which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. This power,
first put in action by the will and understanding and retained under their
irremissive,4 though gentle and unnoticed, control (laxis ejfertur habenis)5
reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant quali
ties:6 of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea,
with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty
and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emo
tion, with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-
possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it
blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to
nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sym
pathy with the poetry. 'Doubtless,' as Sir John Davies observes of the soul
(and his words may with slight alteration be applied, and even more appropriately, to the poetic IMAGINATION):
Doubtless this could not be, but that she turns
Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange,
As fire converts to fire the things it burns,
As we our food into our nature change.
From their gross matter she abstracts their forms,
And draws a kind of quintessence from things;
Which to her proper nature she transforms,
To bear them light on her celestial wings.
Thus does she, when from individual states
She doth abstract the universal kinds;
3. A term from the theory of painting for the main-became central to the American New Critics of the tenance of the harmony of a composition. mid-20th century, that the best poetry incorpo
4. Continuous. rates and reconciles opposite or discordant ele5. Driven with loosened reins (Latin). ments. 6. Here Coleridge introduces the concept, which
.
BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA / 48 3
Which then reclothed in divers names and fates
Steal access through our senses to our minds.7
Finally, GOOD SENSE is the BODY of poetic genius, FANCY its DRAPERY,8 MOTION its LIFE, and IMAGINATION the SOUL that is everywhere, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.
From Chapter 17
[EXAMINATION OF THE TENETS PECULIAR TO MR. WORDSWORTH]
As far then as Mr. Wordsworth in his preface contended, and most ably
contended, for a reformation in our poetic diction, as far as he has evinced
the truth of passion, and the dramatic propriety of those figures and metaphors
in the original poets which, stripped of their justifying reasons and converted
into mere artifices of connection or ornament, constitute the characteristic
falsity in the poetic style of the moderns; and as far as he has, with equal
acuteness and clearness, pointed out the process by which this change was
effected and the resemblances between that state into which the reader's mind
is thrown by the pleasurable confusion of thought from an unaccustomed train
of words and images and that state which is induced by the natural language
of impassioned feeling, he undertook a useful task and deserves all praise,
both for the attempt and for the execution. The provocations to this remon
strance in behalf of truth and nature were still of perpetual recurrence before
4
and after the publication of this preface. 4 *
My own differences from certain supposed parts of Mr. Wordsworth's theory
