Coleridge Summer Conference 2004
Abstracts
'Unitarians on the Susquehanna'
Stuart Andrews
sm.andrews@ukonline.co.uk
Joseph Priestley saw Thomas Cooper's settlement on the Susquehanna as 'an asylum for my christian unitarian friends'. Priestley planned to establish a college 'on the most liberal principles', though he admitted that Northumberland was hardly 'the Athens of America'. Among Unitarian refugees he hope to entice to the Susquehanna was Harry Toulmin, son of Rev. Joshua Toulmin, Unitarian minister of Taunton's Mary Street Baptist Chapel, who seems himself to have considered emigrating to America with his entire congregation.
Cooper's settlement was already failing when Coleridge read Some Information Respecting America. Cooper was reduced to living in 'a log House of one room below, and a room (under the roof) over it', which did not quite match Southey's idyllic picture of life in an American log cabin. But Priestley and Cooper both stayed on in Northumberland county, where they were joined by William Christie, uncle of Thomas Christie, founder-editor of the Analytical Review. William briefly lodged with Priestley, while trying to start a grammar school, but after Priestley's death he returned to Philadelphia. Credited with being 'the first minister of the first permanent congregation in America that was called Unitarian', Christie's importance lies in the conspicuous clarity with which he expounded Unitarian theology for American readers.
Would this trio of Northumberland Unitarians have been neighbours of the pantisocrats? Pantisocracy (like the 1795 Bristol lectures) was part and parcel of Coleridge's short-lived commitment to Unitarian Christianity. The Church of England would itself benefit from the failure of Coleridge and Southey to reach the Susquehanna.
‘GOD’S HAND IN THE WORLD’: COLERIDGE,
barbeaujw@earthlink.net
Although some attention has been given to the
appearance of Coleridge’s “Pentad of Operative Christianity” in not only Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit
(1840) but a myriad of notebook and marginal entries, few have discussed the
function of the “synthesis” of the Pentad:
the preacher. In this paper, I
explore the role of the preacher as a revelatory vehicle of divine ideas in
Coleridge’s thought by placing his work in contact with the history of Anglican
theology and its emphasis on the centrality of hearing the Word of God in
English parishes. In particular, I
survey the Puritan notion of prophesying, or preaching (e.g. William Perkins),
as an avenue of examining the relationship between the role of the inspired
prophet in biblical literature and the continued relevance, according to
Coleridge, of the inspired preacher of the Christian church. Next, I examine Coleridge’s father’s treatment
of the visionary prophet in the Dissertation
on the Book of Judges (1768).
Finally, in light of this background, I turn to Coleridge’s writings on
the Christian preacher and the role of prophecy in order to better understand
how the Divine Word is revealed through the Spirit at work in the inspired
speaker. I thereby shed light on the
significance of one largely unexplored aspect of Coleridge’s conception of
Christian theology.
Coleridge on Beauty: Beauty, Love and the ‘Beauty-making Power’
J. Robert Barth, S.J.
robert.barth@bc.edu
Among
Coleridge’s scattered writings on beauty, perhaps the most coherent and cogent
are his 1814 essays in five successive issues of Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal.
In addition to discussing the theory of beauty he proposes there, this
lecture will argue—with some emphasis on the words "interest" and
"complacency"—that his understanding of beauty is intimately bound up
with his view of love. It will also give
some attention to the relationship between Coleridge’s theory of beauty and his
poetic practice, taking a cue from Coleridge’s use of "Dejection"
within the argument of the essays.
Coleridge's Fantasizing
Imagination
John Beer
I
am hoping to take another look at
Coleridge's puzzling personality, including the question of his unacknowledged
borrowings, and to think about them once again in relation to Norman Fruman's Coleridge the Damaged Archangel and the
psychological interpretation he proposes. I shall also discuss Henry James's
story 'The Coxon Fund', which is well
known to have been prompted by his reading of Campbell's biography of STC.
Silence and the
Pantheistic Sublime in Coleridge’s Early Poetry
Richard Berkeley
berkeley55@hotmail.com
This paper examines Coleridge’s early poetry in
relation to the theological and philosophical issues that the young Coleridge
was grappling with. It focuses on the
function of pantheism and pantheism-like patterns, and the issues they raise
about the status of the finite individual in relation to the infinite.
Silence
is often used in the early poetry to represent the possibility of a threatened
or extinguished individuality, as in the loss of voice experiences in
“Christabel” and “The Ancient Mariner”.
Silence also plays a crucial role in less overtly threatening
articulations of the relationship between finite and infinite, as in “The
Eolian Harp”, “Frost at Midnight”, and even “Dejection: An Ode”.
My
argument is to thematically link these experiences through the idea of the
sublime as the point of breakdown of language – the point where language fails
to individuate and therefore falls into silence. This underlines Coleridge’s fundamental ambivalence – his longing
for unity and his fear of the elision of self necessary to achieve it.
In
conclusion I will broach the question of the emotional dynamic that underlies
these experiences for Coleridge, and their possible relationship to his later
thought and theology.
