Coleridge, Yeats and the Sage

1980

Romanticism, 1998

To a great extent, she succeeds. The uncritical enthusiast is given fair warning, the wary admirer encouraged. Ashton's commentary is tactful and compassionate: Coleridge is never reduced to a set of psychological predictabilities. Two themes thread a way through the tangle. There is, first, the persistent loneliness of the child who perceived himself unloved. To this urgent need for affection is added the guilt of the opium-eater: the horror of a self- incurred and possibly unforgivable bondage. Given these guiding elements, Coleridge's biographer, working through the extensive notebooks and letters, needs to be on guard. Insecurity is a poor environment for truthfulness and 'addicts, we know, lie' (p. 6). They also manipulate affection. The 'wonderful man' needs constant watching lest he make off with the emotional silver. Ashton is at her best in mapping the poet's ambivalence and sometimes tortuous shiftiness. There is, for instance, a particularly fine narrative of the despairing flight to Malta and of the excuses and delays by which Coleridge prevented his direct return home. Ashton offers nimble analyses of Coleridge's letters and his self-disclosive notebook entries. She trains the reader in an affectionate suspicion, alert to accents of insight and self-deceit, defensiveness and honest apology, love and resentment, superiority and self-deprecation, pleading and poison. Ashton provides a tenacious posthumous conscience, monitoring the wriggles of deceit and the seductiveness of need. Days after his move to Nether Stowey, Coleridge boasts

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,

2015

way, doctrines whose essential kinship with the view of nature in much of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge's work is not difficult to see. The attempt to provide a philosophically rigorous grounding for the intuition of nature as embodied spirit made an enormous impact on Coleridge in particular during his two year period of study in Germany. Schelling's work, by his own admission, greatly influenced Coleridge's own philosophical attempts to elaborate a metaphysics showing the essential kinship of nature and spirit. Such an intuition had already received powerful expression in the new genre of the Conversation Poem. It is accordingly through the work of Coleridge that the concerns examined in Chapter 1 came to play a significant part in the development of English Romanticism. It will be evident from this that I do not agree with the belief that the "philosopher" and the "poet" in Coleridge were antithetical to one another. No reader of both the poetry and t...

Studies in English, New Series, 1980

2020

In his celebrated book After Virtue Alasdair MacIntyre asks the reader to imagine a world where the language of science has been handed down in a fragmentary fashion so that one becomes an intellectual archaeologist, not only providing links between key terms and concepts but also fitting these terms to the modern world of scientific discourse. In many respects this is akin to what Peter Cheyne has accomplished in his book Coleridge's Contemplative Philosophy; Coleridge has been reinvented for a new range of students and scholars. This is no minor claim. The philosophical Coleridge has hitherto been received as a fragmented romantic (with kinder readings suggesting connections with the Frühromantiker), a plagiarist of Schelling, or a British footnote to the German idealist tradition, with a consensus regarding his importance in introducing the Idealist system of philosophy to Britain. However, more recently, thinkers such as Gregory, Hamilton, Kooy, Struwig, Flores and Wheeler have glossed major issues regarding Coleridge's self-proclaimed ideal realism. Moreover, the idea of philosophical romanticism has gained currency in terms of the continuing importance of both the idealist and the romantic traditions in addressing current issues in areas as diverse as aesthetics, social policy, theology and cultural theory. In light of recent scholarly developments and subsequent to his edited volume Coleridge and Contemplation (2017), Cheyne's newest monograph is possibly the most impressive attempt so far at articulating a comprehensive architectonic of Coleridge's often fragmented oeuvre, while also in bringing Coleridge back squarely into the fold as a key thinker with contemporary relevance. The monograph clearly lays out this architectonic structure, dealing in turn with formative concepts such as the translucent/transparent contemplation of ideas, the lux/lumen distinction of reason and Coleridge's further development of Platonic noetic ideas. It also deftly introduces concepts such as energic/energetic as subsidiaries to his overall schema of higher and lower reason. The signal claim is that the ascent to noetic ideas is acquired indirectly through the imagination and involving a higher level, through inchoate contemplation. The fruitfulness of this approach to Coleridge's thought is that rather than seeing it in a poststructuralist-and generally aporetic sense-one can read Coleridge as describing an ascent to the higher ideas of reason (freedom, ethics, the will), through a process of contemplation that charters an a

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.

