Poetic Genius and Imagination

The role of poetic genius and imagination in creating good poetry:

According to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (STC)the poetic genius or the ability to create poetry, sustains and modifies the images, thoughts and emotions of the poet's own mind.

The ideal poet, brings "the whole soul of man into activity."

According to STC an important aspect of poetic genius is the imagination. According to STC the imagination is a synthetic and magical power. It "diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends and fuses" disparate aspects in the poets mind.

This power first put "in action by the will and understanding and retained under their irremissive though gentle and unnoticed control it reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities", according to STC.

The discordant qualities that imagination blends are as follows. Sameness with difference

General with the concrete.

Idea with the image.

The individual with the representative.

The sense of novelty and freshness

With old and familiar objects

A more than usual state of emotion.

With more than usual order

Judgement ever awake

And steady self possession.

With enthusiasm and feeling profound and vehement.

And while it blends and harmonizes the natural and artificial.

At the same time subordinates art to nature.

The manner to the matter

Our admiration of the poet to the sympathy with poetry.

Finally, "Good sense is the body of poetic genius.

Fancy is it's drapery

Motion it's life.

Imagination the soul that is everywhere and in each.

And forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole."

All this info is from the Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge