Samuel Taylor Coleridge

(The Romantics were influenced by the subjective philosophy of J.C. Fichte (1762-1914) who held that the very existence and shape of the world depended entirely on the vision of the individual imagination. The eye of the imagination allowed the Romantic poets to see beyond surface reality and apprehend a truth beyond the powers of reason).

Fancy: power of association of materials already provided and subject to the law of association. It is a kind of mechanical and logical faculty. It constructs surface decorations and has no capacity to re-create, but only to combine images.

Imagination: sovereign creative power (more important than fancy). It unifies contrasting qualities and manifests itself in:

Primary Imagination: fusion of perception and the human individual power to produce images; the power to give chaos a certain order, to form concepts and produce communication. It is common to all human beings.

Secondary Imagination: the poetic faculty, which not only gave shape and order to a given world, but built new worlds. It's the poetic vision which unifies and reconciles opposite and discordant elements. It is the conscious use of this power and creates new harmonies of meaning.

For Coleridge, art is no longer an Aristotelian imitation of nature, considered as an object. On the contrary, poetic truth is a union between the subject and the object, of a union of the poet and nature. Art creates new wholes out opposite and discordant elements: it shows the relation of everything to everything else.