The Power of Words

Abstract

Our most powerful feeling is love, and love and sympathy were associated by the Romantics with intense knowledge. Keats spoke of a ‘fellowship with essence’, and in general the Romantics identify the potential relationship of mind and nature as a kind of loving kinship. Indeed love is supreme knowledge, an intimate union of subject and object. It is love, said Novalis, which makes knowledge possible.¹⁷ Love is ‘the most intense form of knowing’, the truest way to escape from the prison of private consciousness.¹⁸ This thesis and the Shelleyan yoking of love and imagination — “tis like thy light, / Imagination’ (Epipsychidion, 163–65) — bring us close to the center of the Romantic creed. To see the life in things, Schelling said, requires the power of love, the ability to project our spirit into the kindred life in nature. According to Solger, God lives in the world and in our consciousness as love. Without faith in Christ, without this highest love, Coleridge said, ‘no rational conviction of reality in any subject is possible’ (Tennemann, VIII, pt. 1, front leaves).

Language is a perpetual Orphic song

Which rules with Daedal harmony a throng

Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were.

Prometheus Unbound (IV, 415–17)

The Word is the first Birth of the Idea, and its flexible Organ.

The Friend

Coleridge suggested to Godwin that he write a book on ‘the power of words’ (CL, I, 625–26).