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

important to understand that explosions of creativity typically are associated with new things, or new ways of looking at things. It is imagination both stimulates and that is stimulated in this way, and it is the definition of imagination that was central to Coleridge’s almost desperate search for understanding the relevance of creativity in the grid-locked universe described by scientific method.  Coleridge’s attempt to define Imagination reaches an apex in Chapter Thirteen of the Biographica Literaria, a statement so famous I won’t repeat it here, but of which Thomas McFarland says

“Not only is there no preparation for the threefold distinction of Chapter Thirteen in Coleridge’s previous writings, there is none even in the Biographica…in Chapter Thirteen…in an astonishing volte face, he writes himself a letter in which…(he) proceeds simply to dump upon (the reader) the threefold distinction…”(210).

Indeed, the spontaneous assertion of a threefold property to Imagination may have had its real roots in Blake’s opinions, according to McFarland: “To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albions covering, to take off his filthy garments, & clothe him with Imagination…” (215)

And yet Coleridge wanted to reconcile mysticism and Imagination, systematically if possible, with “the dictates of common sense with the conclusions of scientific Reasoning.”  For Coleridge

“…shared the respect of his age for science and scientific theories, the confidence that human experience could be explained as physical nature could be explained, that there were laws of human nature as well as laws of motion….What he required was a means of reconciling the experience of the oasis [i.e. of visionary insight] with acceptable

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