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mixture’ with ‘the great appearances of nature’. That distinction, made in his letter to Sharp,reinforces the similar one made in his earlier letter to Sotheby.Coleridge’s answer to the question, ‘What is poetry / what is a poet?’, one that describes thepoet ‘in ideal perfection’, is then qualified by a long list of activities in which antithetical qualities are,typically, balanced or reconciled. The passage is then rounded off by a sententious conclusion:Finally, good sense is the body of poetic genius, fancy its drapery, motion its life, andimagination the soul that is everywhere; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.I suggest that there is little for the reader to ‘grasp’ in Coleridge’s abstract definition of ‘the poet’ as amaster of imaginative synthesis. But it should be clear that the ‘giant hand’ of Kant is directing hispen here, as he strongly alludes to Imagination as Kant’s Einbildungskraft – the power or faculty that‘forms all into one’. By attending closely to Coleridge’s language it is possible to discern somethingmore of the substance of the debate that had been going on with Wordsworth over imagination in1802, and which was seemingly revisited in 1804. I return now, to the letters to Sotheby and Sharp. Inthe first letter, Coleridge had defined his one-life philosophy as a total union of the ‘Poet’s heart andintellect’ with the great appearances in Nature, and he had contrasted this idealised state of true poeticrapture with the ‘fancies’ of a poet’s mind in his less enthused compositions.A Poet’s Heart & Intellect should be combined, intimately combined & unified, with the greatappearances in Nature - & not merely held in solution & loose mixture with them, in the shapeof formal Similes – there are moods of the mind in which they are natural – pleasing moods ofthe mind, & such as a poet will often have, & sometimes express; but they are not the highest,and most appropriate moods. They are ‘Sermoni proprioira’ which I once translated as –‘Properer for a Sermon’ (CL II 864)The true poet of ‘The Imagination’ does not compose poetry simply by drawing on topics andrepeating commonplaces in arguments that are dressed up in poetic language – as Coleridge admits tohaving done in ‘On Leaving a Place of Residence’. 26 He must also be inspired, and lose himself in‘the great appearances of nature’ if he is to attain to the highest, most imaginative forms of true poeticexpression. His subjective identity must be fused with the objects of nature. Fanciful rhetoric might beused to write an effective sermon in which the speaker ‘Leads up and down his captivated flock’ withhis ‘crook of eloquence’, 27 as Coleridge was doing in 1797 when writing sermons that he would haveplanned and set out according to ‘laws’ of composition set down in handbooks. But in his delivery, hewould also have relied on an audience sympathetic to the religious themes he was expounding on, andwould have drawn upon their expectation that he was speaking on behalf of God, in an impassionedand inspired manner – as though enthused. And in the process of delivering such a sermon, with aprepared text, in such a setting and with an appreciative and ‘primed’ audience, he could easily workhimself into a state of mind in which he actually felt his delivery was enthused.26 Later published as, ‘Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement’.27 (Wordsworth’s description of the character of an eloquent preacher in London. Prelude VII 563-5).87