Abstract
Commentators of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817) have to a large degree been divided between adulation and contempt — between awestruck admiration for the way in which the work lays the foundations of a philosophically informed criticism, on the one hand, and scathing criticism of how those same foundations are borrowed, and at times simply stolen, from earlier German sources, on the other.1 What seems to have not been fully comprehended, though, is how Coleridge displaces and selects from those German precedents. This displacement is related to his gradual transition from pantheism to a relatively dogmatic form of Christianity — a transition authoritatively explored by Thomas McFarland.2 But other displacements have been ignored. In this chapter I will home in on one in particular, by providing an elucidation of how Coleridge largely suppresses the radical consequences of the organicism of German idealism.
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Notes
Norman Fruman’s Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel (London: Allen and Unwin, 1972).
Walter Jackson Bate, Coleridge (London: Macmillan, 1969), 148.
M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), 268,2
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, volume I, in Collected Works, volume 7:1 (edited by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 25.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, volume II, in Collected Works, volume 7:2 (edited by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 65.
Kathleen Wheeler in Sources, Processes and Methods in Coleridge’s ‘Biographia Literaria’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 122.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shorter Works and Fragments, volume I, in Collected Works, volume 11:1 (edited by H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1995), 372.
Coleridge and Organic Form: The English Tradition’ (Studies in Romanticism, Volume 6, 1967, 89–97),
Plato, Euthyphro/Apology/Crito/Phaedo/Phaedrus (translated by Harold North Fowler, London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1914), 528–9.
G. N. G. Orsini, Organic Unity in Ancient and Later Poetics: The Philosophical Foundations of Literary Criticism (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975).
Emerson R. Marks, Taming the Chaos: English Poetic Diction Theory Since the Renaissance (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 142–3.
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994).
David Jasper has distinguished Coleridge’s stance on this matter from those of some of his less obviously Christian contemporaries, in The Sacred and the Secular Canon in Romanticism: Preserving the Sacred Truths (London: Macmillan, 1999), 37.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lay Sermons, in Collected Works, volume 6 (edited by R. J. White, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 18.
Stephen Prickett, Origins of Narrative: The Romantic Appropriation of the Bible [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 216.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shorter Works and Fragments, volume II, in Collected Works, volume 11:2 (edited by H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1995), 1134.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, in Collected Works, volume 9 (edited by John Beer, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1993), 45.
Trevor H. Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981),
Nicholas Roe (ed.), Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Owen Barfield, What Coleridge Thought (London: Oxford University Press, 1972).
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks, volume 1 [edited by Kathleen Coburn, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957]).
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Logic, in Collected Works, volume 13 (edited by J. R. de J. Jackson, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 80.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Philosophical Lectures (edited by Kathleen Coburn, London: Pilot Press, 1949), 359.
G. N. G. Orsini, Coleridge and German Idealism: A Study in the History of Philosophy with Unpublished Materials from Coleridge’s Manuscripts (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 136 ff.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State, in Collected Works, volume 10 (edited by John Colmer, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), 84–5.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk, volume I, in Collected Works, volume 14:1 [edited by Carl Woodring, London: Routledge, 1990], 258).
Coleridge, Collected Letters, volume IV (edited by Earl Leslie Griggs, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 728.
Thomas Poole, 9 October, 1809, in Collected Letters, volume III (edited by Earl Leslie Griggs, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 235.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, volume I, in Collected Works, volume 4:1 (edited by Barbara E. Rooke, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 150.
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© 2003 Charles I. Armstrong
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Armstrong, C.I. (2003). Organic Vagaries: Coleridge’s Theoretical Work. In: Romantic Organicism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287754_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287754_4
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