Fancy and Imagination

The distinction between fancy and imagination was a key element in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s theory of poetry, as well as in his general theory of the mental processes. In earlier discussions, “fancy” and “imagination” had for the most part been used synonymously to denote a faculty of the mind which is distinguished from “reason,” “judgment,” and “memory,” in that it receives “images” from the senses and reorders them into new combinations. 

In the thirteenth chapter of Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge attributes this reordering function of the sensory images to the lower faculty he calls 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, that is, the fancy is a mechanical process which receives the elementary images—the “fixities and definites” which come to it ready-made from the senses—and, without altering the parts, reassembles them into a different spatial and temporal order from that in which they were originally perceived. 

The imagination, however, which produces a much higher kind of poetry, dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; 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. Coleridge’s imagination, that is, is able to “create” rather than merely reassemble, by dissolving the fixities and definites—the mental pictures, or images, received from the senses—and unifying them into a new whole. 

And while the fancy is merely mechanical, the imagination is “vital”; that is, it is an organic faculty which operates not like a sorting machine, but like a living and growing plant. 
As Coleridge says elsewhere, the imagination “generates and produces a form of its own,” while its rules are “the very powers of growth and production.” And in the fourteenth chapter of the Biographia, Coleridge adds his famous statement that the “synthetic” power which is the “imagination . . . reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image....” The faculty of imagination, in other words, assimilates and synthesizes the most disparate elements into an organic whole—that is, a newly generated unity, constituted by an interdependence of parts whose identity cannot survive their removal from the whole. 

Most critics after Coleridge who distinguished fancy from imagination tended to make fancy simply the faculty that produces a lesser, lighter, or humorous kind of poetry, and to make imagination the faculty that produces a higher, more serious, and more passionate poetry. And the concept of “imagination” itself is as various as the modes of psychology that critics have adopted (associationist, Gestalt, Freudian, Jungian), while its processes vary according to the way in which a critic conceives of the nature of a poem (as essentially realistic or essentially visionary, as a verbal construction or as “myth,” as “pure poetry” or as a work designed to produce effects on an audience). See I. A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination (1934); M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), chapter 7; Richard H. Fogle, The Idea of Coleridge’s Criticism (1962).

From- A Glossary of Literary Terms- M. H. Abrams

Coleridge labelled two faculties of mind "Imagination" and "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; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.

The IMAGINATION is 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 idealise and unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. 


From Biographia Literaria (1817) - S. T. Coleridge

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