Transcendence Desired, Transcendence Denied:
Shared Anxiety In “Tintern
Abbey” and “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”
Thomas J. Brennan
tbrennan@sju.edu
Wordsworth’s concerns about the effect of “The
Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” on the reception of Lyrical Ballads may reflect more of an anxiety about his contributions
than about Coleridge’s. This possibility emerges especially when we consider
the implicit religious content of “Tintern Abbey” in comparison to the manifest
content in Coleridge’s “Rhyme.” In “Tintern Abbey” the ruin stands as a
reminder of what was once there: the abbatial church, the smoke of liturgical
incense, and religious communities in quest of transcendence. What remains in
the area are the forest temple (columns of trees and arching branches), the
smoke of chimneys from “pastoral farms” (l.17), perhaps an occasional hermit or
vagrant, and – briefly – William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. That such
fragments fail to be integrated into a vision of transcendence is an anxiety
the poem never resolves.
Coleridge’s
Mariner lives this anxiety – the desire for transcendence haunts the narrative.
The Albatross’s appearing “as if it had been a Christian soul” (l.65), the
souls’ of the dead crew whizzing by the Mariner, the spirit that powers the
ship, the Mariner’s blessing of the water snakes – these highlight how much the
Mariner wants to situate his story in a framework of recognizable metaphors
reconstituted from fragments. The process, however, fails. The Wedding Guest’s
fear of the Mariner – he leaves him like a person who has been “that hath been
stunned” (l.622) – suggests a fear that Wordsworth, like Coleridge, knew too
well. Questing for transcendence in Nature amounts to confronting this hope’s
disappointment.
Coleridge on Words,
Thoughts, and Things
Fred Burwick
Departing
from earlier accounts of Coleridge's language theory (Marks, McKusick,
Christiansen), this lecture probes into Coleridge's desynonymization of
"Positiveness" and "Certainty". At the NASSR conference
in New York last August, Seamus Perry gave a paper on "Romantic Poetry and
the Matter of Fact," which led me to question what Coleridge meant by
"matter of fact," when, as in his essay "On Certainty," he
argues the tentativeness of truth, language, and just about everything else.
The
self-conscious nature of the address in Coleridge's Odes
Monika Class, Balliol College, Oxford
monika.class@balliol.oxford.ac.uk
The English ode is an open form, which can be
distinguished through its meditative and sometimes dramatic structure, its
serenity in tone, its address to an object, an abstract or personified idea
and, according to Stuart Curran, its ‘dialect between human necessity and
transcendental yearning.’ (Poetic Form and British Romanticism, 1986, 71). This
paper will focus on what could be called ‘the transcendental yearning’, which
is inherent in Coleridge’s odes: ‘Dejection: An Ode,’ ‘Constancy to an Ideal
Object,’ and ‘France: An Ode.’ To be more precise, I intend to explore the ways
in which aspects of Coleridge’s concepts of truth and meaning are reflected in the
generic characteristic of the ode, in particular through the prominent function
of the address. The dialectics of all three poems are dominated by the role of
the address. In ‘Dejection: An Ode’ and
‘Constancy to an Ideal Object’, both addressees remain elusive, as the
existence of the lady as well as the ideal object is doubted. In ‘France: An
Ode’, the address to freedom and liberty subsumes the tension between
externalised political universe and the internalized will of the speaker, which
establishes the major dialectics of this poem.
Throughout the three poems, the relation between the yearning for
external absolute truth, which is personified through the apostrophe, and the
limiting awareness of one’s own consciousness, ‘O yearning thought! That liv’st
but in the brain’ (‘Constancy to an Ideal Object’) remains ambiguous.
Through this meditative structure, these odes demonstrate a constant
awareness of their own subjectivity as poetic performance. It remains to be shown to what extent the
thematisation of subjectivity, ie self-consciousness, is a product of the
generic demands of the ode form.
Finally, I would like to link the analysis of self-consciousness in
these odes to Chapter 12 of the Biographia Literaria, in which Coleridge
delineate the significance of ‘the SELF, in order to lose and find all self in
GOD.’ (Coleridge Major Works, 2000, 300), or in other words, in how far
self-consciousness represents the godlike in the human. The struggle within the
forms of these three odes performs the yearning for divine truth, which seems
however inaccessible due to the self-reflexive nature of the imagination.
Coleridge
the Biographer of Sir Alexander Ball
Allan Clayson
pamandallan@clayson.fsnet.co.uk
In 1808
Rear-Admiral Sir Alexander Ball, effectively Governor of Malta, died in office
in his early fifties. Coleridge had worked for him as Private Secretary and
later as Acting Public Secretary and had lived with him and Lady Ball as one of
the family towards the end of his stay on the island. His relationship with the
Governor was warm until, perhaps, near the very end, and the Notebooks of this
time are full of personal touches which bring Ball to life, while such letters
as have survived from these days reveal a deep mutual respect.
Naturally
news of Ball’s death profoundly affected Coleridge, then at Allan Bank, and
with surprising application he immediately set about composing a memoir, which
was to take precedence over all other articles in The Friend, until the unfortunate demise of that journal, when the
memoir wanted but a conclusion. The memoir was finely crafted , and so well
structured in its periodical form as to require but little revision for The
Friend of 1818.
This
paper looks at the work from the angle of Coleridge as biographer, and the
surprising strengths he reveals in this one-off sally into what was an
unfamiliar genre for him. The paper will attempt to analyse his biographical
skills – which mingle graphic accounts of Ball’s heroic deeds with his moral
worth, political acumen and qualities of leadership – and attempt to make a
case for the work to stand among the highest of Coleridge’s shorter prose
achievements.
