COLERIDGE (1772-1834)

The Nature of his critical work

Coleridge is the first English critic to base his literary criticism on

philosophical principles. He was more interested in the creative process that
made a poem possible than in the finished product.

 He tried to furnish the principles of writing

 He was not much concerned about how to pass judgement on
what was written by others.

Coleridge’s critical works suffer from a lack of system

 His Biographia Literaria is ill planned and incomplete.

 His Lectures on Shakespeare are disjointed and ill-reported.

Coleridge borrowed freely from German philosophers—Lessing, Kant,

Schelling, Schiller and others.

THEORY OF IMAGINATION

ALL creative activities are products of imagination according to Coleridge.

Imagination was often confused with fancy in the 18th century.

When the imitation faithfully imaged the original, it was held to be a

work of imagination; and where it was substituted by something of
the poet’s own invention it was held to be a work of fancy.

Coleridge owed his interest in the question of imagination to Wordsworth’s

poetical practice. Before Wordsworth, poets only gave ‘what oft was
thought’ and hardly ever what was equally felt. It was Wordsworth who
bridged the gap between the two. His feelings issued forth as thoughts and
thoughts as feelings. This seems to be his feeling when he defined poetry as
‘emotions recollected in tranquillity’.

Nature and Genesis of Imagination & Fancy

  Coleridge finds two forms of imagination—primary
imagination and secondary imagination.

 Primary imagination—is simply the power of perceiving the objects of

sense—persons, place and things—both in their parts and wholes. It
enables the mind to form a clear picture of the object perceived by the
senses.
 Secondary imagination—is a composite faculty of the soul, consisting
of all the other faculties, perception, intellect, will, emotions. While the
primary imagination uses only perception, secondary imagination uses
all. It is therefore a more active agent than the primary imagination. It is a
shaping and modifying power. From its ‘plastic stress’ objects emerge
fashioned in its own likeness. It steeps the in its own light or shade.
Objects are not to it what they are in the external world of nature, but as
the mind conceives them to be. In this process the mind and nature act
and react on each other.
 Fancy—Coleridge did not regard fancy as a creative power at all. It only
combines the things, it sees, into pleasing shapes instead of fusing them,
like imagination, to give them shapes of its own. The original material—
the material on which it works—ever remains the same, clearly
‘distinguishable in member, joint, or limb’, only it is offered in anew
combination, the parts of different things or the things themselves, are
joined to form a new thing, with the component parts or things
undergoing no change whatever. Wordsworth cites an instance of fancy
from Chesterfield—
The dews of the evening most carefully shun,
They are the tears of the sky for the loss of the sun

Here the image presented is that of the sky weeping, a new thing
certainly, but to do so all that the poet does is to combine four things—sky,
evening, dews, tears--, none of which receives any colouring or modification
from his own mind. It is like putting four separate pictures together on the
same screen to form a new picture. So fancy is the arbitrary bringing
together of things that lie remote and forming them into a unity. It is the
‘faculty of bringing together images dissimilar in the main by some one
point or more of likeness.’

Hence fancy is a combinatory and imagination a unifying power.

Fancy is a mixture, the ingredients, though held together, retain their
original properties. Imagination is a compound where all elements are
‘dissolved, diffused, dissipated’ into a new substance altogether.

Imagination is the distinguishing quality of the poetry of Shakespeare

and Milton, fancy that of poets from Donne to Cowley. Spenser has
‘fancy under conditions of imagination. He has an imaginative fancy,
but he has not imagination.

Coleridge’s View of ART

Coleridge viewed art as the union of the soul with the external world or
nature. It represents nature as thought and thought as nature. It is at once
more or less than what it imitates. It is more because it infuses the artist’s
soul into it, and less because it ignores whatever is alien to the soul. It is
therefore not an imitation of reality in its outward manifestation. It reveals
rather what lies deep within it.

