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Biographia
Literaria
Vol I
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
ISBN 1 901843 25 4
SAMUEL TAYLOR
COLERIDGE
EDITED WITH HIS AESTHETICAL ESSAYS BY J. SHAWCROSS
VOLUME I
Contents
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PREFACE................................................................................................... 6
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................... 10
I. EARLY YEARS. ............................................................................... 10
II. GERMANY...................................................................................... 26
III. KESWICK ...................................................................................... 29
IV. MALTA. ......................................................................................... 48
V. LECTURES AND ‘THE FRIEND’................................................... 49
VI. THE ‘BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA’. ............................................... 56
VII. THE ESSAY ‘ON POESY OR ART’............................................. 80
VIII. LATER YEARS. .......................................................................... 85
SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE ON THE GENESIS AND
PURPOSE OF THE BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.................................... 93
EDITIONS............................................................................................ 99
CHAPTER I.............................................................................................. 54
The motives of the present work—Reception of the Author’s
first publication—The discipline of his taste at school—The
effect of contemporary writers on youthful minds—Bowles’s
sonnets—Comparison between the Poets be/ore and since
Mr. Pope.
CHAPTER II ............................................................................................ 74
Supposed irritability of men of Genius—Brought to the test of
facts—Causes and Occasions of the charge—Its Injustice
CHAPTER III ........................................................................................... 92
The author’s obligations to critics, and the probable
occasion—Principles of modern criticism—Mr. Southey’s
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Biographia Literaria 4
Biographia Literaria 5
PREFACE
T
HE aim of the present edition of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria is
to furnish an accurate reprint of the edition of 1817, with such
additional matter as may contribute to a fuller understanding of the
text. For this purpose there have been appended, first, a reprint of
Coleridge’s strictly aesthetical writings; secondly, notes elucidatory of the
text; and thirdly, an introductory essay dealing with Coleridge’s theory of
the imagination.
The only annotated edition of the Biographia Literaria hitherto published
is the second edition of 1847, edited by Coleridge’s daughter and son-in-law,
and now long out of print. The notes on the philosophical portion of the text
in this edition are very exhaustive, and I have found them of great assistance
in preparing my own; but, as a whole, the edition does not meet the needs of
the reader of today. My own aim has been to provide such a commentary on
the text as will prove serviceable both to philosophical and to literary
students; and, above all, to furnish adequate references to other passages in
Coleridge’s published writings on the various topics dealt with in the text,
and thus to illustrate the continuity of his opinions, especially as they regard
the nature of art and the principles of artistic criticism.
It cannot, I think, be said that Coleridge’s philosophy of art has ever
received in England the consideration which it deserves. For this neglect
many causes might be suggested: the chief of them are probably the languid
interest which attaches to questions of aesthetic, and the prejudice existing
with regard to all Coleridge’s speculative writings, that they are dearly
purchased at the expense of more poetry of the type of Christabel or The
Ancient Mariner. This prejudice is an old one, and has received some
1907.
INTRODUCTION
I. EARLY YEARS.
T
HE autobiographical letters, which Coleridge addressed to his friend
Thomas Poole, 1 and meant for no eye but his, have preserved for
posterity an invaluable record of his early mental life. They reveal to
us the future transcendentalist in surroundings peculiarly fitted to
nourish his congenital temper. A fretful, sensitive, and passionate child,
Coleridge at all times shunned the companionship of his playmates, and
substituted for their pastimes a world of his own creation. To this world,
fashioned largely from the Arabian Nights, Robinson Crusoe, and other
works of wonder and fantasy, he attached a livelier faith than to the actual
world of his senses. And when his father discoursed to him of the stars,
dwelling upon their magnitude and their wondrous motions, he heard the tale
‘with a profound delight and admiration’ but without the least impulse to
question its veracity. ‘My mind had been habituated to the vast, and I never
regarded my senses as the criteria of my belief. I regulated all my creeds by
my conceptions, not by my sight, even at that age.’ Nor did the habit of self-
detachment from the actual world, thus early acquired, make of Coleridge a
mere day-dreamer, the slave of his fancies: it served, in his own opinion, an
educational end of the highest value. ‘Should children,’ he asks in the same
letter, ‘be permitted to read romances and relations of giants and magicians
and genii?’ And he answers, ‘I have formed my faith in the affirmative. I
know no other way of giving the mind a love of the Great and the Whole.’
1
See Letters of S. T. Coleridge, edited by E. H. Coleridge, i 4—21.
For those (he adds) who are educated through the senses ‘seem to want a
sense which I possess.... The universe to them is but a mass of little things.’1
‘It is evident that the attitude of the empiricist, the avowed or actual self-
surrender of the mind to the disconnected impressions of sense, was foreign
to Coleridge from the first.
In his ninth year Coleridge migrated to Christ’s Hospital: and here the
same habit of self-abstraction from his visible surroundings enforced itself.
In the first impulse of home-sickness, he was absorbed in memories of the
scenes from which he was so early doomed to be parted for ever: then, as
this yearning gradually abated, the passion for speculation took its place, and
he made his first acquaintance with the philosophy of mysticism in the
writings of the Neo-platonists.’2 But almost at the same time the world of
phenomena claimed his attention. The arrival of his brother Luke in London
to study at the London Hospital gave a new direction to his thoughts, and
soon he was deep in all the medical literature on which he could lay his
hands. Such reading, as we can readily understand, seemed to reveal to him a
new interpretation of things, an interpretation which it was so difficult to
bring into line with his idealistic speculations that it practically remained
unaffected by them. Hence the transition to Voltaire was easy. ‘After I had
read Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, I sported infidel: but my infidel
vanity never touched my heart.’3 Thus early was he awakened to
consciousness of that inward discord which it was the task of his life to
explain and to resolve—the discord engendered by the opposing claims of
the senses and intellect on the one hand, and of what he here chooses to call
1
Letters, ib. p. 16.
