives the parts of an experience a new relation.
• Poetic faith: ask how a work invites you to enter its imagined situation.
• Symbol: ask how a concrete element remains part of the work while carrying a larger significance.

These are reading questions, not a scoring system. Apply one at a time and test the result against the passage. A useful note identifies both the detail that prompts an interpretation and the part of the work that supports it.

For a comparison, read Woolf on the form of experience. For another route into attentive observation, read Bashō’s teachings and short poems. Each writer gives the reader a different account of what attention can do.