Imagination always adds something of its own. What is dark, it illumines,

and what is low it raises, it makes the familiar strange and the strange
familiar.

Art has a universalizing power which turns the concrete or the individual (a
Robinson Crusoe, for instance) into the general (Everyman) and an image ( a
leech-gatherer, for instance) into an idea (resolution and independence).

His Definition of a Poem

Poetry is an activity of the imagination, idealising the real and realising the
ideal. A poem uses the same medium as a prose composition, namely,
words. So the difference between the two must lie in their different use of
words in consequence of their different objects. If the aim of a poem is
merely to facilitate memory, all it has to do is to put words in the metrical
form with or without rhyme, as in the following verses on the number of
days in the months:--

Thirty days hath September,

April, June, and November, etc.
Here metre and rhyme are not necessitated by anything in the content of the
poem. There is no natural relation between the two.

The immediate object of a poem is to give pleasure. Metre under certain

conditions induces pleasure. Metrical form of poetry is closely related to the
content. A poem is a metrical composition which is opposed to works of
science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth. In a
long poem some parts are bound to be only partially satisfying or not so at
all—Dryden found such flats even in Paradise Lost. Coleridge concludes, a
poem of any length neither can be nor ought to be, all poetry.

On poetic diction
Coleridge disputed the assertion of Wordsworth that there was no difference
between the language of prose and the language of poetry. He asserted that
the language of poetry is different from the language of prose, even as prose
itself differs from the language of conversation.

Poetry uses metre necessitating sometimes a different arrangement of words

than would be natural in prose. To all the arguments of Wordsworth to the
contrary, Coleridge has this final reply to give: ‘I write in metre, because I
am about to use a language different from that of prose’.

On Poetic Genius
Coleridge distinguishes between genius and talent by making the one almost
identical with imagination and the other almost identical with fancy. Genius,
like imagination is creative; and talent, like fancy, merely combinatory.
Genius is inborn and talent acquired. Genius manifests itself in 4 different
ways:-
1. Sense of Musical Delight
It consists in ‘the perfect sweetness’ of the versification. It is the outward
manifestation of the music in the poet’s soul.
2. Objectivity
It shows itself in ‘the choice of subjects very remote from the private
interests and circumstances of the writer himself and in the utter aloofness of
the poet’s own feelings, from those of which he is at once the painter and the
analyst.
3. The Shaping and Modifying Power of Imagination
A poet’s pictures of life are not faithful copies, accurately rendered in words.
They become poetic only as far as they are modified by a predominant
passion. The objects observed in life are by themselves lifeless
—‘inanimate’. The poet transfers his own spirit into them and they burst into
life.

4. Depth of Energy of thought

Wordsworth says, “Poems to which any value can be attached were never
produced on any variety of subjects but by a man, who, being possessed of
more than usual organic sensibility had also thought long and deeply”.
Coleridge is of the same opinion, “No man was ever yet a great poet,
without being at the same time a great philosopher”.

ON DRAMATIC ILLUSION
In his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge uses the famous phrase, “willing
suspension of disbelief”. The reader or spectator knows well enough that it is
a tale or play. But to believe what the poet says, to have faith in his fictitious
world, he willingly suspends his disbelief in it for the duration of his reading
or its performance in the theatre. Only by doing so can he derive any
pleasure from a tale or play.

Coleridge agrees with Dr. Johnson that ‘the audience knows from the first to
the last that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players’.
The reader or the spectator allows himself to be deluded temporarily to be
able to enjoy it. He just takes leave of his judgement for the time being.

The value of his criticism

 Coleridge differs from his predecessors by his psychological

approach to literary problems
 He was interested in a play or a poem for what they displayed
of human nature
 The study of poetry led him to search for the sources that gave
it birth
 Even poetic diction, he would discuss with reference to the
rudiments of human speech
 Coleridge’s theory of imagination is heavily weighed in favour
of one particular type of poetry—the romantic.