ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -According to Coleridge, imagination is the faculty associated with creativity and the power to shape and unify, while fancy, dependent on and inferior to imagination, is merely “associative.”

Detailed explanation-2: -Imagination and fancy, however, differs in kind. Fancy is not a creative power at all. It only combines what is 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.

Detailed explanation-3: -Coleridge compares fancy and imagination, saying that fancy is inferior to the imagination. According to Coleridge, fancy is like memory which collects many images to form an image in a different way. For example, when a poet uses metaphor or simile, he uses fancy because he joins the similar and dissimilar together.

Detailed explanation-4: -While Wordsworth thinks of nature as an essential part of human life, especially in childhood, Coleridge associates the experience in nature as something special, as the ideal in the real, as part of the imagination. The different childhood of these two poets underlie this attitude.