Coleridge distinguishes between primary and secondary imagination. Primary imagination is an involuntary and subconscious faculty that allows humans to perceive and receive sense impressions from the external world. Secondary imagination is a creative and conscious faculty that selects and reshapes the raw materials of primary imagination to create something new. It involves both conscious selection and subconscious infusion. While primary imagination is a universal human ability, secondary imagination is a heightened creative power that allows poets to blend conscious and unconscious elements into new wholes.

1. Coleridge’s concept of
primary and secondary
imagination
Abdul Ghaffar Jat
2K16/BLENG/4
University of Sindh Laar Campus Badin

2. What is the imagination?
 Imagination is called the faculty of imagining, is
the ability to form new images and sensations in
the mind. …
 “The imagination then, I consider either
as primary or secondary. The primary
imagination I hold to be the living power
and prime agent of all human perception,
And as a repetition in the find mind of
the infinite I Am.”
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge;
 “Biographia Literaria”

4. Primary Imagination
Primary imagination is merely the power of
receiving impression of the external world
through the senses. It is an involuntary act
of the mind, the human mind receives
impressions and sensations from the outside
world. It is in this way that clear and
coherent perception becomes possible

6.  Primary Imagination: (Living power and prime agent of all human
perception). Coleridge asserts that the mind is active in
perception. This activity which is subconscious and is the
common birth right of all men, is the work of the Primary
Imagination, which may be defined as the inborn power of
perceiving that makes it possible for us to know things.
The Primary Imagination is a repetition in the finite mind of the
eternal art of creation in the infinite I AM. The power of
perception, Coleridge called as Primary Imagination whereas the
poetic imagination as the Secondary Imagination. It differs from
the Primary Imagination in degree, but not in kind. While all
men possess the Primary, only some men possess the heightened
degree of the universally human power to which the poet lays
claim

7. Secondary Imagination is more active
and conscious. It requires an effort to the
will and conscious effort. It selects the
raw material and reshapes and models.

8. Secondary imagination is a creative force. It
recreates the experiences that primary
imagination supplies to it. According to
dissolves and diffuses in order to re-create.
Secondary Imagination reshapes the data.
Thus it is a “a shaping and modifying
power.” By receiving and categorizing data it
creates something new. For example : water
and sugar.

9.  Secondary Imagination: (Echo of the Primary Imagination)
differs in two important respects from Primary Imagination.
First, Primary Imagination is subconscious, while Secondary
Imagination coexists "with the conscious will" and involves,
therefore, elements of conscious and subconscious activity. Poetic
"making" blends conscious selection with subconscious infusion,
some elements are intentionally chosen while others are
mysteriously given or supplied from the deepness of the poet's
subconscious mind. Second, the secondary Imagination is
described as a power that "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order
to recreate." It dissolves and then reintegrates the components in
a new way that draws attention to their coalescence. Secondary
Imagination bridges the gap between the world of spirit and
matter; it fuses perception, intellect, feeling, passions and
memory. It struggles to idealize and unify.