Abstract
But we were not made to find Happiness in the complete gratification of our bodily wants—the mind must enlarge the sphere of its activity, and busy itself in the acquisition of intellectual aliment. To develope the powers of the Creator is our proper employment—and to imitate Creativeness by combination our most exalted and self-satisfying Delight.2 But we are progressive and must not rest content with present Blessings. Our Almighty Parent hath therefore given to us Imagination3 that stimulates to the attainment of real excellence by the contemplation of splendid Possibilities that still revivifies the dying motive within us, and fixing our eye on the glittering Summits that rise one above the other in Alpine endlessness still urges us up the ascent of Being, amusing the ruggedness of the road with the beauty and grandeur of the ever-widening Prospect.4 [The noblest gift of Imagination is the power of discerning the Cause in the Effect a power which when employed on the works of the Creator elevates and by the variety of its pleasures almost monopolizes the Soul. We see our God everywhere—the Universe in the most literal Sense is his written Language]5 Such and so noble are the ends for which this restless faculty was given us—but horrible has been its misapplication.
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Notes
The version of the poem here reprinted is the textus receptus, i.e., with three alterations (listed below in the notes) the text of the first edition (18 16). I have also listed in the notes the more important variants in the Crewe Manuscript text. (For the Crewe Manuscript, see Extract 34, n I.) ‘Kubla Khan’ is the one great poem that STC wrote directly on the nature of poetry and the power of Imagination. The date ofcomposition of’Kubla Khan’ has been widely disputed. In the 18 16 Preface STC says it was written in ‘the summer of the year 1797’, but the Crewe Manuscript gives the date as ‘the fall of the year, 1797’. E. K. Chambers after a careful examination ofthe question settled on a date in October 1797: ‘The Date of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan’ RES I I (1935) 78–80, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Biographical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938) 100–3. EHC assigns the poem to the summer of 1798: CPW 1295, n 2; L. Hanson argues for May 1798: The Life of s. T. Coleridge: The Early Years (London: Allen & Unwin, 1938) 259–60; and E. Schneider (after an exhaustive review) pushes the date to October 1799 or sometime in the spring of 1800: Coleridge, Opium and ‘Kubla Khan’ (1953) 153–237. In general, however, scholarly opinion now seems to lean toward a date in the autumn of 1797. In 1963 Richard Gerber suggested that ‘It is fairly safe to say that no poem in the English language has provided more pages ofcomment per line than “Kubla Khan”‘. The intervening thirteen years serve to confirm this guess yet further. See, for example, the Bibliography entries under Lowes (1930), Bodkin (1934), House (1953), Beer (1959), Chayes (1966), Watson (1966) and Brisman (1975). Other recent studies (less directly concerned with STC’s theory ofImagination in the poem) include the following: S. K. Heninger,]r, ‘A]ungian Reading of “Kubla Khan’” JAAC 18 (1959–60) 358–67;
R. H. Fogle, ‘The Romantic Unity of “Kubla Khan” CE 22 (1960–1) 112–16;
G. Watson, ‘The Meaning of “Kubla Khan” REL 2 (1961) 21–9;
A. C. Purves, ‘Formal Structure in “Kubla Khan” SIR 1 (1962) 187–91;
E. E. Bostetter, The Romantic Ventriloquists (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963) 84–91;
R. Gerber, ‘Keys to “Kubla Khan’” ES 44 (1963) 321–41; M. F. Schulz (1963) 114–24;
K. Raine, ‘Traditional Symbolism in Kubla Khan’ SR 72 (1964) 626–42;
R. Gerber, ‘Cybele, Kubla Khan, and Keats’ ES 46 (1965) 369–89; Bate (19 68) 75– 84; Fruman (197 1) 334–49 and 392–402;
H. W. Piper, ‘The Two Paradises’ in Kubla Khan’ RES n.s. 27 (1976) 148–58.
A number of scholars have engaged in tracking down the sources of STC’s imagery in ‘Kubla Khan’: see especially Lowes (1930), Beer (1959) and W. W. Beyer, The Enchanted Forest (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963) 118–43. I have cited one or two of the better known (and generally accepted) instances in the notes below.
Godwin’s Abbas, King of Persia (1801).
This line, not in the verse letter of 1802, was added when ‘Dejection’ was published in Sibylline Leaves (1817). For an account of the various drafts of ‘Dejection’, see E. de Selincourt, ‘Coleridge’s Dejection: An Ode’ E&S 22 (193 6) 7–25.
