Imagination and fancy

Tell me where is fancy bred :

We have repeatedly referred in this series to the imagination as the well-spring of genuine creative writing. It is therefore time for us properly to acknowledge our debt to Coleridge who first elucidated the nature of the imagination and its vital role in the creative process. Here is the famous passage from his 'Biographia Literaria':

“This Power (to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of Imagination)..reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities; of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the 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 a more than usual order..”

Literary criticism

In the chapter on Modern Sri Lankan English Poetry in his 'Studies in World Literature', MI Kuruvilla states: “...I consider the above statement of Coleridge the foundation, the corner stone of modern literary criticism...”

Coleridge coined the word 'esemplastic' to explain the function of the imagination. This is actually a transliteration of three Greek words which convey the idea of moulding together into a unified whole. Although the word has never entered the general vocabulary it does capture the creative nature of the imagination in that it transforms a diversity of elements into a wholly new unity. That is why Coleridge also calls it “that synthetic (not in our modern sense of artificial but of synthesizing) and magical power.”.

T S Coleridge

This means that for the purpose of imaginative expression the artist has to have the ability to draw upon both the totality of his experience and the totality of his being. As Coleridge says, “The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity”. And as Eliot, cited in this connection by Kuruvilla, elaborates, “When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its task, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.”

We have earlier noted that the first hint of the imagination having this magical power was actually given by Shakespeare. In 'A Midsummer Night's Dream Theseus says: “The poet's eye...doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.”

Ideal image

Consider Shakespeare's amazing prescience in envisioning the poet's grasp of the totality of experience (heaven to earth to heaven); and his ability to combine 'idea with image, general with concrete' (airy nothing and things unknown with local habitation and name), as explained over two hundred years later by Coleridge.

Coleridge went on to differentiate the Fancy from the Imagination. Of the former he said: “Fancy, on the contrary, has no counters to play with, but fixities and definitives. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory...blended with and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE...the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.”

It will be apparent from the above that the fancy is considered a lesser faculty than the imagination. It is 'associational' but not 'synthetic' in the Coleridgian sense, it combines but it does not transform, its procedure is mechanical rather than organic. In short its is an innovative or inventive rather than a genuinely creative facility. You could further claim that the imagination involves the heart of man, his thoughts, feelings and emotions all taken together, whereas the fancy involves the head, the thinking faculty alone. And here too, amazingly, we find that Shakespeare seems to have had an inkling of this cerebral role of the fancy. This time it is in the song prompting Bassanio to make the right choice of caskets in 'The Merchant of Venice':

“Tell me where is fancy bred, Or in the heart or in the head? How, begot, how nourished? Reply, reply, It is engender'd in the eyes, With gazing fed; and fancy dies In the cradle where it lies...” Though Shakespeare does not directly answer the question, the reply suggests that fancy, involving the sense of sight alone, is a limited facility. Dying in its cradle, it fails to engage us for long or transport us to a realm of experience beyond the basic 'associations' of which it is composed. The logical conclusion is that it is a matter of the head rather than the heart.

Love poems

But let us now turn from theory to practice and try to illustrate the workings of the imagination and the fancy. Here are two love poems, the first from 'The Triumph' by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare's great and somewhat younger contemporary. We are only quoting the last of its three verses which is famous in itself and often anthologised on its own:

“Have you seen but a bright lily grow Before rude hands have touch'd it? Have you mark'd but the fall of the snow Before the soil hath smutch'd it? Have you felt the wool of beaver, Or swan's down ever? Or smelt o' the bud o' the brier, Or the nard in the fire? Or have tasted the bag of the bee? O so white, O so soft, O so sweet is she!”

And here is the other, also famous and by one who was no great respecter of Coleridge, namely Byron:

“There be none of Beauty's daughters With a magic like thee; And like music on the waters Is thy sweet voice to me: When, as if its sound were causing The charmed ocean's pausing, The waves lie still and gleaming, And the lull'd winds seem dreaming: And the midnight moon is weaving Her bright chain o'er the deep, Whose breast is gently heaving As an infant asleep: So the spirit bows before thee To listen and adore thee; With a full but soft emotion, Like the swell of summer's ocean.”

Both are striking in the imagery used to describe the magical effect of the beloved's person and the beloved's voice respectively. The question is, which illustrates the imagination and which the fancy, or do both illustrate only one or the other?

Sensational presence

Jonson invokes no less than four of the five senses, sight, touch, smell and taste, in describing the overall sensation of the lady's presence. The comparisons are either original in themselves, viz. beaver, brier and nard, or originally presented, viz. lily and snow before being coming into contact with human hand and the earth. The conventionality of the swan's down illustration is hardly noticed in the sensuous context of its occurrence. Jonson's descriptions seem to anticipate something of what Arnold called the 'natural magic' of Keats' evocations of nature.

Byron, on the other hand, invokes the only sense that Jonson omits, namely hearing. He goes on to make a virtually Homeric simile out of it, the elaboration of which causes us to lose sight of the actual subject until we are brought back to it at the end. Let us look, though, a little closer at the technique of the two poets.

Jonson's similes are arresting. They thrill us with the sense impressions they represent. They almost overpower us with their number and frequency. Yet, when the poet's draws the connection with his beloved, we are conscious not of a climax but even of an anti-climax.

The conclusion seems rather contrived, an act of the will rather than a product of the emotions. And this is because the preceding images are, for all their individual appeal, just an accumulation of sense impressions artfully selected from the poet's memory and assembled for the purpose. They do not transform each other and together transform the lady into something more than the sum of their individual worth. Consequently she seems slightly unworthy of all the comparative attention.

On the other hand the Byronic illustration, though it takes time to absorb, is not just illustrative, it is illuminating. We realise that he is not describing her voice but its effect upon his spirit or inner being. This is likened to an ocean and its winds that have been charmed into stillness by the magic of her voice. Yet though his spirit is at rest it is very much alive as the further image of the gently breathing sleeping infant signifies.

The rapid succession of present participles describing the ocean belies the illusion of stillness and suggests an abundance of inner life. The imagery is so developed as to transport us into another world beyond the lady and the sea and the baby, the hidden but active world of the spirit. Indeed, the poem aptly demonstrates the way in which the Imagination goes to work on felt experience. The other poem, however sensuous and lucid, is an example of the Fancy in operation.