Abstract
How do readers greet a poem? Is there a literary equivalent? Rather than overwhelming it with critique, how does a poem bring us to a threshold of expectancy or what one critic has called a “neighborhood of the questionable”?1 Greeting might be a trope for the poetic word, a word that as such remains precarious and questioning.2 Where a greeting leads to a conversation, however, readers do not leave things as they were: we invite the poem to share its question with us so that questioning is not so much the ultimate word but a shared word—and as such the poem can move on with us.
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Notes
Avital Ronell, “On the Misery of Theory without Poetry: Heidegger’s Reading of Holderlin’s ‘Andenken,’” PMLA 120, no. 1 (2005): 26.
John Milbank, “Divine Logos and Human Communication: A Recuperation of Coleridge,” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, 29 (1987): 73.
The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), vol. 5: 341.
Kelvin Everest, Coleridge’s Secret Ministry: the Conversation Poems, 1795–98 (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1979), 260.
See Matthew Vanwinkle, “Fluttering on the Grate: Revision in ‘Frost at Midnight,’” Studies in Romanticism 43, no. 4 (2004): 588.
John Beer, Coleridge’s Poetic Intelligence (London: Macmillan, 1977), 139.
See Robert Crawford, “‘My Babe So Beautiful!,’” Times Literary Supplement, 26 (November 2004): 13–14.
For the influence of Hartley and Berkeley, see James D. Boulger, “Imagination and Speculation in Coleridge’s Conversation Poems,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 65 (1965): 702.
See Tim Milnes, “Through the Looking-Glass: Coleridge and Post-Kantian Philosophy,” Comparative Literature 51, no. 4 (1999): 310.
See Richard H. Fogle, The Idea of Coleridge’s Criticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 28.
David Miall, “The Displacement of Emotions: The Case of ‘Frost at Midnight,’” The Wordsworth Circle 20, no. 2 (1989): 99.
Donald MacKinnon, “Coleridge and Kant” in Coleridge’s Variety, ed. John Beer (London: Macmillan, 1974), 192–3.
See Jeff Malpas, “From the Transcendental to the ‘Topological’: Heidegger on Ground, Unity and Limit” in From Kant to Davidson: Philosophy and the Idea of the Transcendental, ed. Jeff Malpas (London: Routledge, 2003), 87.
Dermot Moran, “Making Sense: Husserl’s Phenomenology as Transcendental Idealism,” in From Kant to Davidson: Philosophy and the Idea of the Transcendental, ed. Jeff Malpas (London: Routledge, 2003), 63.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings, ed. Thomas Baldwin (London: Routledge, 2004), 37.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, trans. James M. Edie (Evanson, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 6, 22.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort; trans. Alphonzo Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 152.
Jan Plug, “The Rhetoric of Secrecy: Figures of the Self in ‘Frost at Midnight,’” in Coleridge’s Visionary languages: Essays in Honour of J. B. Beer, ed. Tim Fulford and Morton D. Paley (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1993), 36
See Nick Reid, “Coleridge and Schelling: The Missing Transcendental Reduction,” Studies in Romanticism 33, no. 3 (1994): 469.
See James B. Steeves, “The Virtual Body: Merleau-Ponty’s Early Philosophy of Imagination,” Philosophy Today 45, no. 4 (2001): 373.
See Glenn A. Mazis, “Merleau-Ponty, Inhabitation, and the Emotions,” in Merleau-Ponty: Critical Essays, ed. Henry Pietersma (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989), 264.
John Milbank, “The Soul of Reciprocity Part Two: Reciprocity Granted,” Modern Theology 17, no. 4 (2001): 497
See Remy C. Kwant, From Phenomenology to Metaphysics: An Inquiry into the Last Period of Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophical Life (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1966), 243.
See Jerry H. Gill, Merleau-Ponty and Metaphor (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1991), 148.
Jean-Louis Chrétien, “The Wounded Word: Phenemenology of Prayer” in Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, ed. Dominique Janicaud et al. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 148. Chrétien is echoing Nervalis here.
Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Call and the Response (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 18.
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© 2012 Peter Larkin
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Larkin, P. (2012). “Frost at Midnight”: Some Coleridgean Intertwinings. In: Wordsworth and Coleridge. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010940_13
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