The
Garden of Boccaccio
Graham Davidson
gcdd@blueyonder.co.uk
Coleridge’s inspiration for this poem was Ann Gillman’s
sympathetic act of silently placing an engraving of the Decameron on his desk. This
enabled him to celebrate ways of life and love he neither approved nor
adopted. I want to set this surprising
celebration in the context of an intellectual struggle occupying the last 15
years of Coleridge’s life. From
approximately 1819 to 1823 he was setting down what we have of the Opus Maximum, the mark of which is the
necessary union of the will with the ideas of Reason; all other modes of the
will, he asserts, create a false or phantom self. This is severe, and proves to be at odds with Coleridge’s own
creative powers, as well as his understanding of how children create a sense of
self through the image of the mother.
When Ann Gillman substituted nagging for sympathy, Coleridge felt
socially isolated and uncreative, which is probably reflected in ‘Duty
Surviving Self-love’ of 1826. However,
her sympathy restored, so in some measure was Coleridge’s creative powers, and
‘The Garden of Boccaccio’ (1828) marks one such restoration. But Romance
depends upon powers Coleridge had declared out of bounds, and he was not a man
to abandon the carefully enunciated ideas of the Opus: in a remarkable note of 1830 he observes that this search for
sympathy in a man ‘loose from the leading strings of Reason’ is
‘anti-redemptive’ and having ‘the true mark of the Hades.’ Painfully, but
certainly, Coleridge turns away from ‘All Spirits of Power’ and back to ‘the
dread Watch-Tower of man’s absolute Self.’
But which is the essential Coleridge: the romance writer or the sinner
in search of grace?
Coleridge and Obscurity
Leonard
Epp
leonard.epp@balliol.ox.ac.uk
In Coleridge: Darker Reflections, Richard
Holmes wrote that the ‘word “obscurity” would settle on Coleridge like an
albatross’ following the publication of The Friend. While charges of obscurity
certainly did multiply during and after the period of the project of the The
Friend (1809-1818), they formed a constant element in criticism of Coleridge
from his earliest days as a public figure. In my paper I will explore the
negative charge of obscurity in private and public representations of Coleridge
and the manner in which he appropriated a positive charge of obscurity in
response to criticism and, like Heraclitus, became a figure for the obscure. In
particular, I will focus on the manner in which the charge of obscurity, in the
process of review and response, oscillates between the positive and the
negative through inversion and interchangeable forms of attack and defense.
Like the ‘shears of cold and darkness’ emanating from the stellae tenebricosae
of Paracelsus, Coleridge’s obscurity could have positive as well as negative
content: obscurity, that is, could represent not only the absence of light but
also the presence of dark counter-rays competing with the light.
Newton,
Priestley, and the Sources of Coleridge's ‘Tutelary Spirits’
George Erving
gerving@ups.edu
This paper investigates the scientific sources and
political character of the tutelary spirits that frequently appear in
Coleridge's poetry of the 1790s. I
trace their conceptual development to debates among natural philosophers
regarding the causal principle of gravitational attraction. Whereas in the first few decades after the
publication of Newton's Principia (1687), English natural philosophers had
generally come to accept gravity as a force acting at a distance without an
intervening medium, the emergent concept, circa 1740, of "subtle
fluids" as an explanation for electricity and heat sparked a re-evaluation
of gravity. Was it the result of an
immanent God's continual intervention in the natural world, or a mechanical
activity in which atomic particles impinge upon one another across a material
plenum, or the consequence of an immaterial ether operating as an intermediary
between God and nature? This last
alternative proved an attractive argument for England's Dissenting communities
in their struggle for political representation. I discuss the submerged political register of Joseph Priestley's
Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777) in developing the idea of
spiritualized matter as a causal agent at work in the world, and the
significance of Priestley's text for Coleridge the young Unitarian, political
radical, and poet, preoccupied with the hidden agency of tutelary spirits.
Coleridge
the Poet in the Opus Maximum
Murray J. Evans
m.evans@uwinnipeg.ca
In Coleridge
and the Pantheist Tradition, Thomas McFarland warns against considering
either Coleridge’s poetry or his philosophy in isolation, adding that it was
the "irreconcilability" of these two concerns that contributed to
Coleridge’s failure to complete the Opus
Maximum (OM). Yet Elinor Shaffer hints that OM is essentially a kind of poetic
venture, ‘in which all the parts cohere, and from which none can be separated
out as ‘rational.’ ’ I wish, then, to
explore Coleridge as poet in the prose of OM. While my previous work on OM has emphasized its substantive ‘logic
of trichotomy,’ this dialectical rhetoric also includes repeated appeals to
contemplate the ‘Idea alone’ of Coleridge’s argument (usually the Will or
Absolute Will), as a ‘truth known by its own evidence.’ His numerous illustrations of the idea are
indifferent, even arbitrary metaphors borrowed from the relations of time and
space for truths essentially transcendent.
The force of this appeal resembles what Coleridge calls elsewhere the
‘grandest efforts of poetry’: namely, the substitution of a sublime feeling of
the unimaginable for a mere image. The
practice also opens Coleridge to charges of tautology that Jerome Christensen,
for one, has levelled against his prose.
J.C.C. Mays comments on Coleridge’s later poetry that the ‘separate
poems participate in a larger unwritten text, unwritten because they
continually frustrate attempts to translate it into wide-awake
experience.’ The comment may equally
apply to much of the prose of OM. In this way, appreciation of the Opus Maximum can significantly revise
our sense of generic distinction and rhetorical/poetical effect in Coleridge’s
works.
“Patriot Rage and Indignation high”:
The Voice of Sheridan in Fears in Solitude.
