Abstract
Coleridge is unique among British Romantics in the extent to which a fascination with psychology — or ‘the science of the nature, functions, and phenomena of the human soul or mind’ (as The Oxford English Dictionary puts it)1 — dominates his writings in diverse genres and on superficially unrelated topics. What chiefly distinguishes his poems from those of his contemporaries, indeed, is their degree of introspection or self-reflexiveness, and especially their tendency to explore the relationships between various aspects of consciousness or mental functioning.2 Wordsworth’s evocations of the connections between environment and imagination or past and present consciousness, for example, place far more emphasis on a world conceived as existing independently of the mind, and informing or shaping our responses to it.3 Though Blake’s visions of political and spiritual liberation are among the most powerful externalizations of desire in Romantic literature, moreover, the political and social realities underlying his quest for transcendence are far more prominent than in most of Coleridge’s poems.4
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Notes
As Judson S. Lyon points out (‘Romantic Psychology and the Inner Senses: Coleridge’, PMLA, 81 [1966] 247) ‘Coleridge is the best illustration of [the] Romantic fascination with psychology and with notions of inner senses’, though his rejection of ‘the mechanistic implications of associationism’ has close parallels in many other Romantic poets, and especially in Blake.
See Harold Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), 283, and Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 1.
See The Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. W. Garrod (Oxford: Clarendon, 1939), 257–60 for the best-known example of Keats’s self-subverting focus on the fading illusions of ‘fancy’, and Nicholas Roe (ed.), Keats and History (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), 7–12 on the social and political awareness implicit in Keats’s imaginative quests for transcendence.
See WProse, 1: 123–5, and William Wordsworth: The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), 43–63.
On the extent to which such subjectivist tendencies in Romanticism more generally seem to reflect the influence of Rousseau see especially Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Heritage of Rousseau (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 50–2.
These aims in Coleridge, indeed, have obvious features in common with the pursuit of unity between self and other (as distinct from a Byronic transcendence of the other) which Mellor describes as characterizing the ‘feminine sublime’ of writers such as Ann Radcliffe. See Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (London: Routledge, 1993), 91–6.
This is, indeed, so widespread a perception as to be implied in most of the OED’s definitions of ‘Romantic’. Though qualifying this principle with specific instances, Webb similarly describes the ‘typically Romantic poem’ as pointing ‘away from contemporary realities’ towards ‘seductive … visions’ of the ideal (Timothy Webb, Shelley: A Voice Not Understood [Manchester: Manchester UP, 1977], 82).
See Mellor, Romanticism and Gender, 89–106. Even the identification with sublime landscapes which Mellor describes as distinctively masculine, for example, is often prominent in Radcliffe’s writing. See, for example, Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance, ed. Alison Milbank (Oxford: OUP, 1995), 104–5.
This theoretical position is most prominent in A Defence of Poetry (see especially Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, eds. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers [New York: Norton, 1977], 502–8), though as Webb points out (Shelley, 115), Prometheus Unbound, like The Revolt of Islam, is ‘an attempt to deliver Shelley’s contemporaries from despair and … directs itself to the French Revolution and its meaning’.
As McFarland notes, Byron ‘believed in very little’ except freedom, and thus eschews the emphasis on ‘the need for internal order’ which, as Webb points out, was central to Shelley’s view of the relationship between the individual and society. See Thomas McFarland, Paradoxes of Freedom: The Romantic Mystique of A Transcendence (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 46, and Webb, Shelley, 121.
See Webb, Shelley, 111, and McFarland, Paradoxes of Freedom, 37.
See especially Morton D. Paley, ‘The Last Man: Apocalypse Without Millennium’, in Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther M. Schor (eds), The Other Mary Shelley (Oxford: OUP, 1993), 107–23.
On the particular importance of such topics in Coleridge’s later poems see Morton D. Paley, Coleridge’s Later Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 37–61.
On the sense of incomprehensible power or vastness produced by objects incompletely viewed or understood see especially Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (London: RKP, 1958), 58–64, and CJ, 99–105.
See especially CPR, 267–8; also Kant’s Latin Writings: Translations, Commentaries, and Notes, trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Lang, 1986), 159, and Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 264–5.
See CJ, 105–7, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1949), 61–2, and Caygill, A Kant Dictionary, 197, 356–7.
As I show in Chapter 4 below, indeed, even Coleridge’s attempts to distinguish poetry and philosophy often highlight their similarities as much as their differences (see, for example, BL, 2: 15–16 and 2: 25–6). For earlier passages emphasizing the interdependence of poetry and philosophy see German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: The Romantic Ironists and Goethe, ed. Kathleen Wheeler (Cambridge: CUP, 1984) 46, and STI, 231.
David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: OUP, 1975), 77–8n. See also David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: OUP, 1978), 105–6, and the discussion of these passages in Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1996), 35–6.
See Paley, Coleridge’s Later Poetry, 36 and Hill, The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas (London: Deutsch, 1984), 12 on the ‘transfiguring of weakness into strength’ repeatedly evoked by Coleridge’s later poems.
See, for example, Friend, 1: 517–18, and Laurence S. Lockridge, Coleridge the Moralist (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977), 39–40.
Analogies between Emerson and Coleridge are discussed briefly in Frank Lentricchia, ‘Coleridge and Emerson: Prophets of Silence, Prophets of Language’, JAAC, 32 (1973) 43–5. On Nietzsche’s indebtedness to Emerson see especially George J. Stack, Nietzsche and Emerson: An Elective Affinity (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1992), 1–70. On Stevens’s debts to Coleridge see B. J. Leggett, ‘Why It Must Be Abstract: Stevens, Coleridge, and I. A. Richards’, SR, 22 (1983) 500–15. Coleridge, of course, differs from deconstructive thinkers in postulating a transcendent reality; yet as Kathleen Wheeler notes (Romanticism, Pragmatism and Deconstruction [Oxford: Blackwell, 1993], 63–6), his prose works are ‘often mistaken as dogmatic idealism rather than the exercises in imaginative questioning and the ”projects of thought” that they were designed to be’, and in addition to emphasizing ‘a self-criticism and detachment figured in the organic idea of self-propelling energy’, use various ‘strategies … which we have come to associate with deconstruction’ to disrupt the usual passivity of the reading process.
Though Perkins describes Coleridge as eschewing the pessimism of Schopenhauer (see Mary Anne Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy: The Logos as Unifying Principle [Oxford: Clarendon, 1995], 270), the increasing emphasis in his later writings on the ‘unfathomable hell within’ revealed in his dreams suggests a close analogy with Schopenhauer’s notion of the destructive reality underlying civilized illusion.
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Vallins, D. (2000). Introduction. In: Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288997_1
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