Biographia Literaria

                Biographia Literaria

'Biographia Literaria' is a philosophical and auto-biographical work by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It is unsystematic and somehow unfinished; yet its greatness can not be denied. Coleridge deals here with his youthful admiration for the sonnets of William Boweles, his early friendship with Wordsworth and his concept of poetic imagination.

In the 13th chapter of 'Biographia Literaria', Coleridge says about fancy- "Fancy has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space." To Coleridge fancy is a mechanical process which receives the elementary images- the fixites and definites which come to it readymade from the sense. And without altering the parts it resembles them in mind.

According to Coleridge, imagination has two forms- primary and secondary. Primary imagination is merely the power of receiving impression of the external world through the senses. It imposes some wort of order on those impressions, reduces them to shape and size, so that mind is able to form clear image of the outside world. The primary imagination is universal, possessed by all.

The seconday imagination, on the other hand, is the peculiar and distinctive attribute of an artist. It is the secondary imagination which makes artistic creation possible. This type of imagination is more active and conscious in this working. It works upon what is perceived by primary imagination. It is an active agent which 'dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to create'. It is the power which harmonizes and reconciles and hence Coleridge calls it a 'magical systhesis power'.