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IMAGINATION and FANCY are activities of two different kind.
Fancy is not a creative power at all. It only combines what it perceives into beautiful shapes, but like the imagination it does not fuse and unify.
The difference between the two is the same as the difference between a mechanical mixture and a chemical compound.
In a mechanical mixture a number of ingredients are brought together. They are mixed up, but they do not lose their individual properties. They still exist as separate identities. In a chemical compound, on the other hand, the different ingredients combine to form something new. The different ingredients no longer exist as separate identities. They lose their respective properties and fuse together to create something new and entirely different. A compound is an act of creation; while a mixture is merely a bringing together of a number of separate elements.
Thus imagination creates new shapes and forms of beauty by fusing and unifying the different impressions it receives from the external world. Fancy is not creative. It is a kind of memory; it arbitrarily brings together images, and even when brought together, they continue to retain their separate and individual properties. They receive no colouring or modification from the mind. It is merely mechanical juxtaposition, and not a chemical fusion. Samuel Taylor Coleridge explains the point by quoting two passages from Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. The following lines from this poem serve to illustrate fancy:
Fully gently now she takes him by the hand
A Lily present in a goal of snow
Or ivory in an alabaster band
So white a friend engirds so white a foe.
In the above lines images are drawn from memory, but they do not enter penetrate into one another.
The following lines from the same poem (Venus and Adonis) illustrate the power and function of imagination:
Look! How a bright star shooteth from the sky
So glides hi in the night from Venus' eye.
"How many images and feelings", says Coleridge, "are here brought together without effort and without discard-the beauty of Adonis-the rapidity of the flight-the yearning yet the helplessness of the enamoured gazer-and a shadowy, ideal character thrown over the whole."
For Coleridge, fancy is the drapery (dress) of poetic genius, but imagination is it's very soul, which forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.
Man is bad case....isn't it?
Fancy is not a creative power at all. It only combines what it perceives into beautiful shapes, but like the imagination it does not fuse and unify.
The difference between the two is the same as the difference between a mechanical mixture and a chemical compound.
In a mechanical mixture a number of ingredients are brought together. They are mixed up, but they do not lose their individual properties. They still exist as separate identities. In a chemical compound, on the other hand, the different ingredients combine to form something new. The different ingredients no longer exist as separate identities. They lose their respective properties and fuse together to create something new and entirely different. A compound is an act of creation; while a mixture is merely a bringing together of a number of separate elements.
Thus imagination creates new shapes and forms of beauty by fusing and unifying the different impressions it receives from the external world. Fancy is not creative. It is a kind of memory; it arbitrarily brings together images, and even when brought together, they continue to retain their separate and individual properties. They receive no colouring or modification from the mind. It is merely mechanical juxtaposition, and not a chemical fusion. Samuel Taylor Coleridge explains the point by quoting two passages from Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. The following lines from this poem serve to illustrate fancy:
Fully gently now she takes him by the hand
A Lily present in a goal of snow
Or ivory in an alabaster band
So white a friend engirds so white a foe.
In the above lines images are drawn from memory, but they do not enter penetrate into one another.
The following lines from the same poem (Venus and Adonis) illustrate the power and function of imagination:
Look! How a bright star shooteth from the sky
So glides hi in the night from Venus' eye.
"How many images and feelings", says Coleridge, "are here brought together without effort and without discard-the beauty of Adonis-the rapidity of the flight-the yearning yet the helplessness of the enamoured gazer-and a shadowy, ideal character thrown over the whole."
For Coleridge, fancy is the drapery (dress) of poetic genius, but imagination is it's very soul, which forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.
Man is bad case....isn't it?
