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The imagination is the distinguishing characteristic of man as a progressive being.
Coleridge, like Wordsworth, relinquished poetry as a means of mental exploration — the medium through which a ‘shaping spirit of imagination’ could take over from the self and construct his own mind for him. But while Wordsworth enshrined his past vision and made his earlier self a place of worship by his older self, Coleridge pursued a more rewarding means of assimilating poetic experience. The problem of what ‘imagination’ is — what makes the mind continue to grow — became the cornerstone of Coleridge's poetic philosophy, always proved upon the pulses of his own imagination. Though feeling himself to be abandoned by ‘the poet’ (the poet within himself, split off into Wordsworth), his mind seized another mode of working which seemed ugly and cumbersome by comparison with poetic language yet which essentially remained faithful to the poetic spirit. Coleridge was drawn reluctantly into ‘delving in the metaphysic depths’:
I was once a Volume of Gold Leaf, rising & riding on every breath of Fancy — but I have beaten myself back into weight & density, now I sink in quicksilver, yea, remain squat and square on the earth amid the hurricane, that makes Oaks and Straws join in one dance.2
These ‘quicksilver mines’ remain Coleridge's image for the mental depths in which it is impossible to escape the tumult of the soul.3 He felt himself driven into them against his will: ‘Sickness and some other and worse afflictions first forced me into