Abstract
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817) is an iconic work in the history of English Literature, which uniquely draws on contemporary German thought. Coleridge attempts to replace arbitrary critical judgements with principles based on a philosophical argument about human psychology. This chapter first explores Coleridge’s digressive, “Shandean” method and then traces his rejection of associationism. Coleridge replaces the latter, empiricist theory with an idealist conception of the “imagination.” The chapter considers both how Coleridge’s fragmentary definition of the imagination responds to the rival account of William Wordsworth, and its affinity with the approach of “mystics” such as Jacob Böhme to whom Coleridge professes a spiritual and intellectual debt.
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- 1.
For a patient defence of its structure, see Wallace 1983.
- 2.
“Viele Werke der Alten sind Fragmente geworden. Viele Werke der Neuern sind es gleich bei der Entstehung.”
- 3.
- 4.
“The actual birth of Tristram somehow eludes attention; in the same way, the most crucial aspects of Coleridge’s career, the growth and subsequent decline in his personal relationship to Wordsworth from 1798 onwards, and the fate of his love for Sara Hutchinson, are neglected in the narrative as a whole, which instead circles round and round the annus mirabilis, leaving space only for the German trip immediately afterwards and for passing references to his stay in Rome” (Beer 2010, 156).
- 5.
Eschenmayer’s account concludes: “Das Mädchen, das die lateinische Sentenz aussprach, mag sie von ihrem Vater, einem Pfarrer, öfters gehört haben, ohne den Sinn der Worte zu verstehen. Es blieb als dunkle Spur zurük, die sich jezt erhellte” (1816, 63). The source is identified in Møller 2011, 368–75. Coleridge must have encountered the work at a very late stage of his composition.
- 6.
Coleridge quotes the Cambridge Platonist John Smith similarly in Coleridge 1957–2002, II 2164.
- 7.
“Esemplastic ” was Coleridge’s coinage (1983, I 168 and n.), derived from the Greek for “to shape into one,” to describe the modifying and unifying power of the imagination.
- 8.
This threefold distinction is indebted to the Perceptionsvermögen, Dichtungsvermögen, and Phantasie into which Johann Nicolaus Tetens divides the representing power or Vorstellungskraft in his Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwicklung (1777). See McFarland (1972).
- 9.
Again, these terms resemble those of Tetens (McFarland 1972, 211–12).
- 10.
Modiano (1989) interprets this strongly as a polemic against Wordsworth.
- 11.
See Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” quoted at length in Coleridge 1983, 153–4.
- 12.
On the derivation of Coleridge’s early understanding of “Spinozism” from Priestley and Hartley, see Halmi 2012, paragraphs 10–14.
- 13.
Coleridge also mentions William Law, “Behmen’s commentator,” and “De Thoyras” (1983, I 151, 149). The latter, as Sara Coleridge pointed out, is almost certainly a transcriber’s slip for “Taulerus,” meaning Johann Tauler of Strassburg (1983, I 149n.5), whom Coleridge may—following Martin Luther—have assumed to be the author of Theologia Deutsch.
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Vigus, J. (2020). Shandeanism, the Imagination, and Mysticism: Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. In: Forster, M., Steiner, L. (eds) Romanticism, Philosophy, and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40874-9_13
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