S.T. COLERIDGE - Primary and secondary imagination

For S.T. Coleridge imagination is devided into two: the primary imagination is a faculty possessed by everyone through we can perceive the world around us and through which we can grab the complexity of the infinite and make it finite giving it an order. The secondary imagination is a step forward: it is the faculty of dissipating, dissolving the order produced in the primary imagination and re-create something totally new, a radically different reality, thanks to fancy. This second capacity is not common to everyone, it is possessed only by poets, and it is similar to primary imagination in the kind of the process but it differs in degree: in fact secondary imagination is deeper. Finally, fancy is the way trough which he poet expresses himself, the way through which he presents the products of secondary imagination, for example rhymes, rhythm, figures of speech, metaphors and so on.