Coleridge's Organic Unity : A Semiotic Approach
Abhay Mudgal2022, Shodh Drishti
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Abstract
Coleridge has exercised an enormous influence on modern critics. Including T.E. Hulme with whom modern criticism is said to originate, that one has little hesitation in giving assent to Hyman's significant remark that "the Biographia Literaria" published in 1817 is almost Bible of modern criticism." Saintsbury regards Coleridge as the greatest English critic and one of the three great critics in the history of literary criticism. In his stupendous work on the history of criticism he remarks that the Biographia Literaria "is among the few works which constitute the very Bible of criticism." He considers the great literary critics and excluding one after the other from the category of the greatest critics he pronounces: "So, then, there abide these three, Aristotle, Longinus and Coleridge," Although he hesitates to call Coleridge greater than Aristotle and Longinus, he nonetheless asserts that the former's "range is necessarily wider." He admits the great importance of Coleridge in the modern age; hence he aptly remarks, "For all, I believe, of these later days certainly for all whose mother tongue is English Coleridge is the critical author to be turned over by day and by night." This paper intends to establish Coleridge as a semiotic critic.
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