5.3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

Next

Previous

 

5.3.1. Imagination

5.3.2. Poetic Diction

5.3.3. Definition of a poem

5.3.4. The Poet

 

 

 

 

5.3.1. Imagination

 

 

 

 

In the first half of his Biographia Literaria,

Coleridge tells of the evolution of his philosophical ideas from 18th-century associationism and empiricism to idealism, an evolution which he claims to have effected spontaneously, previous to his knowledge of German philosophy. The fact remains that whole passages of this book are translations of Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism. Kant's influence (for instance, in Coleridge's discussion of the internal purposiveness of the work of art, or his distinction between the beautiful and the agreeable) is evident in the earlier Principles of Genial Criticism (1814), and his essay On Poesy or Art (1808) was inspired by Schelling's On the Relation between Art and Nature (1807). Whatever credit we give to his claim of originality, it is anyway true that Coleridge was a major channel for the introduction of the new philosophical and critical ideas in England, and a perceptive thinker himself. He develops a metaphysical and psychological theory along the lines set by Fichte and Schelling. Coleridge appeals for standards of criticism based on his philosophical psychology: already in his 1800 preface, Wordsworth had affirmed that "the ultimate reference of taste would be a study of the manner in which language and the human mind react on each other" (1800 prologue, 433). Coleridge, too, opposes the idea of criticism as a mere evaluation of literary works, and, above all, as a pointing out of petty faults: the main task of a critic is to elucidate the beauty of a work. The models to be followed in criticism are the classical critics: Aristotle, Horace, Longinus. Coleridge, we may note, may be a romantic poet and critic, but he values sound sense, and not emotion, in his ideal critic, just as he values in the poet (e. g. in Wordsworth) the union of deep feeling with profound thought. Critics, he believes, ought to refer "to fixed canons of criticism, previously established and deduced from the nature of man" (Biographia 36). His aim is

to reduce criticism to a system by the deduction of causes from principles involved in our faculties . . . . I laboured at a solid foundation on which permanently to ground my opinions in the component faculties of the human mind itself and their comparative dignity and importance. (11)

Coleridge will examine different psychological theories form Aristotle to the German Romantics, as a step towards the determination of those faculties. He opposes the mechanicism of some 18th century theories (Hartley, Hume), and asserts the active faculty of the mind, will . Will and thought, he says, are not blind mechanisms, as Hartley presented them, but rather controlling powers. The association of ideas (in the sense of Locke) may well be mechanical, but the mind works by alternately opposing and yielding to this mechanic movement, by an act of the will. So, there is in the mind an active and a passive power: they are connected by a third one, which is both active and passive: imagination. In Chapter XII of his Biographia Coleridge develops an idealist theory of knowledge which draws heavily on Schelling, and which is the basis for his theory of the imagination.

 

In Chapter XIII he develops a difference between Primary Imagination, Secondary Imagination and Fancy:

The imagination then I consider either as primary or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffusses, dissipates, in order to re-create' or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital , even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space, and blended with, and modified, by that empirical phenomenon of the will which we express by the word choice . But equally with the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association. (167)

The practical conclusion for writers is that "the poet should paint to the imagination, not to the fancy" (252).

The origin of the opposition between primary and secondary imagination is vaguely Kantian. Fancy is a limited or false parallel of Secondary Imagination. Coleridge criticises Wordsworth's near-equivalence between imagination and fancy; fancy merely combines; Wordsworth's fancy is Coleridge's wit, which is a pure play of the intellect, of concepts, without the passion of poetry. Primary Imagination can be related to Kant's Understanding, while Secondary or Poetic Imagination is nearer to Kant's Reason. In Kant's theory, the role of the Understanding face to experience was an active one: it sets its own forms and categories on experience, synthesizes the impressions into phenomena and elaborates judgements. "Every human being, thus, is, so far as he perceives anything at all, a creator and an idealizing agent" (Wimsatt and Brooks 393). Coleridge establishes and analogy between the imaginative capability of the poet and the creativity of the "infinite I Am." The parallel between the creativity of the poet and that of the cosmos makes us think of Schelling, but in Coleridge's account there is an emphasis on the consciousness an deliberation of the cosmic creativity, so that the word "God" is perhaps more appropriate here.

 

The poet, then, differs in degree and not in essence from other men. He has a greater ability of organizing, and a greater control over it. The Secondary imagination works the perceptual products of the Primary Imagination into symbols of ideas. Coleridge, like Aristotle, states that the poet must copy the essence, and not the mere fact, "which presupposes a bond between nature in the higher sense and the soul of man."

Nature and consciousness mirror each other, developing through similar phases and processes. The poet, in watching nature, seeks "a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists" rather "than observing anything new."