David Fairer
D.Fairer@leeds.ac.uk
Coleridge’s ‘Fears in Solitude. Written, April 1798 during the Alarms of an Invasion’ (to give its full title) is, in the words of Paul Magnuson, ‘not only a meditative poem, a poem of healing, but it is also a public speech act’. With this in mind the paper argues that the public voice of ‘Fears in Solitude’ responds to that of Sheridan, who at the critical moment when a French attack was thought to be imminent called on Britons to unite in the nation’s defence. It is argued that Coleridge’s poem reacts to Sheridan’s rallying cry in his House of Commons speech of April 1798, when, confronting the national alarm, he gave his support to the government—while at the same time continuing to assert his unflinching reformist principles. Sheridan showed how love of country and of liberty might still coexist; and his wish ‘to see unanimity run throughout the country from the highest to the lowest’ went along with a continuing commitment ‘to procure those reforms that were necessary to the salvation of the Constitution’. The other voice of Coleridge’s poem—that of healing, calmness and domesticity—also responds to Sheridan, who poured scorn on the idea that Napoleon, if victorious, would (as some had maintained) ‘secure peace to every cottager’. ‘Domestic tranquillity’ and the threatened cottage were part of the political rhetoric of the moment, and Coleridge’s anxious return at the poem’s conclusion to ‘my own lowly cottage, where my babe / And my babe’s mother dwell in peace!’ makes him less a likely collaborator than a potential victim of the invasion to come.
'The
wild hunter worships as he roves,
In the green shade of
Chili's fragrant groves' (Rogers)
Tim Fulford
timfulford@tiscali.co.uk
My paper will examine Romantic perceptions of the Araucanian Indians of Chile, examining historical texts by Molina and poetical ones by Hayley, Southey, Rogers and Bowles. I shall argue that the Araucanians reveal much about Romantic primitivism, because they acted as living embodiments of the Wordsworthian (and, before him, Ossianic) ideal of a independent, hardy, autochthonous mountain people, living in proud liberty. Southey gave then this role, in poems that he wrote in conscious imitation of Lyrical Ballads. The role was then redefined in 1811 by Bowles, writing with guidance from Southey and Coleridge. In Bowles's Araucanians, I conclude, we can discern the political and social ideals that once drove the Pantisocracy project refigured as an idealised Christian – but also paternalist – postcolonial community of settler and native. This refiguration was, I shall suggest, in line with Coleridge's own later advocacy of missionary colonialism.
Coleridge’s Crusoe: The Counter-Voice
Marilyn Gaull
mg49@nyu.edu
In folklore, the founding myth is often historical, religious, political, and affirms the identity of those who recite, preserve and believe it—Prometheus, Moses, Christ, Mohammed, Columbus, all the adventurers, heretics, and risk-takers to whom the origins of culture are attributed. But this myth also inspires rebellion, new heretics, delinquents, counter-voices, more literary or popular than historical and religious, whose very rebellion is a reflection and affirmation: Hermes, Cain, Don Quixote, Crusoe, Ahab, Captain Hook. Coleridge and Crusoe, indeed Cain as well, intersect at a crucial moment in the cycling of both the founding myth and its counter-voice, the oral and literary conventions. His poem reflects both, affirms both, timely and timeless, personal and universal, derivative and original. To a folklorist, it is the test of all hypotheses which I plan to explore and perhaps account for.
Hartley
Coleridge and the Stereographic Picturesque
Bruce Graver
beg@postoffice.providence.edu
Hartley Coleridge's cottage and grave are
surprisingly well-represented in Lake District stereographs of the 1850s and
1860s; among writers associated with the English Lakes, only Wordsworthian
sites are represented more widely, and often Wordsworth and Hartley's names are
paired together in the labels and letterpress affixed to stereographic
cards. These stereographs constitute an
important, and entirely neglected, chapter in the history of Hartley
Coleridge's literary reputation, and I wish to use this paper to begin
sketching that history out.
First,
I will discuss stereo photography more generally, beginning with its
introduction to the British public at the Crystal Palace Exhibition. I will then turn specifically to landscape
stereographs of the Lake District, showing how stereographers extended and
transformed the conventions of the picturesque in their photographs. Here I will illustrate my argument with
stereographs of Rydal Water in which Hartley Coleridge's cottage figures
prominently.
In the
last half of the paper, I will turn more specifically to close-up shots of Nab
Cottage, St. Oswald's, and, especially, Hartley's grave. There seems to have been a convention of
photographing children at the grave: sometimes the child is quietly
contemplating the grave, sometimes the child is prostrate with apparent grief. I will look at a few examples of this kind
of photograph, and speculate about why this convention began and what Hartley
must have represented for the Victorian audience. And I will compare the way Hartley's grave was photographed with
stereographs of the Wordsworth plot nearby.
How Coleridge Was More Wild than Byron
Nicholas Halmi
nh2@u.washington.edu
While Byron privately apologized to Coleridge for having satirized him in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers and vigorously defended the "wildness" of his poetry, particularly "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel", in letters to others, he did not scruple to ridicule the older poet again in Don Juan. Yet his contempt and admiration were directed at different manifestations of the same thing--Coleridge's anti-materialism. Byron's scepticism and materialism not only made him contemptuous of Coleridge's "metaphysics" but also made him incapable of reproducing in his own poetry the wildness he admired in Coleridge's.
