Thinking Activity Coleridge's

Introduction:-
           The Biographia Literaria is a critical work by Samuel Taylor Coleridge which is contained in 24 chapter.In this critical disquisition,Coleridge concerns himself not only with the practice of criticism but also with its theory.In the chapter of XIV of Biographia Literaria,Coleridge's view on nature and function of poetry is discussed in Philosophical term. The difference between prose and poem is discussed by Coleridge and the difference between poetry and poem is discussed by philosopher.

     Biographia Literaria, or in full Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, is an autobiography in discourse by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which he published in 1817, in two volume of twenty-three chapter.

     

The work is long and seemingly loosely structured, and although there are autobiographical elements, it is not a straightforward or linear autobiography. Instead, it is meditative.

intended Biographia Literaria to be a short preface to a collection of his poems, Sibylline Leaves (1817). However, it quickly expanded into a two-volume autobiography, mixing memoir, philosophy, religion and literary theory, and was heavily influenced by German criticism, the evaluation and interpretation of literature. Coleridge himself described Biographia Literaria as an ‘immethodical miscellany’ of ‘life and opinions’. In 1906, the poet Arthur Symons called the work ‘the greatest book of criticism in English, and one of the most annoying books in any language'.

In one of the most famous passages in Biographia Literaria, Coleridge offers a theory of creativity (pp. 95-96). He divides imagination into primary and secondary. Primary imagination is common to all humans: it enables us to perceive and make sense of the world. It is a creative function and thereby repeats the divine act of creation. The secondary imagination enables individuals to transcend the primary imagination – not merely to perceive connections but to make them. It is the creative impulse that enables poetry and other art.

Biographia Literaria contains the first instance of the phrase ‘suspension of disbelief’. Writing about his contributions to the Lyrical Ballads, which includes The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge says that although his characters were ‘supernatural, or at least romantic’, he tried to give them a ‘human interest and a semblance of disbelief’ that would prompt readers to the ‘willing suspension of disbelief … which constitutes poetic faith’.