Schelling and Plato are reconciled in Coleridge's dictum that whatever new things we discover are already known truths which had been forgotten. Like Schelling, Coleridge believes that art makes conscious, or rather explicit, what is unconscious in nature (although we may assume it to be conscious in God), and that this process is essentially the same as that of idealizing reality. The role of art in Schelling or Coleridge is similar to that of philosophy: art is a kind of philosophy, a "figured language of thought" ; a work of art is of a "middle quality between a thought and a thing."

The unity of a work of art is the integration of all its parts (matter ) into one idea.

 

Imagination integrates the opposites, finding a balance of contraries. As Wordsworth had said, it makes strange what is familiar and familiarizes what is strange. Indeed, this idea was the groundwork for the original plan of the Lyrical Ballads to be written in collaboration by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Wordsworth was to deal with themes of common life whose imaginative heightening would lead to an intuition of the presence of the unknown; Coleridge would develop fantastic themes (The Ancient Mariner ) imaginatively infusing them with the known so as to produce credibility. In any case, Coleridge says, the work of the poet must join accurate observation with the modifying power of imagination, mixing the old and the new in such a way that the freshness of sensations is always present in the poem.

 

Other derivations of this general definition of imagination as an integration of opposites can be found in Coleridge's critical statements. For instance, he defines meter (Biographia XIV) as the result of a balance between passion and organization; or else he distinguishes imitation (infusing difference among the same or the same among different elements) from copying, or makes the remark that the women in Shakespeare's plays, while preserving their individuality, are all essentially the same, variations on one woman. All these are instances of "a highly reflexive application of the doctrine of conciliation to the work of art conceived as a non-illusory object" (Wimsatt and Brooks 392).

 

It has been argued that, for all their elaboration, Wordsworth and Coleridge's theories of the imagination are narrow and restricted, in that they are made ad hoc, to suit the special kind of poetry they were writing. The subject of romantic poems is usually inspiration, creation, the poet's own sensibility, etc. They are highly reflexive, and so is Coleridge's theory of the imagination.

However,

[i]t is one thing to say that all our knowledge is a "self-realizing intuition" which reconciles subject or conscious self with object or nature. (It is impossible to write a poem which will especially illustrate this transcendental principle. How could any one expression better illustrate or embody it than any other?). It is a vastly different thing to say that the forms of nature are, or are capable of being, suited to moral reflections-or that the latter can be, in any peculiar way, elicited or superinduced from the former. This is a very special showing of how "nature" is "thought", and "thought" is "nature". (It may be quite possible to illustrate this in a special kind of poem. (Wimsatt and Brooks 399)

Surely the Romantics' praise of symbol as opposed to allegory suits their own poems, just as it may lead to an undervaluation of much important literature (Dante, Cervantes, Rabelais are excepted by Coleridge). Their explanation of a parallel working of nature and the human mind makes their projective imagery especially suitable; the subjectivization or personification of nature (what Ruskin called "the pathetic fallacy") is the most representative image in romantic poetry. So, their theory of imagination is a description of their own poetry: it is a poetry which suggests similitudes usually without stating them overtly. In the Romantic metaphor "[b]oth tenor and vehicle are wrought in a parallel process out of the same material. The landscape is both the occasion of subjective reflection or transcendental insight and the source of figures by which the reflection or insight is defined" (Wimsatt and Brooks 402; cf. Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" or "Intimations of Inmortality"). The best poems of the Romantics are philosophically purposive: they are the logical outcome of the approximation between poetry and philosophy made in contemporary theory, of Schelling's doctrine that poetry was the highest kind of philosophy. Romantic poems are over-reflexive, they "contain and assert the philosophy of nature and art which is supposedly also their formal principle" (Wimsatt and Brooks). This is something like Pope's "imitative harmony" translated to purely conceptual terms, and set at the heart of the poem's structure.

This . . . they were led to do and were able to do because of the intimate union which they conceived to obtain between art and nature. The theory was enlessly reflexive and self-conscious . . . . Romantic poems tend to be about Romantic imagination. (Wimsatt and Brooks 402)

This hidden intellectualism leads to some incoherence in Coleridge's criticism. He states that pleasure is the immediate object of a poem, but then he cannot discriminate a good poem from a bad one unless he speaks of the passion and truth behind it. And his undervaluation of all which can be intellectual, of that which is mere "wit" or "fancy" restricts the field of subjects available for poetic treatment. Nothing too playful or merely witty is adequate subject for a romantic poem, which tries to reach the infinity behind the fact.

