The letter in chapter 13 is there to explain why Coleridge's description of the primary and secondary imagination in this chapter is so fragmentary and incomplete, or, as the letter puts it:
You have been obliged to omit so many links, from the necessity of compression, that what remains, looks (if I may recur to my former illustration) like the fragments of the winding steps of an old ruined tower.
The letter urges Coleridge not to include his full explanation in this volume. First, because it would run to about 100 pages, which would greatly increase the cost of the book to the reader. Secondly, because Coleridge's theory, the letter says, is so difficult to follow that it would lose most readers. Lastly, because it is "so abstruse a subject so abstrusely treated" that an ordinary reader—like the letter writer—would likely feel imposed-upon or annoyed.
Therefore, in this chapter, Coleridge offers only a cursory explanation of the two types of imagination. In short, he says, the primary imagination is the ordinary, everyday imagination of the average person that is "the living power and prime agent of all human perception." In other words, it simply repeats what it sees in nature. For example, if the primary imagination perceives a field of golden grain, this field of golden grain is all that it sees.
The secondary imagination, on the other hand, is what Coleridge considers to be rarer and more powerful: the imagination of the artistic genius (such as the imagination of men like Coleridge). This imagination "dissolves, diffuses, [and] dissipates [what it observes], in order to recreate." Thus, it is more creative than the primary imagination.
The best way to understand these two kinds of imaginations is to read Coleridge's Kubla Khan. The placid first stanza is the work of the primary imagination, while the second two stanzas—which are more powerful, dreamlike, and "demonic"—represent the secondary imagination.
The letter in Chapter 13 of the Biographia Literaria is significant, because it is here that Coleridge sets out his famous distinction between primary and secondary imagination. In very simple terms, the primary imagination makes sense of the world around us. If we look at the world, we can see some evidence of order and regularity. It is only because of the primary imagination that this is possible. Our senses provide us with fragments of the world, bits and pieces, but it takes the primary imagination to put them together to make a coherent whole. The primary imagination also creates symbols, which are particularly important in expressing the truths of religion, for example. This isn't something we consciously do; it's entirely spontaneous, a reflex or instinct of our minds.
The secondary imagination goes beyond the primary imagination, beyond mere perception. It gives us a much deeper understanding of reality, one that allows the artist to create new worlds. As we see here, the primary imagination is entirely unconscious; the secondary imagination, on the other hand, is a product of the conscious will; it's something deliberate, not spontaneous. It is the poetic imagination, and as such, is limited to only a relatively small number of people (Coleridge being one of them).
The secondary imagination is essential to the creation of art in that it joins the world of nature to the self-conscious mind. Those people—the vast majority of humankind—who remain at the level of the primary imagination, are incapable of genuinely creative acts. They can make sense of the world around them, but they can't do anything more than that.
By a conscious effort of will, the secondary imagination takes what is given to it by the subconscious and by sense perception and creates completely new imaginative worlds, the kind we see in poems or paintings, for example. In this way it establishes a bridge between the worlds of spirit and matter; it attempts to unify all the various elements of what makes us human—perception, intellect, feelings, passions and memories. This is what a work of art should do; it should reflect the whole of the artist's self.
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