What is fancy and imagination in literary criticism?

The realm of fantasy or fairy tales is referred to as "Fancy" in our vocabulary. It refers to the realm of our daydreams or dreams. It is only the workforce that empowered Keats (in his 'Tribute to Fancy') to imagine the episode of Hebe's kirtle slipping its brilliant catch and tumbling to her feet to uncover her white midsection and side.

Fancy is not as wild as imagination; It is made of heavier materials; Like Wordsworth's skylark, whose heart is in the nest below despite scaling the empyrean heights, it is rooted in reality even as it invents. By eliminating their flaws and inconsistencies, it is a skill that presents the things of reality in terms of their ideal hues and combinations. The Solitary Reaper's song is paralleled, illustrated, and illuminated by the cuckoo's song from the Hebrides and the nightingale's song from an Arabian haunt. In addition, power produces intuition, similar to Wordsworth's faith described in "Written in Early Spring": that each flower takes pleasure in the air they breathe. As a result, its creation and weight of truth simultaneously satisfy a rational mind and contributes to the enhancement of this beloved planet. Fancy is nothing more than fantasy, and while the delicateness or unusualness of its creation may please us, it will never fully satisfy us because its fruits are gathered at random and the impulse that causes them is irrational. In the sense of fantasy or invention, the terms were almost used interchangeably in the 17th century. However, a distinction developed over time, and pagination eventually rose to prominence. However, in his British Synonyms Discriminated (1813), William Taylor gave the higher power of inventing or freely creating the name of "Fancy," while he reserved the name "Imagination" for the lower, more or less reproductive faculty that derives its force from memory (just the kind of faculty that Keats describes in "Fancy" as retrieving the beauties that the earth has lost).

To correct Taylor, Wordsworth wrote that the imagination was the higher faculty in his Preface to the 1815 Poems. He thought that the distinction had been made very lightly. According to him, both faculties were creative; Only Imagination was more serious and superior than Fancy, which was more frivolous and inferior.

Essentially, Coleridge disagreed with Wordsworth in this regard. He claims that the terms do not refer to the same thing; neither do they represent a faculty with a higher or lower reach. He stated that the two faculties are distinct.

While imagination is the co-daunting (unifying) power, fancy is the faculty that gathers and connects people. According to Taylor above, fancy is a mode of memory whose outputs are mechanical, subjective (i.e., "fanciful" to elicit a question), and arbitrary (there is no unifying principle). The imagination is a vital force that produces beautiful and living images.

Coleridge cited Milton and Cowley as examples of the "fanciful" and imaginative types. Therefore, Coleridge's definition of "Fancy" is very similar to what we mean when we talk about "Wit" or "Metaphysical Wit." It is the ability to connect disparate images and concepts by using one or more similarities. Nevertheless, these are mechanically connected; They are not generally regarded as a single entity. Coleridge does not provide an illustration of the works of Fancy in the Biographia Literaria itself, but he does so in his lecture on Shakespeare: a poet, in general, He is referring to the quatrain in Venus and Adonis in which Venus holds Adonis by the hand and describes the young man in the following ways:

A snow-bound prison for a lily or ivory encased in alabaster;

A foe who is so white is a friend who is so white:

Therefore, rather than knitting or melding images into an organic unity, Fancy simply selects images from the infinite storehouse of the mind and brings them together through association. Like a butterfly, it moves from one image to another.

(Ruskin stated that Fancy sees only the surface and presents a clear, brilliant, and detailed picture; whereas imagination perceives and experiences things at their core and inner nature. He used Wordsworth's poem "To a Daisy" as an example of the works of Fancy. In it, the poet calls the flower soft names "in many a mused rhyme"— a nun queen, a cyclops, a shield, a star—which are just a string of images that don't have a common thread. According to him, the imagination, on the other hand, reveals the fundamental kinship between subject and object).

The Imagination was now viewed by Coleridge from two perspectives: Secondary and primary The faculty that enables all men to "construct" (make sense of, integrate) experience is known as the Primary Imagination. Participates in the divine act of creation insofar as it presents the external world to the mind as a reflection of itself (the mind "receives but what it gives"). As a result, the Primary Imagination acts as a bridge between perception and comprehension (the inner world of the mind and the outer world of the senses interact and blend into a single vision). It connects man and nature, object and subject. The poet and artist's special gift is the secondary imagination, also known as the esemplastic imagination. It is the higher plastic (shaping) power that dissolves, dissipates, and re-creates the oppositions between man and nature, subject and object, matter and mind, thought and mind, and the conscious and unconscious. It also sees the entire world as a family. It also makes lasting, beautiful shapes that show how spirit and matter, man's inner world and nature's outer world, are in harmony.