 

 

 

 

 

5.3.2. Poetic Diction

 

 

 

In his essay "Shakespeare's Judgement Equal to His Genius" (1808, pub. 1836)

Coleridge re-states the main Romantic views on poetry. He wants poetry to be based on genius and originality, and to deal with its subject matter in such a way that its language will be organically linked to it; or rather, that the subject-matter is co-extensive with the poem: "to the truly great poets . . . there is a reason assignable not only for every word, but for the position of every word." Coleridge is the major English exponent of organicism as a metaphor for the work of art; he opposes organic form and mechanic form in the same way as the German romantics (Herder, Schlegel). Imagination produces organic forms, fancy merely mechanic forms. "The work of art must grow organically from within itself. Its principles of order are finally internal and not imposed from without" (Adams 459). There are rules in the work of art, Coleridge admits as he criticises the neo-classicists, but they are not imposed mechanically. The order of the work of art is like that of a living body: each part is connected to the whole, and each is at once end and means.

The true ground of the mistake lies in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form. The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a predetermined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material; as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes, as it develops itself form within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form. Such as the life is, such is the form. ("Shakespeare's Judgement" 462).

Coleridge opposes in this way, like Schelling or Goethe, symbol to allegory.

 

Just as he opposes the rules of drama, in his Biographia Literaria he opposes that conception of poetry inherited from the eighteenth century: he is against the closed couplet, and favours lines running into each other and the use of plain words whenever possible. There is no question of "poetic diction" as something which can be isolated from the poems themselves. This was the defect of the poetry of the previous century for Coleridge: it presented "not so much of poetic thoughts as thoughts translated into the language of poetry" (9).

 

The effect of a good poem, Coleridge says, is to make us see life anew, to remove "the film of familiarity" which sets at length on all our thoughts and perceptions. An imaginative poem is characterized by its "awakening the mind's attention form the lethargy of custom and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us" (Biographia 168). This freshess of perception can never be achieved with a poetic diction which is old-fashioned, well-known; clichés and hackneyed expressions rather have the opposite effect, they dull our perception. However, as it happened with Wordsworth, Coleridge lays the stress not so much on novelty as on quality of expression; badness comes not so much from repetition as from intrinsic faults.

 

But Coleridge's attitude to poetic language is not the same asWordsworth's. He will criticise Wordsworth's primitivistic assumptions as well as the implications which derived from them with respect to poetic language. Coleridge does not share Wordsworth's faith in the intrinsic virtues of the cottagers and country life. He believes in the value of culture and education, rather than in "untutored minds" in contact with nature. He points out that Wordsworth's definition of "the language of real life" was equivocal: on one hand, he identified it with the language of the lower classes; on the other, that language was to be a "selection." In fact, he says, if you "select" from a particularity (language of peasants) what you obtain is a generality (language of men): "I adopt with full faith the principle of Aristotle that poetry as poetry is essentially ideal, that it avoids and excludes all accident, that its apparent individualities of rank, character, or occupation must be representative of a class" (Biographia 192). Language, for Coleridge, does not spring immediately from nature in the way Wordsworth would have it: it is the product of a whole society, and it has a long history, in which the role of the learned is fundamental.

 

Even allowing that the same words can be used in prose and in poetry, Coleridge claims, the "poetic manner of combining words" is not that of prose. Coleridge identifies badness in poetry as faults of logic, psychology, good sense and taste: in general, faults against the rules of the Imagination. The criterion to define badness is not to be found in the oposition between the hackeneyed and the new. The same is true for Wordsworth, although he complains that some themes and expressions beautiful in themselves could no longer be used because of their having been so drawn upon by bad poets. Today we tend rather to lay the stress upon this idea, following T.S. Eliot: "It is as wasteful for a poet to do what has been done already, as for a biologist to rediscover Mendel's theories."

5.3.3. Definition of a poem

 

 

 

For Coleridge, metre is the proper form for poetry. It favours, when it is successful, the most perfect blend of content and form; it must be adequate to the content of the poem and become one with its meaning. The role of metre is to intensify the attention of the reader to every element in the poem, as well as to the whole. Metre

tends to increase the vivacity and susceptibility both of the general feelings and of the attention. This effect it produces by the continual excitement of surprize, and by the quick reciprocation of curiosity still gratified and still re-excited, which are too slight indeed to be at any one moment objects of distinct consciousness, yet become considerable in their aggregate influence (Biographia 207).

However, it is not a necessary element for poetry: only the most suitable form. And this is so because the language of poetry is not the same as the language of prose, even if its vocabulary is the same. It is peculiar to the Romantic era that poetry is defined not only with respect to science, but also with respect to other kinds of literature. Coleridge points out that poetry does not equal rhythmical language nor does it equal literature.

