ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Coleridge himself described Biographia Literaria as an ‘immethodical miscellany’ of ‘life and opinions’. In 1906, the poet Arthur Symons called the work ‘the greatest book of criticism in English, and one of the most annoying books in any language’.

Detailed explanation-2: -fancy, the power of conception and representation in artistic expression (such as through the use of figures of speech by a poet). The term is sometimes used as a synonym for imagination, especially in the sense of the power of conceiving and giving artistic form to that which is not existent, known, or experienced.

Detailed explanation-3: -Coleridge believed the aim of literary criticism should be to establish important principles of new writing, not to provide rules for judging existing writings. Biographia Literaria is probably the single most significant work of criticism by the most important critic in the first half of the 19th century.

Detailed explanation-4: -Coleridge regards fancy to be the inferior to imagination. It only combines different things into different shapes not like imagination to fuse them into one. According to Coleridge, It is the process of bringing together images dissimilar by the main by source.