AESTHETICS There are what Kant calls the formative arts, namely painting and the plastic arts of sculpture and architecture There is a third class of art which creates a play of sensations: the most important of these is music ‘Of all the arts’, says Kant, ‘poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank’ (M 170) It is interesting to compare Kant’s ideas on aesthetics with those expressed a few years later by the English Romantic poets In treating of works of art Kant as it were starts from the consumer and works back to the producer; he begins by analysing the nature of the critic’s judgement and ends by deducing the qualities that are necessary for genius (namely, imagination, understanding, spirit, and taste) The Romantics, on the other hand, start with the producer: for them, art is above all the expression of the artist’s own emotions Wordsworth, in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, tells us that what distinguishes the poet from other men is that he has a greater promptness of thought and feeling without immediate external excitement, and a greater power of expressing such thoughts and feelings: Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced and does itself actually exist in the mind In giving expression to this emotion in verse, the poet’s fundamental obligation is to give immediate pleasure to the reader Coleridge agreed with this ‘A poem’, he wrote, ‘is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth.’ But in describing the nature of poetic genius Coleridge improved on both Kant and Wordsworth, by identifying a special necessary gift Whereas Kant and earlier authors had regarded the imagination as a faculty common to all human beings—the capacity to recall and reshuffle the experiences of everyday life—Coleridge preferred to call this banal, if important, capacity ‘the fancy’ The imagination, truly so called, was the special creative gift of the artist: in its primary form it was nothing less than ‘the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a representation in the finite mind of the eternal act 254