Abstract
The second decade of the nineteenth century saw an extremely complex and much neglected series of changes in Coleridge’s poetic and intellectual development. The miseries and creative decline recorded in ‘Dejection: An Ode’ hang over the early years of the period, reaching a climax with the demise of The Friend and the break with Sara Hutchinson in the winter of 1810–11. On the other hand, it was the period of his most developed literary criticism, including the Shakespeare Lectures of 1811–12 and concluding with the publication of Biographia Literaria in 1817. His study of literature, against the background of contemporary German philosophy and criticism, led him into discussions of aesthetics, history and Christian theology, and are a necessary study as a prelude to considering both his later theological and philosophical writings, and his later poetry.
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Notes
See Thomas McFarland, ‘The Origin and Significance of Coleridge’s Theory of Secondary Imagination’, in Geoffrey H. Hartman (ed.), New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth (New York, 1972) pp. 195–246, esp. p. 204.
Tetens, Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwickelung (Leipzig, 1777) vol. I, p. 117. The text used is from Coleridge’s annotated copy in the British Library.
D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Coleridge and Kant’, in John Beer (ed.), Coleridge’s Variety: Bicentenary Studies (London, 1974) pp. 183–203, esp.p. 189.
M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and Critical Tradition (New York, 1953).
Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London, 1950) pp. 132–3.
Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford, 1928) p. 77.
Austin Farrer, Faith and Speculation: An Essay in Philosophical Theology (London, 1967) p. 74.
Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth, 1968) pp. 88–9.
Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814 (New Haven, Conn., 1964) p. 39.
See Roy Park, ‘Coleridge and Kant: Poetic Imagination and Practical Reason’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 8 (1968) pp. 336–7.
Benedetto Groce, Aesthetic: As Science of Expression and General Linguistic, trans. Douglas Ainslie (New York, 1955) p. 275.
James D. Boulger, ‘Coleridge on Imagination Revisited’, The Wordsworth Circle, IV (1973) 16.
Wordsworth, ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ (1815), Poetical Works (Oxford, 1969) p. 744.
Kant, The Inaugural Dissertation (1770), in Selected Pre-Critical Writings and Correspondence with Beck, trans. G. B. Kerferd and D. E. Walford (Manchester, 1968) pp. 66, 70.
James Beattie, ‘An Essay on Poetry and Music as They Affect the Mind’ (1762), in Essays (Edinburgh, 1776) p. 52.
See Anne K. Mellor, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge, Mass., 1980) p. 26.
J. S. Mill, ‘Coleridge’, in Mill’s Essays on Literature and Society, ed. J. B. Schneewind (New York, 1965) p. 318.
Schiller, Kleinere prosaische Schriften (Leipzig, 1800) vol. 2, p. 66.
For further discussion of Herder, Eichhorn and Coleridge on this point, see E. S. Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and the Fall of Jerusalem (Cambridge, 1975) p. 32.
Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago, 1974) p. 92
Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (London, 1982) p. xv.
G. N. G. Orsini, ‘Coleridge and Schlegel Reconsidered’, Comparative Literature, XVI (1964) 103.
See Gabriel Marcel, Coleridge et Schelling (Paris, 1971) pp. 84–7.
F. Schlegel, Literary Notebooks, 1797–1801, ed. Hans Eichner (Toronto, 1957) p. 62.
F. Schlegel, Gespräch über die Poesie (1800), in Kritische Ausgabe, vol. II, p. 313.
F. Schlegel, Lyceums-Fragmente, nos 42, 47 and 54, Prosaische Jugendschriften, ed. J. Minor (Vienna, 1882) vol. II pp. 189–91. See also K. M.
Wheeler, Sources, Processes and Methods in Coleridge’s ‘Biographia Literaria’ (Cambridge, 1980) p. 66.
Victoria University Library, Toronto. See, Laurence S. Lockridge, Coleridge the Moralist (Ithaca, NY, 1977) pp. 193–8: ‘Irony and the Coleridgean Personality’.
K. Solger, Nachgelassene Schriften und Briefwechsel, ed. L. Tieck and F. von Raumer (Leipzig, 1826) vol. 1, p. 117. And see Wheeler, op. cit., p. 73.
See Basil Willey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, 1972) p. 212.
Stephen Prickett, Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth (Cambridge, 1970) p. 181.
See further Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (London, 1975) p. 130.
Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New York, 1969) pp. 127–8.
Stephen Happel, ‘Words Made Beautiful by Grace: on Coleridge the Theologian’, Religious Studies Review, 6 (1980) 201.
See also Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford, 1969) pp. 379–80.
John J. Duffy, ‘Problems in Publishing Coleridge: James Marsh’s First American Edition of Aids to Reflection’, New England Quarterly, 43 (1970) 195.
James Marsh, ‘Preliminary Essay’ (1829), AR (II), p. xxv.
S. H. Hodgson, The Philosophy of Reflection (London, 1878) vol. 1, p. 177; vol. 2, p. 235.
See Terence Hawkes, Metaphor. The Critical Idiom, 25 (London, 1972) p. 47.
See further Dorothy Emmet, ‘Coleridge and Philosophy’, in R. L. Brett (ed.), Writers and their Background: S. T. Coleridge (London, 1971) p. 205.
Owen Barfield, What Coleridge Thought (Middletown, Conn., 1971) p. 248.
Jerome Christensen, Coleridge’s Blessed Machine of Language (Ithaca, NY, 1981) pp. 109, 117.
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© 1985 David Jasper
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Jasper, D. (1985). The Critical Prose. In: Coleridge as Poet and Religious Thinker. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07509-6_5
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