Imagination In Robert Browning's 'My Last Duchess'

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I. In Biographia Literaria, Chapter 13 Coleridge writes that ‘’fancy has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word choice. But equally with the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.’’

Coleridge had divided imagination into two parts, primary and secondary. Here he associates primary imagination with creation and says a poet has no control over it. He mentions secondary imagination as an echo of the primary but with limited capacity and without the power to create. According to him, fancy is even lower than the secondary imagination. For Coleridge, fancy was suitable for the tasks that were ‘mechanical’ and ‘passive’, in a way collection of facts and then documenting whatever one sees. He adds ‘fancy is the source of our baser desires. It is not a creative faculty but a repository of lust’. For him, where imagination is the soul of poetry, fancy is feature of poetic genius. He …show more content…

Throughout the reading of the poem there is a tension between sympathy and judgement about the speaker, in this the duke. As the poem progresses we are introduced to the villainy of the duke, thus causing a split between moral judgement and what we are actually feeling for him. But despite of his wickedness, the duke comes out to be attractive to the readers. His intelligence, his self-conviction of superiority, his manners and his taste for art, these are the qualities that make the reader suspend the judgement about the duke for a while. As we see the duke power and freedom, in his hard core of character loyal to himself, we choose to suspend the moral

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