Coleridge very carefully kept science, poetry, and religion distinct by attributing each, primarily, to its appropriate faculty of understanding, imagination, and reason. It was only in the early Victorian period, when all discourse was explicitly or tacitly thrown into the two exhaustive modes of imaginative and rational, expressive and assertive, that religion fell together with poetry in opposition to science, and that religion, as a consequence, was converted into poetry, and poetry into a kind of religion.
Sartre and Stevens were both heirs to this early Victorian shift. Sartre converted its epistemological dualism into the phenomenological ontology of being and nothingness; Stevens into the metaphysical dualism of reality and the imagination.
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