Page 20 - GALIET INSIGHT IN THE LIGHTNING: Coleridge IV

to,” shall no longer a repose be, no longer that “consummation devoutly to be wished.”13 Only imagination saves and resurrects.
Creativity, Wind & Storm. For Wordsworth, imagination opposes “endless imitation” (IO, VII, 108); it is not an image- maker of forms, figures, images that aspires to imitate nature, and hence, be twice removed from the essence of its true form, as Plato posits. Neither it is the acting of a part, the wearing of a theatrical mask that separates us from our own self; but instead, it is boundless, unending creation that transcends our boundaries of time and space. It is pure originality, a spark, that once it elucidates, it cannot dwell in meaningless, temporal rites. It cannot breathe in “dialogues of business, love or strife” (IO, VII, 99), it can only be its very essence: never fully a figure or trope of bivalent logics of A is A or not A, reducing existence to a formulae that dare not ascend to e.e. cummins’ 2+2=5 though Wordsworth may claim imagination to be “Reason in her most exalted mood” (TA, 41).
The imagination, in both poets, journeys through a-priori, hyper-urano and noumenal dimensions of being: beyond empiricism, where being unfolds in a relational, magical, creative way, winds that fuse imagination and reason. For Coleridge, this creativity takes place unnoticed as it sweeps across the Aeolian strings where the winds and frenzy of creation dwell. These winds possess divine qualities: they are
13 Shakespeare. Hamlet. Ed. Gibbard, G.R. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. (3.I. 63-65) 240
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