Imagination, Apuntes de Idioma Inglés

¡Descarga Imagination y más Apuntes en PDF de Idioma Inglés solo en Docsity! Summary of the file: of “Chapter XIII” of his Biographia Literaria. Imagination: primary, or secondary • The primary Imagination: 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: It dissolves, diffuses, and dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. FANCY: a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space, it must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association. What are primary and secondary imaginations according to Coleridge ANAND MUNDRA According to Coleridge, Imagination has two forms, primary and secondary, primary imagination is merely the power of receiving impressions of the external world through the senses. It is the power of perceiving the objects of sense, both in their parts and as a whole. The primary imagination is universal, it is possessed by all. The secondary imagination, on the other hand, may be possessed by others also but it is the peculiar and distinctive of the artist. It requires an effort of the will, volition and conscious effort. It works upon what is perceived by the primary imagination; its raw material is the sensations and impressions supplied to it by the primary imagination. Mundra Anand, What are primary and secondary imaginations according to Coleridge , Preservearticles, last seen: March 2015, 6, website: http:// www.preservearticles.com/2012031226752/what-are-primary-and-secondary-imaginations- according-to-coleridge.html According to Coleridge the imagination is divided into two types: primary and secondary. Primary imagination is "the living power and the prime agent of human perception". It is the faculty by which we perceive the world around us; it works through our senses and is common to all human beings. Secondary imagination is the poetic vision, the faculty that a poet has "to idealize and unify". During a state of ecstasy, in fact, images do not appear isolated, but associated according to laws of their own which have nothing to do with the data of experience. The imagination is contrasted with fancy, which is inferior to it, since it is a kind of mechanical and logical faculty which enables a poet to aggregate and associate metaphors, similes and other poetical devices. Coleridge, amicicg.altervista, Fancy and Imagination, last seen: on March 2015, 6, website: http://amicicg.altervista.org/sharky/coleridge.html Summary of the file S. T. Coleridge. Kubla Khan. Or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment The author, in ill health, had retired to a lonely farmhouse, at the moment that he was reading the following sentence: "Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall." The author fell for about three hours in a profound sleep. The following writings are the recollection of the general purport of the vision. “Kubla Khan” Commentary As the poet explains in the short preface to this poem, he had fallen asleep after taking “an anodyne” prescribed “in consequence of a slight disposition” (this is a euphemism for opium, to which Coleridge was known to be addicted). Before falling asleep, he had been reading a story in which Kubla Khan commanded the building of a new palace; Coleridge claims that while he slept, he had a fantastic vision and composed simultaneously—while sleeping—some two or three hundred lines of poetry, “if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or conscious effort.” Waking after about three hours, the poet seized a pen and began writing furiously; however, after copying down the first three stanzas of his dreamt poem—the first three stanzas of the current poem as we know it—he was interrupted by a “person on business from Porlock,” who detained him for an hour. After this interruption, he was unable to recall the rest of the vision or the poetry he had composed in his opium dream. It is thought that the final stanza of the poem, thematizing the idea of the lost vision through the figure of the “damsel with a dulcimer” and the milk of Paradise, was written post-interruption. The mysterious person from Porlock is one of the most notorious and enigmatic figures in Coleridge’s biography; no one knows who he was or why he disturbed the poet or what he wanted or, indeed, whether any of Coleridge’s story is actually true. But the person from Porlock has become a metaphor for the malicious interruptions the world throws in the way of inspiration and genius, and “Kubla Khan,” strange and ambiguous as it is, has become what is perhaps the definitive statement on the obstruction and thwarting of the visionary genius. Regrettably, the story of the poem’s composition, while thematically rich in and of itself, often overshadows the poem proper, which is one of Coleridge’s most haunting and beautiful. The first three stanzas are products of pure imagination: The pleasure-dome of Kubla Khan is not a useful metaphor for anything in particular (though in the context of the poem’s history, it becomes a metaphor for the unbuilt monument of imagination); however, it is a fantastically prodigious descriptive act. The poem becomes especially evocative when, after the second stanza, the meter suddenly tightens; the resulting lines are terse and solid, almost beating out the sound of the war drums (“The shadow of the dome of pleasure / Floated midway on the waves...”). The fourth stanza states the theme of the poem as a whole (though “Kubla Khan” is almost impossible to consider as a unified whole, as its parts are so sharply divided). The speaker says that he once had a vision of the damsel singing of Mount Abora; this vision becomes a metaphor for Coleridge’s vision of the 300-hundred-line masterpiece he never completed. The speaker insists that if he could only “revive” within him “her symphony and song,” he would recreate the pleasure-dome out of music and words, and take on the persona of the magician or visionary. His hearers would recognize the dangerous power of the vision, which would manifest itself in his “flashing eyes” and “floating hair.” But, awestruck, they would nonetheless dutifully take part in the ritual, recognizing that “he on honey-dew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise.”