A poem is that species of composition which is opposed to works of science by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part . . . one the parts of which mutually support and explain each other , all in their proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose and known influences of metrical arrangement. (Biographia 172)

The communication of pleasure, Coleridge affirms, is the only legitimate way for a poet to moralize his readers (cf. the similar view in Dryden).

 

We may note that Coleridge has defined the whole of the poem as a system, a structure (cf. Aristotle on plot). This is only possible not merely through Wordsworth's orderly mind feeling spontaneously, but through reflection, consciousness and hard work.

In poetry, in which every line, every phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and deliberate choice, it is possible, and barely possible, to attain that ultimatum which I have ventured to propose as the infallible test of a blameless style, namely its untranslatableness in words of the same language without injury to the meaning, Be it observed, however, that I include in the meaning of a word not only its correspondent object, but likewise all the associations which it recalls. For language is framed to convey not the object alone, but likewise the character, mood and intentions of the person who is representing it. (Biographia 263)

The same could be said of imagery. Together with dramatization, Coleridge points out the importance of imagery as an element which is used by the "invisible" author in directing the response of the reader. Imagery is significant and becomes alive when it is modified by a predominant passion, or when it has the virtue of reducing multiplicity to unity, or succession to an instant; or when a humour and an intellectual life is transferred to it from the poet's own spirit. That is, when it has an experiential, subjective and perceptual value, "when it moulds and colors itself to the circumstances, passion or character present and foremost in the mind " (Biographia 178). The guiding spirit of the imagery may be the author in an immediate way, or the author through his characters. This is the difference between Shakespeare and Milton: "All things and modes of action shape themselves anew in the being of Milton; while Shakespeare becomes all things, yet for ever remaining himself" (Biographia 180).

 

This new view of the relationship between the poet and his language will inspire many studies of the poets' imagery in the twentieth century, from Caroline Spurgeon's study of Shakespeare's imagery as a means of characterization and creation of atmosphere to Charles Mauron's "psychocriticism," which analyzes the mind of the poet on the basis of his "obsessive metaphors." This new perspective becomes possible after Coleridge and other romantic: let us note that language for Coleridge is no longer a mere means to communicate things or concepts: it is more like a tool which shapes reality. Likewise, we find a new definition of metaphor in Coleridge: it is a thought of its own, which creates a new meaning, and not a dress or cloak for a pre-existing thought.

 

In seeming paradox with his organic conception of the poem, Coleridge affirms that

a poem of any length neither can be, nor ought to be, all poetry. Yet if a harmonious whole is to be produced, the remaining parts must be preserved in keeping with the poetry; and this can be no otherwise effected than by such a studied selection and artificial arrangement as will partake of one, though not a peculiar, property of poetry. And this again can be no other than the property of exciting a more continuous and equal attention than the language of prose aims at, whether colloquial or written. (Biographia 173; cf. similar ideas in Wordsworth and Poe).

So:

 

Poem Poetry

Neutral language

Prosaic language Non-poem.

 

 

 

 

 

5.3.4. The Poet

 

 

 

Imagination and emotion, the principal characteristics of the poem, are in truth the characteristics of the poet.

To discuss what poetry is, Coleridge affirms, equals to discuss what a poet is. A poet is a person endowed with a peculiar ability to conciliate discordant qualities, a person endowed with a special ability to feel emotions combined with an unusual mental order (this conception is inherited by I. A. Richards). Needless to say, this is a gift which cannot be acquired.

 

The mind of the poet may seem disorderly at first sight, but in fact this appearance conceals a much more basic order: the poet is in tune with the universe. The universe is orderly, and the mind of the poet is orderly as well. His whole imaginative activity is one of ordering, of distinguishing the similar from the same. In this sense, poetry is a kind of repetition of God's creative act which is also an act of adoration of God.

 

Like Wordsworth, Coleridge insists on the necessity of objectivization in the poet; in shaping a poem, it is essential

to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

 

Subjectivity is all right, but the truly great poets are characterized by their power to go beyond their circumstance, and by their keeping outside their work, which unfolds by itself: they objectivise, dramatise without personal involvement. Such is the case with Shakespeare: in his poems as well as in his plays, "You seem to be told nothing, but to see and hear everything" (Biographia 177). And such is not the case with some of Wordsworth's rustic poems, in which you can hear the ventriloquist poet behind the puppet characteræan instance of defective dramatization. Coleridge desires an "utter aloofness of the poet's own feelings from those of which he is at once the painter and the analyst" (Biographia 177), something which reminds us of later pronouncements by novelists around the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the 20th century (Flaubert, Henry James, Joyce). The influence of Coleridge in this respect is far-reaching and goes beyond the Romantic age to inspire much of the New Critical attitudes in our own century.

Next

Previous