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Coleridge’s proposals about Wordsworth’s imaginative power in Biographia went against the grain ofWordsworth’s own beliefs at the time. And in the Prefaces to Lyrical Ballads; his ‘Address toColeridge’; the Preface to the Poems of 1815; and the Essay Supplementary, Wordsworth continued toarticulate his opposition to Coleridge’s more modern – possibly Kantian – understanding ofImagination. During this period he maintained a commitment to the ancient ‘manners’ and ‘morals’that defined his own character, and a poetic art that understood ‘imagination’ as a practical activity ofthe mind in its relationship with the ‘objects of nature’ and the world of human experience.Wordsworth conceived of imagination as an activity of the mind that interacted ‘democratically’ withthe world of the senses, rather than acting in the sovereign capacity envisaged by Kant in his criticalphilosophy.Earlier, in The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth, Gill had made a point of stressing theimportance of Imagination to Wordsworth’s poetry by placing a five-page section of quotations:‘Wordsworth on Poetry and Imagination’ among the prefatory materials preceding his ‘Introduction’.The section appears as something of a paratext, existing outside the main body of the work, andsignalling the importance of a topic that has been largely avoided by recent critical studies.‘Imagination’ has become something of an embarrassment in a more historically orientated, andmethodologically sophisticated age that has learnt to distance itself from ‘High’ Romantic concernsabout metaphysics, and immaterial matters of ‘consciousness’. As Richard Cronin has observed, ‘themajor achievement of Romantic studies in the last twenty years is to have transferred to ‘history’ theglamour that was once routinely attached to the word ‘imagination’. 21 But despite the major shifts inthe discipline of literary studies over the past quarter century, the ‘turn to history’ has yet to provide analternative appreciation of ‘imagination’ to the now problematic definition provided by Coleridge, onWordsworth’s behalf, in Biographia Literaria.Although ‘Imagination’ has been dismissed as a form of ‘false consciousness’ – by bothMarxian and Freudian readings of literature – the problems it presents, in its Coleridgean guise, havenot actually been addressed. It continues to haunt Romantic Studies as a ghostly presence, a nowdefunct Romantic spirit that has not properly been laid to rest. And although it has been banished tothe margins (perhaps an appropriate habitation for Coleridgean commentary) it continues,intermittently, to drift across the centre of the page, ‘like an unfathered vapour’, that might engulfsome lonely reader’s mind as he or she ponders the problem ‘imagination’ poses to contemporaryreaders. The ‘Romantic Imagination’ lives on as an apparently necessary and potent ideal for readersof The Prelude, who seem to be obliged to pursue a Romantic interpretation of the poem. Because ofthis, I argue that The Prelude remains something of a sacred cow, a fetish even, of the ‘spilt religion’of Romanticism – not something that Wordsworth ever intended. Central to the beliefs of that‘religion’ is a dogma, based on interpretations of Coleridge’s definitions of the primary and secondary21 The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In Search of the Pure Commonwealth, p. 2.106