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)

Aeon, 2021

Though far more often remembered as a poet, Coleridge's theory of ideas was spectacular in its originality and bold reach. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) stands tall in the cultural pantheon for a few world-famous poems. It is less well known that in his own lifetime, and in the decades following his death, this canonical poet had an equal reputation as a philosopher. This article introduces key elements of Coleridge's philosophy in outline, including his theory of ideas, the polar philosophy, and his dynamic idealism, which sees matter as arising from a clash of opposed forces, themselves derived from more originary powers or ideas.

Coleridge's 1817 text Biographia Literaria was one of his later publications that delved into a variety of topics, ranging from autobiographical anecdotes to literary criticism and metaphysical arguments about the self and reality. Coleridge was better known as a poet in his earlier days when he, along with his friend William Wordsworth, had published Lyrical Ballads in 1798. A couple of decades later, Coleridge began writing the Biographia Literaria initially as a preface to a collection of his poems, but it soon became large enough to be published as an independent text in two volumes. 1 Among the principal themes of this text is Coleridge's disagreements with Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction and the idea of a lack of significant differences between poetry and prose. Coleridge's close friendship with Wordsworth had already ended in 1810, but it was in the Biographia that he first published his differences from Wordsworth in literary criticism. 2 This critique is closely tied to a second theme in the Biographia, which is Coleridge's theory of "imagination" as a vital and voluntary force that is embodied in poetic language in opposition to the mechanical combinative power called "fancy." Coleridge's emphasis on the active force of imagination supported his broader idealistic theological framework that opposed the materialism of philosophies arguing for the primacy of empirically observable phenomena. The Biographia combines these philosophical elements with eclectic personal anecdotes in a memoir form.

European Romantic Review, 2017

Conversation is a distinctive form of communication that balances verbal and nonverbal cues, and these qualities have marked affinities with how Romantic writers conceived of poetry’s unique effects upon readers, listeners, and poets themselves. As an example of these “conversational poetics,” this essay examines how Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who both authored the “conversation poems” and was a notoriously one-sided talker, was fixated on what Romantics would have called “natural signs” in his poetry and personal writings. Far from always having delivered monologues, Coleridge had a talent for multisensory communication. However, this same talent left him vulnerable in his intimate relationships, leading him to withdraw from close, communicative friendships into solipsistic lecturing. As a young poet, though, he had an ambitious concept of sympathy whose achievement sometimes proved too much to bear if he could not regulate it with verse. Examples include an 1803 notebook entry in which Coleridge and Wordsworth exchange a disconcerting “pig look.” This look is contrasted to Geraldine’s “serpent’s eye” in “Christabel.” The essay concludes that poems such as “Christabel” should inform our understanding of what constitutes a conversation poem, especially if we acknowledge Coleridge’s own attitudes toward conversation and the nonverbal components of poetry.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Devon in 1772. His father, a clergyman, moved his family to London when Coleridge was young, and it was there that Coleridge attended school (as he would later recall in poems such as "Frost at Midnight"). He later attended Cambridge but left without completing his studies. During the politically charged atmosphere of the late eighteenth century--the French Revolution had sent shockwaves through Europe, and England and France were at war--Coleridge made a name for himself both as a political radical and as an important young poet; along with his friends Robert Southey and William Wordsworth, he became one of the most important writers in England. Collaborating with Wordsworth on the revolutionary Lyrical Ballads of 1798, Coleridge helped to inaugurate the Romantic era in England; as Wordsworth explained it in the 1802 preface to the third edition of the work, the idea of poetry underlying Lyrical Ballads turned the established conventions of poetry upside down: Privileging natural speech over poetic ornament, simply stated themes over elaborate symbolism, emotion over abstract thought, and the experience of natural beauty over urban sophistication, the book paved the way for two generations of poets, and stands as one of the milestones of European literature.

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...