Silence and the Pantheistic Sublime in Coleridge’s Early Poetry

Abstract

Silence plays an intriguing role in eighteenth-century accounts of the sublime. It is often present in lists of sublime objects, typically (as in Burke) associated with the other privations—darkness, solitude and so on.² In the course of the century there was a huge variety of increasingly intricate speculations on the sublime, leaving behind their Longinian origins in rhetoric and variously becoming subjectivized, more clearly defined in distinction from beauty, and associated with experiences of the infinite.³ By the early 1800s someone like Richard Payne Knight could articulate a theory in which privations like silence and darkness are specifically associated with the infinite because the infinite is itself a privation of limits or boundaries.⁴ It seems quite characteristic that Coleridge would pick out the word ‘silence’ from this background, and recognize the philosophical and poetic resources latent in it.

All mankind, whose common sense is not diverted by system, will agree, that darkness, solitude, and silence, naturally oppress the mind by a tremendous and sublime sensation.¹