Imagination in the Contemporary World and the Legacy of Romantic Literary Thought

and ‘secondary imagination’ is apparently not clear enough to allow all other critics to agree with the analysis offered by Robert Penn Warren, according to notes from the source quoted directly above, as displayed in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, where Penn Warren argues that “The Ancient Mariner is a poem of ‘pure imagination” in the sense that its subject is the poetic, or Secondary, Imagination itself.

Whalley (1946-7) believes that: “whether consciously or unconsciously” the albatross is “the symbol of Coleridge’s creative imagination.”  House (1953) opposes the rigidity of Penn Warren’s symbolic analysis and argues that the poem is “part of the exploration…part of the experience which led Coleridge into his later theoretic statements (as of the theory of Imagination) rather than a symbolic adumbration of the theoretic statements themselves”  (84, 113).

It might be useful, then, to take a glance at Imagination’s root definitions, as those distant but great philosophers,  Plato and Aristotle, thought of it.  After all, the Romantics seemed to have looked at the classic definitions, too.  Basically, the Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind gives us a handy distillation of the definition of imagination as proposed by that philosopher of philosophers,

“Aristotle…(who) tells us that “imagination [phantasia] is (apart from any metaphorical sense of the word) the process by which we say an image [phantasma] is presented to us” (De Anima. 428a 1-4).  It has been questioned in recent times whether the Greek words phantasia and phantasm are really equivalent to “imagination” and'(mental) image” as heard in contemporary usage.  However, there can be little doubt that, until very recent times, theoretical

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