Imagination and Intentionality

Abstract

This chapter brings together Coleridge’s responses to associationism and German idealism into an account of Biographia’s theory of imagination. The first half focuses on the account of the primary and secondary imagination, and the technical preamble that leads up to it. This section provides a new perspective on the Coleridgean imagination, offering a detailed analysis of it as a faculty responsible for the formation and adaption of subjective experience and a precursor to Husserlian intentionality. This is followed by an outline of Coleridge’s own critical position: a form of phenomenology that seeks to identify acts of the poetic imagination with particular types of perspective formation. This presents the possibility for a system of criticism that grounds literary achievement in the ability to encapsulate these structures of intentionality. The chapter concludes with an examination Coleridge’s treatment of Wordsworth’s poetic principles, specifically the latter’s notions of the ‘real language of men’ and the poetic valorisation of childhood.