Goethe and Coleridge on Imagination

“What Goethe meant by this ‘inner necessity and truth’ is what his younger contemporary, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, spoke of as ‘facts of mind.’ For both Goethe and Coleridge, the imagination was not merely a loosening of reason and a setting free of uncontrolled fantasy—as the Enlightenment regarded it—but a cognitive power that obeyed its own rules and disciplines.” — Gary Lachman, in Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

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