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another letter to Sotheby he follows a train of thought that begins with a criticism of the poet WilliamBowles and ends up defining the difference between ‘Imagination’ and ‘Fancy’ that describessomething of the ‘radical Difference’ between his, and Wordsworth’s theoretical opinions. Hiscriticism of Bowles begins with his disapproval of Bowles’ ‘perpetual trick of moralizing everything’:– which is very well, occasionally – but never to see or describe any interesting appearance innature, without connecting it by dim analogies with the moral world, proves faintness ofImpression. Nature has her proper interest; & he will know what it is, who believes & feels,that every Thing has a Life of its own, & that we are all one Life. A Poet’s Heart & Intellectshould be combined, intimately combined & unified, with the great appearances in Nature – &not merely held in solution & loose mixture with them, in the shape of formal Similes – thereare moods of the mind in which they are natural – pleasing moods of the mind, & such as apoet will often have, & sometimes express; but they are not the highest, and most appropriatemoods. They are ‘Sermoni proprioira’ which I once translated as –‘Properer for a Sermon’(CL II 864) 46Bowles has the sensibility of a poet but not the Passion, of a great poet (like Milton), andColeridge (identifying himself with Milton), relates how he had ‘involuntarily poured forth a Hymn inthe manner of the Psalms’ while on the top of Scafell, and that the experience had helped him todistinguish the efforts of the inspired Hebrew poet – whose mind becomes one with God – from thoseof the Greek poets. 47 The latter only conceive of their gods inhabiting natural objects in a manner thatreflects the action of a simile, while the Hebrew poet’s mind actually becomes one with the Deity, andspeaks the voice of the God. Coleridge’s poetic reflections then turn to theological distinctions as hedefines a difference in kind between Greek and Hebrew religious belief and this is, in turn, translatedinto an analogous distinction between Imagination and Fancy:It must occur to every reader that the Greeks in their religious poems address always theNumina Loci, the Genii, the Dryads, the Naiads, &c &c – All natural objects were dead –mere hollow statues – but there was a Godkin or Godessling included in each – In the HebrewPoetry you find nothing of this poor Stuff – as poor in genuine Imagination as mean inIntellect – At best it is but Fancy or the aggregating Faculty of the mind – not Imagination, orthe modifying and co-adunating Faculty’. (CL II 865-6)Coleridge relates to Sotheby how his study of ‘Hebrew & Christian Theology & the Theology ofPlato’ has influenced his thinking in arriving at this understanding. He tells how, over the last winterhe had read the Parmenides and the Timaeus with great care and, a little later, he describes Plato as‘Milton’s darling’ as he discusses Milton’s ‘Platonising spirit’.Although, by September 1802, Coleridge would have had a good knowledge of Kant’sphilosophy, he makes no mention here of Kant’s understanding of Imagination as Einbildungskraft,and remains committed to pursuing a Platonic understanding of the term. He had been reading Kant’sworks since he returned from Germany and Kant’s ‘critical’ approach to philosophy had displaced that46 Coleridge employed this play on words in the publication of ‘Reflections on Entering into Active Life’, APoem, which affects Not To Be POETRY, in the Monthly Magazine October 1796.47 The ‘effusion’ that he claimed to have ‘spontaneously’ produced at this time in his complete absorption in thedivinity was ‘Hymn Before Sun-Rise in the Vale of Chamouni’. The poem was later recognized to have beennothing of the sort, and a prime example of the kind of plagiarism that Norman Fruman made the focus of hisargument in Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel.67