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Geoffrey Hartman made a point of discussing the ‘dynamics of contrast and blending’ in hisfamous reading of Wordsworth. Taking his cue from the passage in the prospectus to ‘The Recluse’’in which Wordsworth described the blended might of mind and external world, he comments on ‘the“blendings” for which the later Wordsworth is famous’ (Wordsworth’s Poetry 104). His study traces ashift from an earlier phase in which ‘contrasts’ predominate, to a later one in which ‘blending’ occurs.His concern with ‘contrasts and blendings’ is linked to his argument that ‘by 1798 [Wordsworth] hadcome to firm self-consciousness and separated his imagination from nature’ (175). His observationsabout ‘blending’ serve to reinforce the argument of his thesis about ‘Wordsworth’s ‘consciousness’and ‘anti-self consciousness’’. I suggest that Wordsworth’s appreciation of ‘blendings’ had its sourcein his knowledge of early Stoic philosophy, and his own particular concern to stress a particulardistinction between ‘blending’ and ‘synthesis’ (or ‘fusion’) that he used to distinguish between his andColeridge’s radically different theories of knowledge.I have suggested that the thirteen Book text of the original 1805 Prelude was produced as aresult of Wordsworth deciding to further address the argument between him and Coleridge overImagination and Fancy that had originated in the 1802 ‘radical Difference’. It would seem that thetwo men revisited the topic during Coleridge’s stay with Wordsworth before he left for Malta, aconjecture based on the fact that Coleridge raises it again in his letter to Sharp in January 1804. In hislater, definitive, commentary on the matter in Biographia Literaria (in which he would contradictWordsworth’s ‘peculiar opinions’ and the ‘perversity of his judgement’), Fancy, differing in kind, wasrelegated to an inferior, uncreative, mundane role, while Imagination, ‘the vision and faculty divine’,was the power that made the poet.The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with thesubordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. Hediffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends and as it were fuses, each unto each, by thatsynthetic and magical power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name ofImagination. (BL XIV 173-4)Coleridge’s ‘Imagination’– the term he had ‘exclusively appropriated’ to describe some kindof theurgic power – has mystified readers for nearly a couple of centuries. This famous passageconcludes a section in which Coleridge had echoed the question ‘What is a Poet?’ that Wordsworthhad asked in his 1802 additions to the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge writes that ‘the question‘What is poetry? is so nearly the same question with, what is a poet ? that the answer to the one isinvolved in the solution of the other’ (BL 173). In stressing that the poet’s creative activity does notsimply ‘blend’ but, ‘as it were fuses each into each by a synthetic and magical power’ (my emphasis),Coleridge re-iterates the distinctions he had made in his earlier letters to Sotheby in 1802, and toSharp in January 1804. 25 In placing a stress on ‘fusion’ he is again making a particular distinctionbetween a Kantian concept – clearly adverted to here in describing an act of synthesis – and one heattributes to Wordsworth, in which the poet’s heart and intellect are ‘merely held in solution & loose25 CL II 862-867; 1031-1035.86