The
Trinitarian Phenomenology of the Self in Coleridge’s Opus Maximum
Alex Hampton
alexander.hampton@oriel.oxford.ac.uk
Christian anthropology holds that Christ completes
the human form in the image of God, and allows man to do the same. Man thus occupies a middle ground, where he
is physical and spiritual, finite and infinite. Freedom is acknowledging the dynamic nature of this unfinished
position, and is not an either/or choice between the finite or the
infinite. Despite this, men desire
completeness, and strive to circumscribe the infinite within systems of
understanding which only result in self-alienation. Following the Enlightenment, Coleridge’s was an age of totalising
monisms—empiricism, utilitarianism, pantheism, Biblical fundamentalism—which
denied the incomplete self. Man’s position
dictates that he strive to find a middle path between reason and biblical
authority, and this is the central aim of the Opus Maximum: ‘That religion differs from philosophy on the one
hand, and from history on the other, by being both’ (OM p.83).
In the
Opus, Coleridge illustrates, through
a phenomenology of self, based on the will and morality, that the ground of
personal identity lies in a trinitarian structure which is necessary to
maintain one’s concept of the self, the other and God. If one aspect of the structure is left
unincorporated, the result is destabilisation and collapse into a self-negating
dependency or passivity. This
phenomenology is examined in three successive stages—epistemological, ontological
and anthropological. The Opus has the aim of defending the human
middle ground. It is in the self’s
incompleteness that man finds his freedom, and it is in the model of the
Trinity where his own dynamic being is affirmed in the dynamic dogma at the
centre of Christianity.
Coleridge’s
Notebooks: Manuscript to Print to Database
Anthony John Harding
harding@duke.usask.ca
This paper is designed to serve two interlocking
purposes. It will begin with a brief overview of the genesis of the Bollingen
edition of Coleridge’s Notebooks and an assessment of what it has achieved and
what it has not achieved – in other words, what the edition is, and what are
its current limitations as a resource. This part of the paper, then, will be in
the nature of a very brief report on the research of a succession of scholars,
separated by geography and time. It will lead to a description of a project in
which I’m presently involved, with David Miall and Terry Butler of the
University of Alberta, as well as a small team of research assistants, the aim
of which is to create an electronic on-line index to the printed text of the
Notebooks.
The
paper will also be an opportunity to raise some questions about the
interdependency, in the scholarly culture of the twenty-first century, of three
media: (1) manuscript, (2) printed-and-bound volume, and (3) electronic
database. I say "interdependency" because, though in an obvious sense
the printed volumes are derivative from the manuscript and the electronic
database from the printed volumes, in another sense the manuscripts have
arguably had "value added" to them by virtue of the existence of the
printed volumes. Similarly, those who are working on the electronic index hope
that the development of this research tool will sustain interest in the printed
volumes, and the manuscripts themselves, well into the rest of this century.
Both
the projects I’ll be describing – the printed edition, begun in the 1930s and
completed in the 1990s, and the electronic index, begun in 2001 – touch on
several broader issues. One such issue, for example, is the way in which the
significance of a text changes, once it has transgressed any notional boundary
that might exist between private and public, between the writer’s diary as
"confidant" (a term which Coleridge used for his notebooks), and the
category of texts made available for public use.
The
Supernatural Sublime
Alistair Heys
alhsheys@tesco.net
I propose to explore the contradiction that the
‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads would
seem to eschew allegorical modes of representation but for the fact that the
first poem in the volume breaks this stated aesthetic methodology by
incorporating the figures of Death and Life-in-Death into the text of ‘The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner’. My paper will proceed by comparing these allegorical
figures to those of Sin and Death in Paradise
Lost and also to Coleridge’s discussion of Milton’s allegorical portrait of
Death in his Bristol lecture upon Romeo and Juliet. It seems to be the case
that Coleridge’s thinking in this instance is unusually over-informed by the
influence of Shakespeare and Milton. From which peak-like sources it is
possible to explicate a reading of the Coleridgean supernatural sublime. The thoughts of Lucy Newlyn in Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader
and Stephen Knapp in Personification and
the Sublime will be discussed in this context. In particular, I wish to
suggest that Newlyn’s reading of influential relations as sublime but also as
Romantic Irony is in some ways similar to I. A. Richards’s theory of metaphor.
Richards is useful in this discussion because his Principles of Literary Criticism applied itself in passing to an
outline of the influence of Paradise Lost
upon Kubla Khan. However, it is altogether possible to suggest an alternative
interpretation of metaphor from that of Richards’s tenor and vehicle in order
to adumbrate the transmission of literary influence. Indeed, my thoughts in
this area have been stimulated by Christopher Ricks’s recent publication Allusion to the Poets and by Max Black’s
writings on metaphor. It might be remembered that Coleridges relationship with
Milton was the first example used by Bloom to introduce his six-fold schemata
of intra-textual misprision in New
Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth. So, it seems peculiarly apt to
again utilize this relationship in order to suggest a new method for analysing
influential relations.
Coleridge,
Davy, and the Science of Method
Waka Ishikura
ishikura@shse.u-hyogo.ac.jp
In this paper I would like to suggest the way to
read Coleridge’s essays on method, which first appeared in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, and was
revised extensively to be issued in The
Friend in 1818, as his philosophical response to Humphry Davy’s chemical
investigation. It may be true that the presence of Davy as a leading chemist of
the country had stimulated Coleridge to have a regulating principle for the new
age of science when scholars, innovators, and manufacturers gathered to push
forward the social force of industry with utilitarian values in view. Coleridge
not only attended Davy’s lectures in 1802, but also became an avid reader of
contemporary scientific journals some of which contained Davy’s essays on
electrochemistry. Calling it the “March of Glory,” Coleridge acclaimed Davy’s
galvanic experiment in 1806, and later refined Davy’s theory of electric
affinity as a fundamental idea for the power in nature, “the law of polarity,
or the manifestation of one power by opposite forces.” Coleridge’s principles of method may be
derived from his understanding of the urgent necessity to coordinate the
contemporary progress of sciences with the wisdom by which we are capable of
contemplating what could be the attributes of the Supreme Being. This understanding of Coleridge might be
rooted in his sense of backing up Davy, who in his dream vision, and by
attempting to “enlighten mankind, had inflicted ghastly wounds,” and so Davy
became something of an imaginary twin figure of Coleridge himself.