2
See Lamb’s Essay, Christ’s Hospital five-and-thirty years ago.
3
Gillman’s Life of Coleridge, p. 23
1
Biog. Lit. i. 4.
2
Ib. i. 14
1
Biog. Lit. i. 14.
2
Ib. i.93.
3
Letters, i. 113. 2 lb. i. 93.
1
Letters, i. 162. Yet it was many years before Coleridge embraced any definite form
of doctrine. See Biog. Lit. i. 136, 1. 30 and note
the more reflective faculty partook of death’, and so enabled him ‘to skirt,
without crossing, the sandy deserts of unbelief’.1 Hence it is that when,
during the years of his retirement at Stowey 2 (the Pantisocratic enthusiasm
now dead), he devoted his thoughts to ‘the foundations of religion and
morals’, the doubts which assailed him were directed against the human
intellect as an organ of final truths, not against those truths themselves. ‘I
became convinced,’ he writes, ‘that the evidence of the doctrines of religion
could not, like the truths of abstract science, be wholly independent of the
will.’ ‘If the mere intellect could make no certain discovery of a holy and
intelligent first cause, it might yet supply a demonstration that no legitimate
argument could be drawn from the intellect against its truth.’ 3 It is
significant to note that in thus turning the intellect against itself, and causing
it to assign bounds to the sphere of its own validity, Coleridge, still a
stranger to Kant, is adopting the critical attitude. For Kant he is further
preparing himself by his recognition of the importance of the Will, of self-
activity, in the attainment of truth—the conviction that a moral act is
indispensable to bring us into contact with reality. This conviction, if he
owed it partly to his training in idealism, was also forced upon him by
experiences whose very strength was the testimony of their truth—the
experiences of his religious, his moral, and also of his imaginative self, in all
of which he was conscious that his will was not merely active, but in a sense
even originative.
To the record of his mental state during this period contained in the
Biographia Literaria may be added the evidence of the poems which belong
1
Biog. Lit. i. 98.
2
Coleridge settled at Nether Stowey on Dec. 30, 1796.
3
Biog. Lit. i. 135.
1
Religious Musings, ll. 42—4.
2
The Destiny of Nations, pub. 1797, 11. 27 ff. It seems not improbable that
Coleridge, both in this poem and in the Religious Musings, has in mind (among a
mixture of theories) the central notion of Boehme’s philosophy, in which he
and his sense of the inadequacy, if not impiety, of all speculations of the
intellect, the ‘shapings of the unregenerate mind’, is expressed in a letter
written at the end of 1796 to Benjamin Flower, ‘I found no comfort till it
pleased the unimaginable high and lofty one to make my heart more tender
in regard of religious feelings. My metaphysical theories lay before me in the
hour of anguish as toys by the bedside of a child deadly sick.’ 1
But it was not through his religious, nor his moral feelings alone, that
Coleridge received assurance of a reality transcending that of the senses.
This sensible world itself, impenetrable as its meaning remained to the mere
‘sciential reason’, might yet, if viewed under another aspect and by another
faculty, confirm the witness of morality and religion. It is of this faculty that
Coleridge is thinking when, in the letter to Poole above quoted, he remarks
that those educated through the senses ‘seem to want a sense which I
possess. ... The universe to them is but a mass of little things’. And with the
1
Letters, p. 228. It is interesting to compare Schelling’s words in the
Transcendental Idealism (quoted on p. lxviii.) that ‘every single work of art
represents Infinity’.
1
Destiny of Nations, 11. 17 ff. A similar figure is found in Goethe, Faust, Pt. II,
First Monologue: ‘So bleibe mir die Sonne stets im Riicken,’ and ib., ‘Am farb’gen
Abglanz haben wir das Leben.’
The symbol is still present, but now only co-present with the direct
consciousness of the ideal.
The symbolic interpretation of nature, and the symbolic use of natural
images, was thus a fact and an object of reflection to Coleridge, even before
the period of his settlement at Stowey, but we have no evidence that he had
before that date assigned a definite faculty to this sphere of mental activity,
or named that faculty the imagination. Indeed, a letter to Thelwall, written
immediately before the migration to Stowey, seems to preclude such an
hypothesis. In this letter he speaks of the imagery of the Scriptures as ‘the
highest exercise of the fancy’: yet it is this very imagery which at a later
date, in comparing the fancy with imagination, he adduces as an example of
the latter power. There can, however, be no doubt that the conception of
beauty, as the revelation of spirit through matter, had been fostered in him
many years before through the study of Plato and the Neo-platonists: and his
habit of psychological research, influenced by the psychological methods of
those days, must have urged him to assign to a definite faculty this particular
mode of apprehending objects. But for the choice of the term imagination he
had no warranty in the practice of English philosophy: nor did its etymology
suggest such an application. Further, it must be borne in mind that
Coleridge’s speculations in the years previous to the closer intercourse with
Wordsworth (which dates from the summer of 1797) were as much
concerned with religion and metaphysic as with aesthetic proper. Hence we
cannot wonder if his analysis of the poetic faculties proved a long and
difficult task.
According to his own account in the Biographia Literaria, it was during
1
Fears in Solitude, 1798, 11. 17—27. The italics are of course mine.