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According to Coleridge, true poetry is produced in similar states of inspiration which, to betrue to Nature – as Coleridge understands ‘Nature’ – must also be underwritten by the true (Christian)God. In the letter to Sotheby the Psalms are cited as evidence of truly inspired poetry 28 and arecontrasted with the religious poetry of the Greeks, described as:poor Stuff – as poor in genuine Imagination as mean in Intellect – At best it is but Fancy orthe aggregating Faculty of the mind – not Imagination, or the modifying and co-adunatingFaculty’. (CL II 865-6)Coleridge insists that the act of poetic inspiration that can be truly described as an act of Imagination(in the highest sense of the word) is one of total fusion. The poet’s ‘Heart and Intellect’ are not merelyheld ‘in solution & loose mixture’ with Nature’s great appearances by a merely fanciful ‘aggregatingFaculty of the mind’; they are modified in the synthesis enacted by the ‘co-adunating Faculty’ ofImagination. In 1804, Coleridge believed that one day Wordsworth would, ‘hereafter be admitted asthe first & greatest philosophical Poet, because he would be:the only man who has effected a compleat and constant synthesis of Thought and Feeling andcombined them with Poetic Forms, with the music of pleasurable passion and withImagination or the modifying Power in the highest sense of the word in which I have venturedto oppose it to Fancy, or the aggregating power – in that sense in which it is a dim Analogueof Creation, not all that we can believe but all that we can conceive of creation. 29It would seem, from the terminology being repeatedly used, that Coleridge’s demands for total‘fusion’ rather than ‘loose mixture’, is a direct response to a difference of opinion with Wordsworth,who is maintaining a Stoic position in which ‘Mind’ and ‘Nature’ are seen as ‘blending’, without aformal ‘synthesis’ occurring. For Wordsworth, there is no understanding of a ‘fusion’ enacted by the‘synthetic and magical power’ of the ‘Imagination’. I suggest, as part of my argument here, thatWordsworth must have actually discussed the Stoic concept of ‘mixtures’ that distinguished between‘juxtaposition’, ‘fusion’, or a ‘total blending’ with Coleridge; and that he had argued for a union ofdivine and human identities that was, specifically, one of ‘total blending’, in which the two unite, butdo not lose their separate identity. Coleridge’s concern to see a union that is a total ‘fusion’, defined interms of a ‘compleat and constant synthesis’, sets out his radically different appreciation of thisunification. His ‘Imagination’ is a transcendental faculty of the mind, having ‘divine’ powers that aresuperior to, and rule over, human experience. Coleridge’s terminology, in his comments on thedifferences between Imagination and Fancy, is dictated by his concern to rebut Wordsworth’s Stoicposition.Wordsworth had argued for a difference of degree, rather than one of kind in his discussion ofthe matter, and by attending to Wordsworth’s actual work it is possible to see his commitment to theconcept of a ‘blending’ of the divine and the human, and not a ‘fusion’ in which the human ‘Fancy’ is28 Coleridge would have had Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews in mind.29 Coleridge repeated this distinction between the ‘shaping and modifying power’ of imagination, and the‘aggregative and associative power’ of fancy in Omniania in 1812, p. 182.88