What is the basic difference between the philosophies of Wordsworth and Coleridge?The above question is in reference to a comparative crical study...

Breaking with the earlier eighteenth century, which maintained that poetry should be rational and objective, Wordsworth's "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads" focused on the subjectivity of the individual. He writes, "Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart...speak a plainer and more emphatic language."  He believed that feelings "coexist in a state of greater simplicity" than "rational thought. Thus, to Wordsworth it is a poet's duty to capture and express experience with authentic and internal force, "a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings with emotions recollected in tranquility."The poet should descend from his or her "supposed height" and "express himself as other men express themselves". This statement lies at the very essence of Wordsworth's theory of poetry.Notice, that in the preface to "Lyrical Ballads," there is not much about imagination.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge brought back the issue of imagination and fancy in his discussion of poetry in "Biographia Literaria." While to Wordsworth, imagination was something taken for granted, especially in poets, Coleridge, while agreeing with Wordswoth's premise, nevertheless, clarifies for himself what imagination was; what was the difference between imagination and fancy that the eighteenth century critics tended to merge together?

The Biographia Literaria was one of Coleridge's main critical studies. In this work, he discussed the elements of writing and what writing should be to be considered genius. The "Biographia" blends criticism of poetry with literary theory, philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and is full of discussions on politics, religion, social values and human identity.

Central to the Biographia Literaria," is his discussion of imagination and fancy.

Like Wordsworth, Coleridge, too, rejected that the mind was a tabula rasa on which external experiences and sense impressions were imprinted, stored, and recalled. Rather, he believed that imagination is innate. Coleridge divides the mind into imagination and fancy.

To Coleridge imagination was primary and secondary. Primary imagination, was the creative force behind perception itself; meaning, that there is nothing called objective perception. Perception, according to Coleridge, is essentially subjective. While the human being is finite, Coleridge maintained that the poet's creation of "I AM" is his or her expression of the infinite. What this means is, according to Coleridge, if we could remind ourselves of the "I AM," we can, through our writings, move gradually from the finite to the infinite.

FANCY, on the contrary, is much more limited. It comes from memory, according to Coleridge. When we free our memory from being to bound up with time and space, we are in the realm of fancy. Its provenance is memory and its interaction is through the association of ideas. Whereas imagination is active and dynamic, fancy is "passive and mechanical." Imagination, on the other hand, is "vital" and transformative, "a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation."e and inventive genius."

Frederick Engell, one of the two original Marxist's critics, has observed that Coleridge's division of the imagination into the "primary" and "secondary" draws a distinction between creative acts that are unconscious and those that are intentional and deliberate. Imagination works at the unconscious level, while fancy is willful and deliberate.