Coleridge, Imagination, and Romance: Extracts from 'Biographia Literaria'

I once wrote a paper on Coleridge's descriptions of primary and secondary imagination.  It was one of the best papers I have ever written, which I unfortunately have lost due to my own ineptness and the evolution of technology devises which have evolved over time.  But I'm digressing.  The following passage, from Coleridge's  "Extracts from Biographia Literaria" contains insights into the world of romance and I'd like to share it with the class.  The section that I think is the most applicable to romance reads as follows:

"The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity.  He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination.  This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, control (laxis effertur habenis) 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 individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgement ever awake and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound and vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry.  'Doubtless', as Sir John Davies observes of the soul (and his words may with slight alteration be applied, and even more appropriately, to the poetic Imagination),

Doubtless this could not be, but that she turns
Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange,
As fire converts to fire the things it burns,
As we our food into our nature change.

From their gross matter she abstracts their forms,
And draws a kind of quintessence from things;
Which to her proper nature she transforms
To bear them light on her celestial wings.

Thus does she, when from individual states
She doth abstract the universal kinds;
Which then re-clothed in divers names and fates
Steal access through our senses to our minds.

Finally, Good Sense is the body of poetic genius, Fancy its Drapery, Motion its Life, and Imagination the Soul that is everywhere, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole" (Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selected Poetry and Prose 198-197).

Dr. Sexson has told us numerous time that it would take us one thousand pages to unpack Coleridge's Kubla Khan, and I think the same holds true for the above passage.  However, I do think we can see by reading this material the power of imagination, how it is constructed, and that it breathes through all of the stories that we have read in this class.