The Functions In Coleridge's Idea of Imagination

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In the preceding pages, Coleridge is seen as a writer in his roles of literary critic, and poet. The following remarks are intended to summarize his critical principles and to indi-cate where his poetic excellence. Coleridge wrote two kinds of poetry that really mattered: the conversational poems and the poems of high imagination. They incorporate his critrcal theories: 'organic unity, the reconciliation of opposites'.
To keep this principle in mind is rathera chore, Coleridge used this term for 'the poet, described in ideal perfection,' the poet as the focal point of poetic unity. 'The 'whole suul of man' is brought into activity,' ard thereby comes 'a tone and spirit of unity.' It is a unity that demands, 'the balance or reconciliation of opposites or discordant qualities': sameness and difference; generals and concretes; ideas and images; the individual and the representative; novelty and familiarity; emotion and order, judgement and feeling; the natural and the artificial; the poet and his poems.
In Coleridge, who is rathera chore, Coleridge used this term for 'the poet, described in ideal perfection,' the poet as the focal point of poetic unity. 'The 'whole soul of man' is brought into activity,' and thereby comes 'a tone and spirit of unity.' It is a unity that demands, 'the balance or reconciliation of opposites or discordant qualities' : sameness and difference; generals and concretes; ideas and images; the individual and the representative; novelty and familiarity; emotion and order, judgement and feeling; the naatural and the artificial; the poet and his poems.
In Coleridge, who is pre-eminently a poet of imagination, these are reduced to a unified and organic shape. The function of imaginative poetry is to create a unified and significant pattern of the Chaos and welter of experiences. That is precisely why, as Coleridge says, the whole personality of the poet is engaged in the imaginative process. In Coleridge, as J. B. Beer says, the shaping spirit and the inquiring spirit were equally strong, and he was never happier than when exercising both to the limit of their powers.
There is indeed, in Coleridge, a new poetic vision. It is a vision from which nothing seems to be left out: the poet, his thoughts and feelings, the world of man. and the world of nature, the world of universal values whatever man can know. He fused all these things into a new being. We may call this new being, as Coleridge does, a symbol.
When considering his individual, 'Kubla Khan' is a poem of high imagination. In the fragmentary" Kubla Khan," the poet sets before the reader two worlds, that of the ima-gination and that of understanding. That latter is the world in which all men are more of less at home; it is a world in which the poet enters Eden, so to speak, on the viewless wings or poesy. Coleridge attempts in "Kubla Khan" to portray the world of imagination pictu-resquely in terms of sunlit caverns and floating pleasure-domes, in effect, he tries to re-create creativity in action.
The "caverns measureless to man," like the "sunless sea" and "lifeless ocean." are all remote from the actual world. Such settings are unknown to the faculty of the understan-ding or, more simply, to common-sense man in the beanfield world. The "caverns mea-sureless to man" are twice mentioned in order to emphasize the point that man's under-standing, that is his quantitative abilities, are insufficient. They can neither measure the caverns, nor provide entry into this second world. The above images all belong to this second world of the imagination. The next significant lines (Ⅱ . 29-30) "ancestral voices prophosying war" heard by Kubla, but heard "from afar"; that is heard from that distant land of the understanding belonging only to the common-sense man.
The scene shifts to accent the pleasure-dome. This of an ideal world makes the poet exclame: "It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!"(Ⅱ35-36) Only in the ideal world could such Ioveliness be realized; "singing of Mount Abora" - singing of distant lands of enchantment and mystery. In the last line, the poet create mysterious ambrosia ("honey-dew" and "Milk of paradise) fit for inhabitants of that world of poetic imagination. These seemingly antithetical images combine to demonstrate the proximity of the known and the unknown worlds, the two worlds of understanding and imagination, the two worlds of common-sense and mystery.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Ⅰ. 序 論
• Ⅱ. 有機的 想像力
• Ⅲ. 象徵的 想像力
• Ⅳ. 結 論
• Ⅴ. Synopsis
• Ⅵ. Bibliography