Cf STC’s later statement that a Shakespearean ‘play is a syngenesia*each [character] has indeed a life of its own and is an individuum [, individual thing’] of itself, but yet an organ to the whole’ (MC 95). [*syngenesia: ‘plants having stamens coherent by the anthers, and flowers (florets) in close heads or capitula’ (OED).] As an organicist in his criticism, STC stresses both the parts and the whole, both the unity itself and the things unified. On STC as an organicist in literary theory, see McKenzie (1939) and Fogle (1962); J. Benziger traces the development of the idea in his paper ‘Organic Unity: Leibniz to Coleridge’ PMLA 66 (1951) 24–48; McFarland (1969) examines the philosophic, rather than the aesthetic, implications of STC’s theory of organic unity; Barfield (1972, especially 41–68) examines STC’s Theory of Life and points out that ‘it can be inaccurate and misleading to adduce Coleridge’s thought as an example of “organicism”‘. For STC’s later organic views, see Extract 28 and n 2.
Samuel Butler, Hudibras (1663–78) II ii 31–2. In TT STC cites these lines as an instance of Fancy, which ‘brings together images which have no connexion natural or moral, but are yoked together by the poet by means of some accidental coincidence’: cf Extract 5I–E.
John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704). The distinction between the ‘Vulgar and Enthusiastick Passions rais’d in Poetry’ appean in Chap iv: relevant section quoted in CN III 3247 n.
A slighting reference to John Locke. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke likens the human mind to a blank sheet of paper on which the external world, through the agency of the five senses, makes impressions; in Locke’s system, the mind is a passive receiver of external stimuli, and knowledge is the result of relating or associating the ‘ideas’ left in the mind by sensation. Cf Introduction, p. 1 , and Extract 4, 42 – A, n 7.
Cf the discussion of the ‘philosophic imagination’ in Biographia Chap xii: Extract 33– E. The imagery in this Notebook entry is influenced by Jean Paul Richter’s Geist oder Chrestomathie (180 I) I 29– 33. (For Richter, see Extract 16, n 10.) Miss Coburn quotes (and translates) the relevant section from Jean Paul at length (CN III 4088 n); her translation reads in part: ‘This inner universe, more splendid and marvellous than the external one, requires a different heaven from the one above us and a loftier world than is warmed by any sun.–The triple chord of Virtue, Truth, and Beauty, drawn from the music of the spheres, summons us from this dull earth and announces for us the nearness of a melodious world. . . . But once our necessary animal needs [Thierdienst] are met, the howling circle of wild beasts within us fed, the animal combat over, then the inner man demands his nectar and ambrosia.... Strangers born in the mountains are consumed in the lowlands by an incurable homesickness. We are made for a higher place, and that is why we are gnawed at by an eternal longing. In the morning of our lives, we see the joys that satisfy the timid wishes our hearts aspire to, far off, shimmering towards us from later years; once we have reached these years, we turn round at this deceptive place and see our happiness blossoming behind us in our strong and lusty youth, and enjoy now, instead of our hopes, the memories of our hopes. So in this too, joy resembles the rainbow in this respect, that it shines before us in the West in the morning, and arches over the East in the evening.–Our eye can travel as far as light, but our arm is short, and can reach only the fruit of our earth. ‘And what are we to conclude from this?’ Not that we are unhappy, but that we are immortal, and that the second world within us demands and demonstrates a second world outside us.’ For the idea that the human soul, imprisoned in the body, has (through love) some power of recollecting the world of ideal and immutable Forms from which it has come, see Plato, Phaedo 72e–76 (quoted in part in Extract 40– C, n 20) and Phaedrus 247c– 252C. Cf also STC’s ‘Dejection: An Ode’ 17–20,59–93; and Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ sections i, v–vi, viii–ix.
The ‘histories of highest note’ were David Hume’s History of Great Britain (1754– 61)
and Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776– 88).
W. G. Tennemann, Geschichte derPhilosophie, 11 vols (1798– 1812). For a general assessment of STC’s marginalia in Tennemann, see PL 18.
Samuel Butler, Hudibras (1663–78) II ii 29–32. Cf also Extract I3–C.
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Hill, J.S. (1978). Extracts and Notes. In: Hill, J.S. (eds) Imagination in Coleridge. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-03409-3_2
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