Coleridge,
Anna Seward, and the Gendering of Reason in the Romantic Sonnet
Noel Jackson
njackson@MIT.EDU
My paper will consider Coleridge's
role within the Romantic-era sonnet revival, particularly in relation to a
prominent fellow sonnet-writer of the period, the "Swan of Lichfield"
Anna Seward. As part of a larger
work-in-progress on representations of rationality within the poetry of the
Romantic period, I will consider these authors’ thoughts on the sonnet with
respect to the mental faculty or habit of mind to which this form was variously
thought to appeal. In the Preface to
the Sonnets from Various Authors (1796),
Coleridge declared that the central purpose of the sonnet was to "generate
a habit of thought"; Seward, likewise, frequently insisted upon the
intricately logical structure of this poetic form, and defended the so-called
"legitimate" or Petrarchan sonnet as best-suited to the purpose of
uniting powerful emotion and deep thought.
Though holding similar views as Seward about the sonnet's ideal mixture
of thought and feeling, however, Coleridge was a strong critic of Seward's
work; while selecting one of her sonnets for inclusion in his 1796 anthology,
he otherwise dismisses Seward's "legitimate" works as "laborious
trifles," wanting in the concision, coherence, and "manly" sentiment
of his earliest poetic idol, William Lisle Bowles. Reviewing the cultural contexts of this debate, I will argue that
the dispute over the proper form of the sonnet reveals this poetic form to have
been a contested site for questions in this period about the role of reason in
poetic composition, and about the gendered status of the sonnet itself. Along the way, my paper will offer a
re-interpretation of Coleridge's account, in the first chapter of the Biographia Literaria, of his infatuation
and subsequent disillusionment with Bowles, whose poetry Coleridge will come to
see as mawkishly sentimental.
Coleridge
and the Fears of Friendship, 1798
Felicity James
felicity.james@christ-church.oxford.ac.uk
My paper offers a close reading of the April 1798
edition of Fears in Solitude,
containing ‘Fears in Solitude’, ‘France: an Ode,’ and ‘Frost at Midnight’. I place these complex poems in the context
of Coleridge’s domestic and friendly life at the time, reading them through the
unspoken anxieties and preoccupations of his relationships in 1797 and
1798. I examine the dynamics at work in
his ‘beloved STOWEY’, affording new light on the tensions within the
poems themselves.
The
edition itself is fascinating from a bibliographical point of view: moreover,
it has rarely been examined in the context of its connections with the
productions of his circle at the time.
I offer a new perspective on the poems, showing how they are shaped by
the difficulties experienced in Coleridge’s friendships with Lamb and Lloyd
during 1797 and 1798. I trace the
allusions and resonances which link the volume with the work of Lamb and Lloyd,
in particular their Blank Verse,
published a few months before. I show
how fears concerning idolatrous affection, misreading, and betrayal echo
throughout the work and the letters of the friendship group at this period,
emerging in poems such as ‘To Southey’, and ‘Lines Composed at Midnight’, and
picked up and amplified in Fears in
Solitude.
I hope
that my paper may open up discussion of how Coleridge’s readings of friendship
feed into his writing: how his identity as a poet is intricately connected with
his character as a friend.
'The
Reproof and Reply': On the Stealy Resolve
of STC.
Andrew Keanie
aj.keanie@ulster.ac.uk
In order to supplement his defence against charges of plagiarism Coleridge sometimes postured as the whimsical pilferer. (Robbery is no sin if it’s whimsical.) Hence the title, and sub-title, of the poem that he wrote in 1823: ‘The Reproof and Reply, Or, The Flower-Thief’s Apology, for a robbery committed in Mr. and Mrs.—’s garden, on Sunday morning, 25th of May, 1823’. Coleridge’s neighbour has just scolded him for purloining a handful of flowers:
‘You, that knew better! In broad open day,
Steal in, steal out, and steal our flowers away?
Or, rather, the charge is read out in the court of Coleridge’s guilty mind. The poet argues his case:
But most of you,
soft warblings, I complain!
’Twas ye that from the bee-hive of my brain
Did lure the fancies forth, a freakish rout,
And witch’d the air with dreams turn’d inside out.
This poem has been crafted as a hauntingly persuasive denial of first-degree guilt. Coleridge’s argument is that a Bard need not negotiate the intricacies of timorous pedantry. He heedlessly misquotes Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’ ode. His point is that genius does not borrow, and doff its hat in the direction of the lender. Genius steals and makes better. By the end of the poem, the momentum of Coleridge’s metaphorical defence has outstripped that of any syllogistic prosecution:
Thus, long accustom’d on the twy-fork’d hill,
To pluck both flower and floweret at my will…
The Eighth Commandment was not made for Bards!
