ALife
BSociety
CPhilosophy
DPolitics
Answer:
A. Life
Read Explanation:
Coleridge distinguishes a poem from poetry. For him, poetry is an activity of the poet’s mind and a poem is merely one of the forms of its expression in words. Poetic activity is grounded on imagination.
Poetry, in the larger sense brings the whole soul of man into activity with each faculty playing its proper part according to its relative worth and dignity.
This activity takes place whenever the Secondary Imagination comes into operation.
Whenever the synthesising and the integrating powers of the Secondary Imagination are at work, all aspects of a subject are brought into a complex unity, and poetry, in this larger sense, materialises.
The employment of Secondary Imagination is important for poetic creativity.
Coleridge discusses the poet’s activity because he considers the poet to belong to the larger company of those who distinguish themselves by the activity of their imagination.
A poem is the work of a poet who employs Secondary Imagination to achieve the harmony of meaning and the reconciliation of opposites, which Coleridge stresses.
A poem is also considered to be a specific work of art produced by a special handling of language.
The harmony and reconciliation resulting from the special kind of creative awareness produced by the use of imagination cannot operate over an extended composition.
The meeting of blending and balancing, reconciliation of difference and sameness, the general and the concrete, the idea and the image, the individual and the representative, the sense of novelty and freshness of the old and the familiar objects and so on cannot take place for an indefinite period.
A long poem therefore cannot be considered to be poetry. Coleridge says that there is no such thing as a long poem.
Rhyme and meter are appropriate to a poem considered in the larger sense of poetry because they are means of achieving harmony and reconciling of opposites.