Coleridge's Criticism

Analysis, observations, and quotations on Biographia Literaria, The Statesman's Manual, Shakespearean Criticism, and On Poesy or Art. I highlight Coleridge's definitions of critical terms (like poetry and imagination) and compare his friendship with Wordsworth to the friendship of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

2009

THOROUGHLY COMPILED, forty-page timeline initially suggests what the reader finds parcelled out in the subsequent thirteen chapters on Coleridge’s reception in nine European countries: as translations from and criticisms of his works, after a slow start in the nineteenth century, become rapidly more widespread in the twentieth, the European reception of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetry as well as his critical, philosophical, and theological writings assumes a centrifugal trajectory. The contributors to Shaffer and Zuccato’s volume aptly convey how this reception has unfolded into increasingly uneven, disparate, even contradictory fragments between and within their countries and cultures of reception. This is what makes this volume Coleridgean in the most profound sense, as I shall elaborate below. In the extensive number of works of reception cited throughout, the reader encounters, firstly, a multiplicity of often conflicting interpretations and appropriations of Coleridge’s politi...

2017

In his philosophical writings, Coleridge increasingly developed his thinking about imagination, a symbolizing precursor to contemplation, to a theory of contemplation itself, which for him occurs in its purest form as a manifestation of ‘Reason’. Coleridge is a particularly challenging figure because he was a thinker in process, and something of an omnimath, a Renaissance man of the Romantic era. The dynamic quality of his thinking, the ‘dark fluxion’ pursued but ultimately ‘unfixable by thought’, and his extensive range of interests make essential an approach that is philosophical yet also multi-disciplinary. This is the first collection of essays to be written mainly by philosophers and intellectual historians on Coleridge’s mature philosophy. With a foreword by Baroness Mary Warnock, and original essays on Coleridge and Contemplation by prominent philosophers such as Sir Roger Scruton, David E. Cooper, Michael McGhee, and Andy Hamilton, this volume provides a stimulating collection of insights and explorations into what Britain’s foremost philosopher-poet had to say about the contemplation that he considered to be the highest of the human mental powers. The essays by philosophers are supported by new developments in philosophically minded criticism from Coleridge scholars in English departments, including Jim Mays, Kathleen Wheeler, and James Engell. They approach Coleridge as an energetic yet contemplative thinker concerned with the intuition of ideas and the processes of cultivation in self and society. Other essays, from intellectual historians and theologians, clarify the historical background, and ‘religious musings’, of Coleridge’s thought regarding contemplation.

Le Simplegadi

Coleridge and Contemplation, brilliantly edited by Peter Cheyne, with a Foreword by Baroness Mary Warnock, is a thorough and comprehensive collection of essays by renowned scholars from different research backgrounds who put together their varied expertise to scrutinise Coleridge's philosophical, poetic, scientific and metaphysical thoughts (in poetry and prose) from a wide range of perspectives, but with a main focus centred on the idea of contemplation/meditation in his opus. The book acknowledges Coleridge's original and innovative work and constant and tireless study of the human being, from philosophy to many branches of what was to become 'science', from religion to politics, including Hinduism and the French Revolution, from Classical to musical, medical and physiological studies, including the workings of the psyche, often anticipating later psychology. Indeed, in studying the side-effects of laudanum on his mind and body, as Knight mentions, he was a "careful follower of his symptoms and coiner of the word 'psychosomatic'" (91). Coleridge and Contemplation is divided into four parts, beginning with an in-depth analysis of Coleridge's "Poetics and Aesthetics" (Part I), with contributions on contemplation,

International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, 2020

1980

JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND PHENOMENOLOGY, 2024

This short book defends the respectable thesis that British romantic poet and philosopher S.T.Coleridge pursued a phenomenology, incipient though comparable to Edmund Husserl’s,that led to his “transcendental system of poetic composition and critique” (2). Arguing forshelf-space for his book, Tom Marshall mentions studies that overlook the Coleridgeanconnection to phenomenology, yet he constructs his thesis in a way that sidesteps the manyworks on Coleridge that refer to major phenomenologists (e.g. Staples, “Rebirth of anEnigma”; Uehlein, Die Manifestation; Larkin, “Coleridge Conversing”; Jacobs,“Phenomenology and Revolutionary Romanticism”). Others have studied Coleridge’s phe-nomenology on its own terms, such as Rei Terada’s “Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction”,Kazuko Oguro’s excellent “From Sight to Insight”, and, if I may, my chapters (with somereference to Heidegger) on Coleridgean “Aesthetic Contemplation” and “Poetic Life-Writing”(Cheyne, Coleridge’s Contemplative Philosophy, 84–124)

The Wordsworth Circle, 2023

Review of Tom Marshall's book

Colloquium III, 2016

This article dwells on Coleridge's prose to understand his negotiation of the problem of representing essences, rather than things, a crucial concern of the poet. He saw himself as a communicator of ideas, bringing to life the readers' imagination through a language that is close to the language of dreams, that is, associative and non-linear . In this article I discuss passages from Biographia Literaria, Aids to Reflection, Lay Sermons and Notebook entries to elucidate my understanding of his ideas.

The written monument of Coleridge's critical work is contained in 24 chapters of Biographia Literaria (1815-17). In this critical disquisition, Coleridge concerns himself not only with the practice of criticism, but also, with its theory. In his practical approach to criticism, we get the glimpse of Coleridge the poet; whereas in theoretical discussion, Coleridge the philosopher came to the centre stage.  In Chapter XIV of Biographia Literaria, Coleridge's view on nature and function of poetry is discussed in philosophical terms. The poet within Coleridge discusses the difference between poetry and prose, and the immediate function of poetry, whereas the philosopher discusses the difference between poetry and poem. He was the first English writer to insist that every work of art is, by its very nature, an organic whole. At the first step, he rules out the assumption, which, from Horace onwards, had wrought such havoc in criticism, that the object of poetry is to instruct; or, as a less extreme form of the heresy had asserted, to make men morally better.