Coleridge and the Uses of
Mania
Larry Kennard
KennardLR@aol.com
At
various times during his life Coleridge exhibited some of the key symptoms of
what we now diagnose as clinical mania. These include bursts of hyper-energetic
activity, and three expressive characteristics - grandiosity, flight of ideas,
and pressure of speech. Did Coleridge then suffer from a disease similar to
modern manic-depressive illness (bipolar affective disorder), as two medical
writers have claimed (Pollock 1989, Jamison 1993)? In the first portion of my paper I evaluate the claim through
investigation of critical episodes of both elevated and depressed mood in
Coleridge's life. Despite the two problems of (a) incomplete diagnostic
information and (b) partial symptomatic similarity with opium addiction, the
record suggests that Coleridge may indeed have suffered from such a disorder,
probably in a relatively mild form similar to that in which the manic episodes
are characterized today as hypomania.
Accepting
this diagnosis, I stress the relevance of hypomania to both "Coleridge the
Poet" and "Coleridge the Talker." The poet frequently deployed motifs that may (among other things)
be read as metaphors for the shifting contrasts of his own condition. And the talker succeeded in harnessing the excesses
of manic speech with spellbinding effect. In his lecture on Hamlet Coleridge
argued that the prince's madness is partly genuine (or clinical) and partly histrionic. Somewhat similarly I conclude by proposing
that for Coleridge mania was both a disease and a rhetoric, an affliction whose
symptoms he exploited as an asset.
Coleridge,
Victor Frankenstein and the Poetics of Polarity
Peter J.Kitson
p.j.kitson@dundee.ac.uk
The mid to late eighteenth century and the early
nineteenth century witnessed the beginnings of the physical science that we
know as ‘Geophysics’. Although many had been interested in the phenomenon of
magnetism previous to this time, what we have in the period, as Jan Golinski
and Patricia Fara have pointed out, is the development of a public science of
‘terrestrial magnetism’ composed of navigators and mariners, natural
philosophers and individual craftsmen and instrument makers who fashioned and
marketed their products to both the natural philosophers of the Royal Society
and the ordnance purchasers of the Royal Navy. This was also the period when
the ‘planetary consciousness’ postulated by Mary Louise Pratt was established
by the great scientific voyages of British and French explorers. Cook’s three great voyages of exploration
charted the coastline of much that was then unknown and by 1830 only the North
and South Poles remained remote and unknowable. The focus of this paper is on
the development of the science of terrestrial magnetism, the hypotheses and
theories it gave rise to, and literary and political uses of the metaphor in
Coleridge’s writing and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
This paper outlines the first proper scientific voyages of Edmond Halley and
those of Banks and Cook to the nineteenth-century voyages of Royal Navy polar
explorers, culminating in James Clark Ross’s location of the North Magnetic
Pole in 1831 and his search for the South Magnetic Pole in 1839. A time when a
series of theories were put forward and refined in Britain and Europe, names
such as Biot, Aepinus, Gauss, Coulomb, Oersted, Hansteen, and Alexander von
Humboldt developed notion about the earth’s magnetic properties and began the
process of detailed measurement on sea and land, mapping the globe with a
series of isogenic lines, as significant and important as the boundaries
attached to states and nations. This paper will address the issue of what this
context means for imaginative writing concerning the Poles, specifically
Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’ and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, both narratives of polar exploration.
Principles
Unfixed:
Science and Imagination in
Coleridge’s 1808 and 1811-12 Lectures
Julian Knox
juknox@ucla.edu
Following on the heels of Humphry Davy’s immensely
popular public lectures and experiments at the Royal Institution, Coleridge in
1808 commenced the first of twelve lecture courses that he would deliver over
the next decade—and which, along with “different essays on subjects of national
interest,” he claims in the Biographia
Literaria to “constitute my whole publicity.” Paying particular attention to the 1808 lectures “On the
Principles of Poetry” and the 1811-12 “On Shakespeare and Milton,” my paper
examines several ways in which context—especially the constituencies of the
respective lecture institutions—contributed to Coleridge’s formulation and
presentation of aesthetic principles.
Keenly aware (at times to the point of despondency) of his illustrious
and groundbreaking predecessor, and also of the Royal Institution’s
charter-goal of “teaching, by Courses of Philosophical Lectures and
Experiments, the application of Science to the Common Purposes of Life,”
Coleridge approaches the topic of a “fixed Principle” of “Taste, in regard to poetry”
from a physiological perspective.
Tracing the development of this concept of taste through the 1811-12
lectures, I consider Coleridge’s close engagement with Richard Payne Knight’s Inquiry into the Principles of Taste in
both the lectures and in Coleridge’s Marginalia
as a fundamental but overlooked catalyst for Coleridge’s own aesthetic
formulations. Annotated in the hand of
an unexpected audience member, Wordsworth, at the ailing Coleridge’s bedside in
March 1808, Knight’s Inquiry serves
as a springboard not only for Coleridge’s discussion of taste, but also, I
suggest, for his theory of mimesis.
Fundamental to the aesthetics set forth in the Biographia, both concepts find their first lengthy articulation in
these early lecture courses.
