Abstract
That the philosopher killed the poet in Coleridge is an often told tale. Wordsworth suggested it; Carlyle had his taunt about ‘transcendental life preservers, logical swim bladders’; it was repeated in substance by Professor Quiller-Couch:
He had landed in Germany a poet… he embarked from Germany not yet perhaps the ‘archangel a little damaged’ (as Charles Lamb described him some sixteen or seventeen years later) but already — and worse for us — a poet lost… The man came back to England intensely and furiously preoccupied with metaphysics. This, I suggest and neither opium, nor Mrs. Coleridge’s fretfulness, was the main reason why he could not recall his mind to poetry.1
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Notes
Mr H. Read, in his lecture Coleridge as Critic (London, 1949) has noted Coleridge’s conjunction of this passage with Dejection: an Ode.
From Huntington Library MS., quoted by J.H. Muirhead Coleridge as a Philosopher (London 1939) p. 282.
The title of a book by J. Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (London, 1927).
IA. Richards Coleridge on Imagination (London, 1934) p. 68.
Quoted A. Snyder, Coleridge on Logic and Learning (New Haven, 1939) p. 135, from autograph notebook MS. C;
cf. also J.H. Muirhead, Coleridge as Philosopher (London 1939) pp. 97 ff.
Rendered by Kathleen Coburn, Inquiring Spirit (London, 1951) p. 206, from Egerton MS. 2800. A variant version of this occurs in Biographia Literaria, Vol. I, p. 34n.
J.L. Lowes, in The Road to Xanadu (London, 1927) p. 205, shows that the colours, the ‘still and awful red’ of the charmed water, and the ‘blue and glossy green’ of the water snakes possessed already another definite association in Coleridge’s mind. ‘There is in the Note Book a long passage from a “Description of a Glory by John Haygarth”, transcribed from the third volume of the Manchester Memoirs…’. ‘And the sun shining on a surface of snow covered with a hoar-frost exhibit … beautiful brilliant points of various colours, as, red, green, blue, etc., reflected and refracted at different angles.’ This passage appears in Coleridge’s note books along with jottings from Father Bourzes’s account of phosphorescent fishes, and of a rainbow in the spray. It is gratifying to think that Coleridge’s reading penetrated to the Manchester Memoirs (for 1790).
Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston, 1919) p. 287.
S. Kierkegaard, The Works of Love, translated D.F. & L.M. Swenson (Princeton, 1946) p. 263.
Quoted by E. De Selincourt, Wordsworthian and Other Studies (Oxford, 1947) p. 65, from British Museum MS. of Barron Field’s Memoirs of the Life and Poetry of W. W.
N. Fruman, The Damaged Archangel (New York, 1971; London, 1972) Part IV.
‘Hints towards the Formation of a more Comprehensive Theory of Life’ (quoted A. Snyder, Coleridge on Logic and Learning (New Haven, 1929) p. 22.
I am indebted to John Beer, Coleridge’s Poetic Intelligence (London, 1977) for a comparison of Coleridge’s view of nature as a spiritual process with Erasmus Darwin’s naturalistic view of evolution.
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© 1998 Dorothy Emmet
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Emmet, D. (1998). Coleridge on Inner Powers. In: Outward Forms, Inner Springs. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26672-2_9
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