“The imagination then, I consider either as primary, or
secondary. 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. The secondary Imagination I
consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will; yet
still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing
only in degree, and in the mode of operation. It dissolves, diffuses,
dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible,
yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and unify. It is essentially
vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.”
This resonated for me with the article prosody, in which a contrast is drawn between the function
and ability of prose and poetry. This difference is that when an author sits
down to write in prose, they are doing there best to convey exactly what they
intend to the reader, as prose has nearly no restrictions. Poetry on the other
hand is ruled by restrictions such as those of meter and rhyme. This causes the
poet to use words and phrases that they would otherwise not to fit the form
they are writing in, and by doing so they are foregoing their intended purpose;
instead making the significance of the work solely defined by the reader. The
article argues that it is this that gives poetry so much more weight as each reader
can derive something different from the poem that they would not be able to
with prose, as prose is limited to the creative powers of the author alone.
This way of looking at poetry is what connected Coleridge’s
imagination for me, specifically in the definition of the secondary
imagination. The manner of function that the secondary imagination operates on,
that “It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to recreate”, is the same
function for reading poetry. To get to what can be defined individually as the
meaning of a poem, one must be broken down in order to find that meaning. These
individual meanings are made possible by the rigidity of form and are given
shape by each individual’s imagination.
This view of poetry also works as an example of another
quote we discussed in class concerning chaos being simply an order we do not
yet understand. Poetry has a musical component that is absent in prose, which
gives it a sense of order, in that the words the author chooses to fit the
musical form, fit together in a way they don’t in prose; thus the restriction
of poetry on the outside gives it a sense of order. However, because the author
is forced to use words that are “Quasiarbitrarily imposed by musical
considerations” the ideas presented in a poem are agents of chaos. This is to
say without the authorial control found in prose; the meaning of a poem is
unpredictable.
With poetry
understood to have a subjective meaning born of its chaotic nature and the
readers secondary imagination that another connection is forged to a theme of
this You, Me, and Shakespeare class, dreams. This is to say that poetry is to
prose what dreams are to reality. Like reality, prose is defined by what is
there, by what can be commonly agreed upon as fact. Prose in this way creates a
its own reality where what is “real” is what can be proved in the text, much
like what in our reality the real is what can be proved by our senses. Dreams like poetry on the other hand
are defined not on what is “real” but what is felt. With meaning not being
dictated by facts derived from reason, poetry is more able to elicit more
powerful emotions, as often emotions are the opposite of reason. Dreams are
essentially the same as their meaning both starts and ends with the dreamer;
the significance of a dream is decided in the waking mind in order to decipher
the emotional subconscious of the dreamer.
This argument is not to say that the imagination is absent
from prose writing, only that it employs the other two imaginations defined by
Coleridge. When writing prose the author is engaging in the primary imagination
by attempting to create a reality in imitation of the implied third
imagination, the divine imagination. Once finished the author is ascended to
the divine in that the product of their imagination created a reality to be
understood by the reader; by use of the same primary imagination the reader
attempts to perceive the reality the author created.
However, as the author of the prose is human and therefore
flawed, the product of their imitation is likewise flawed in that it can only
describe that which we understand. This is not true of poetry, as poetry is
always pushing, always reaching, always attempting to reach into its own
chaotic nature to bring back an understanding of the order, which its musical
construction implies.
