Reason and Understanding: Coleridge’s Philosophical Influence on Yeats

Abstract

Yeats made a slightly unflattering comparison between his father and the great man in an unpublished letter to John Quinn of 30 September 1921, when he wondered aloud ‘whether Coleridge was not much the same. His philosophy is full of wisdom, but his application of it never is.’ Given the references to Coleridge in The Trembling of the Veil (1922), published a year later, Yeats may have been musing on the gap between the advice on imagination in the Biographia and the relative paucity of great poems by the tragic proto-Aesthete he described therein, when he delivered this stock nineteenth-century comment on his forebear. By 1930 this view was certainly no longer one Yeats seriously entertained, and even in The Trembling of the Veil itself Yeats had made reference to the Biographia and Coleridge’s refutation of Hartley’s ‘mechanical philosophy’ (Au 358). Coleridge’s most important philosophical contribution to Yeats was an understanding of the ‘nous’, or active principle of Reason in the mind, as being more concrete than it appeared to him from either a neo-Platonic or Kantian perspective. Although later entries show that he found Coleridge’s style boring and unimpassioned, compared to that of his Anglo-Irish ‘counterparts’ (Ex 314), his metaphysics and their political application were to be of great importance to him in understanding his own system. As such Coleridge did fulfil, to some extent, Yeats’s impression of him as sage or Romantic philosopher.