Abstract
If there is a single feature of Coleridge’s writing by which (at least in academic circles) he is most often distinguished from other English Romantics, it is his intellectualism. Though Keats’s criticism of his inability to remain ‘content with half-knowledge’ has undergone numerous modifications in succeeding centuries, indeed, the Romantic philosophical tendencies which (among other qualities) Coleridge’s work exemplifies are still not infrequently the target of critical deprecation.1 T. S. Eliot’s remark that Biographia shows ‘the disastrous effects of long dissipation and stupefaction of his powers in transcendental metaphysics’ is perhaps the most absurd of twentieth-century assessments; yet it is chiefly feminist critics who now most energetically deprecate Coleridge’s intellectualism, especially as exemplifying the pursuit of individual power by which Mellor, in particular, characterizes the work of male Romantics.2 Despite the prestige which his literary theories (in particular) have enjoyed since the Victorian period, moreover, many are in doubt as to the relationship between the extremes of abstraction which characterize much of his later thought, and the vigour and concreteness of his language and imagery in poems such as ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Ancient Mariner’.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, ed. H. E. Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1958), 1: 194. As Wheeler notes (Romanticism, Pragmatism, and Deconstruction, 70–1), Ludwig Tieck’s suspicion ‘that for the greater number of English readers [Biographia Literaria] is too weighty and profound’ is ‘only a little less apt today than it was in 1825’.
See T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England (London: Faber, 1933), 67, and Mellor, Romanticism and Gender, 89–90.
See Kathleen Wheeler, The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1981).
The multiplication of theoretical complexities in recent studies of Romanticism is noted in Mellor, Romanticism and Gender, 13. Recent studies focusing almost exclusively on Coleridge’s philosophy include Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy, and James W. Clayton, ‘Coleridge and the Logos: The Trinitarian Unity of Consciousness and Culture’, Journal of Religion, 70 (1990) 213–40.
To extend the comparison further, the psychological archetypes evoked in ‘Christabel’ are no less clearly aspects of an internal reality of ‘feeling’ whose forms and logic are presented with particular directness in the ‘outward forms’ of characters and imagery. See especially Anthony Harding, ‘Mythopoesis: The Unity of Christabel’, Coleridge’s Imagination: Essays in Memory of Pete Laver, ed. Richard Gravil, Lucy Newlyn, and Nicholas Roe (Cambridge: CUP, 1985), 207–17 on this point.
See especially CL, 1: 349 on Coleridge’s need to believe in ‘something one & indivisible’; also the analogous passage (dating from 1823) in CN, 4: 4968. Nigel Leask (The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought [Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988], 23) notes that the quest for such an underlying unity ‘is perhaps above all others the unifying principle of Coleridge’s multifarious writings’.
See BL, 1: 285 and STI, 17. The tendency towards stabilizing this dialectic is already prominent in Coleridge’s discussion of the ‘infinite I AM’ in BL, 1: 304. See also Nicholas Reid, ‘Coleridge and Schelling: The Missing Transcendental Deduction’, SR, 33 (1994), 457, 471–2 on Coleridge’s later attempt to escape from the dialectic of subject and object which governs Schelling’s System by defining it as belonging to ‘the world of the (finite) Understanding’ as distinct from the underlying ‘dynamic reality’ of Reason or the Trinity.
S. T. Coleridge, Notebook 54 (British Library, Add. MS 47549), fo. 16v.
For the phrase ‘Trinitarian Resolution’ see Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 191–255. On the ‘Logosophia’ or projected ‘Magnum Opus’, see ibid., 194.
Quoted in T. F. O’Meara, RomanticIdealism andRoman Catholicism (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame UP, 1982), 89. On Schelling’s increasing ‘need to place God beyond reasori, see also Gabriel Marcel, Coleridge et Schelling (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1971), 151–2.
On the importance of locating God beyond the phenomenal realm in order to account for His productive power or conform to Christian principles, and the countervailing need to locate him within nature in order to conceive his products as a unified whole, see especially David Vallins, ‘Production and Existence: Coleridge’s Unification of Nature’, JHI, 56: 1 (1995) 106–24.
Critics’ responses to Coleridge’s claim that the poem originated in a dream are usually ambivalent. Watson and Wheeler, for example, both emphasize the deliberateness of its depiction of imagination and the creative process, yet also acknowledge what Wheeler calls ‘the intuited unity and truth to aesthetic experience’ which ‘has preserved it as a compelling enigma’. See Watson, Coleridge the Poet (London: Routledge, 1966), 117–30, and Wheeler, The Creative Mind, 17–41.
The ‘deep well’ is a phrase which Lowes borrows from Henry James to refer to that ‘subliminal’ area of the mind in which ‘Images and impressions converge and blend’, and ‘the fragments which sink incessantly below the surface fuse and assimilate and coalesce’ — an idea closely resembling the creative processes described both by Coleridge in the preface to ‘Kubla Khari, and by Schelling in the System. See J. L. Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (London: Constable, 1927; 1930), 59–60, and STI, 223.
On the significance of the stylistic and formal eccentricities of ‘The Ancient Mariner’, and especially the effects of the marginal glosses added in 1817, see especially Wheeler, The Creative Mind, 42–64. For a translation of the quotation from Burnet see The Annotated Ancient Mariner, ed. Martin Gardner (London: Blond, 1965), 36.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2000 David Vallins
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Vallins, D. (2000). On Poetry and Philosophy: Romantic Feeling and Theory in Coleridge and Schelling. In: Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288997_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288997_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-40900-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-28899-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)