Coleridge’s Art of Divine Chit-Chat:
Restoring
Conversation to The Conversation Poems
Robert Koelzer
koelzer@fas.harvard.edu
My paper focuses on Coleridge’s “The
Nightingale” – included in Lyrical
Ballads as “A Conversational Poem” (1798) – in order to reassess the
marginal status of conversation in Romantic poetics. While “the conversation poem” is a standard genre, established by
G.M. Harper and ratified by M.H. Abrams, this codified reading hems in
conversation’s richly complex relationship to lyric. Criticism tends to trope conversation as a verse style;
conversation has never been articulated, I argue, as a unique type of
poem. It is still unclear how
conversation fits normative lyric expectations: a single speaker, a private milieu. The qualities of rapport, extroversion, and improvisation which
make up conversational talk seem alien to a Romantic ethos which valorizes
lonely wandering and affirms an inward vision “which is the bliss of solitude.”
My
reading acknowledges conversation’s fuller potential as a resource for
lyric: a potential which Coleridge, the
legendary talker, realized in social life.
It does not simply accommodate conversational speech as “colloquial
tone” or as “informal,” “fluid,” “natural” versification. Such a reading drains Coleridge’s poetry of
what makes it most robustly conversational.
I consider the ways “The Nightingale” embodies conversation as a
performance of ‘discoursing’ detectable in the poem’s rhetorical shifts, its
continual gesturing toward friends and friendship, its wit and charm. I argue finally that “The Nightingale” revises the melancholy, self-absorption of a
recently-fashionable Sensibility and recovers a bit of the luster of an Augustan
tradition in which the expressive fluency and brilliance of the skillful
conversationalist is entirely suited to poetic ends.
‘Who
would have thought, that he had been a
Poet!’: Coleridge in Malta, 1804-05
Robert C. Koepp
rkoepp@hilltop.ic.edu
O me! that
being what I have been I should be what I am!
(CN II 2606)
…if ever I should once more be happy enough to
resume poetic composition… (CN II
2599)
While much critical attention has been directed to
S. T. Coleridge’s experiences in the Mediterranean—particular his 1804-05
residence in Malta--the focus of studies of this period has often been on such
matters as his political work for Alexander Ball, his struggles to quit his use
of opium and regain health, his wide-ranging interests in the oddities and
curiosities of Maltese life, and his pre-occupation with the Wordsworths and
Sara Hutchinson. What about Coleridge
the poet? Certainly his various
writings from Malta may leave one with the impression that, though he
frequently discusses poetry, Coleridge no longer regards himself, first and
foremost, as a poet.
This
paper will examine material from Coleridge’s notebooks, letters, and poetry—the
latter mostly fragments, prose poems, or experiments in verse—in which he
attempts to work out problems in his writing of poetry, exhibiting a desire to
recover his creative imagination and happily “to resume poetic composition.”
The
period in Malta is a significant time of struggle for Coleridge to regain not
only health, self-control, financial independence, self-esteem, and emotional
stability, but also those “genial Spirits” which he previously acknowledged as
lost, and the “Joy” which he seems no longer able to feel. In his lowest moments, Coleridge imagines
that he is no longer taken seriously as a poet. Yet he keeps thinking about his status as a writer and his
future poetic career; moreover, he continues to experiment with language,
images, and ideas, evincing a mind and poetic imagination still active, working
to recover what he feared was lost forever.
Coleridge may not be the poet he once was, but he remains a poet nevertheless.
Michael John Kooy
michael.kooy@warwick.ac.uk
The
sheer variety and complexity of Coleridge’s many interests has sometimes
eclipsed a simple fact of his career:
namely, that for more than half of it Britain was conducting a bloody,
costly war with France. While
Coleridge’s radical opposition to war with Revolutionary France has been well
documented, as well as his change of mind during the invasion scares of 1798
and 1803-4 (thanks to Nick Roe, Tim Fulford, Paul Magnusson, and others), less
perhaps is known about his support of the war effort in subsequent years. That’s partly because the shrill tone of
some of the Courier articles and the
sometimes distended arguments in The
Friend leave even normally patient Coleridgeans shifting in their
seats. In romantic studies more
generally, Coleridge is often considered simply a warmonger.
In this
paper I would like to reconsider this view. My central argument is that while Coleridge’s interventions in
public debate about the war tended to feed the cultural nationalism and nascent
militarism of the war years, and also lent support to an unreformed state, they
also, paradoxically, revealed a liberal theory of modern war by which conflict
would be minimized rather than extended, and government brought to account for
its military actions abroad. My paper
focuses on four aspects of this theory of war:
1. war as wrong-doing; 2. war
and the strengthening of the state; 3.
the soldier as citizen; and 4. the
language of war. Coleridge’s
reflections on these topics are not those of a warmonger. I shall be drawing on a variety of Coleridge
texts, including ‘Ode to the Departing Year’, The Friend, marginalia, and an important contribution Coleridge
made to Wordsworth’s Cintra
pamphlet. My paper concludes with a
brief comparison of Coleridge’s theory of war with those of his contemporaries
Hegel and Clausewitz.
Gender
Warfare and Feminine Retribution in The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Lisa Lappin
ljleisure@yahoo.com
This
paper will examine parallels between Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Wollstonecraft argues that if men do not
accord women their due respect, they will be subject to feminine
retribution. Similarly, in Ancient Mariner, Coleridge depicts the negative repercussions that befall the
patriarchy as a result of the mistreatment of its feminine counterpart.
The Ancient Mariner begins with the Mariner and his crew enjoying a
position of masculine hegemony. I argue
that the feminine albatross is executed for her intrusion into this exclusively
masculine world. Coleridge’s image of
Life-in-Death, an avenging force reigning over the helpless Mariner, who
hitherto held complete power over the albatross, represents an inversion of
power that reflects Wollstonecraft’s words of warning.
I
argue that the water snakes are a further manifestation of the feminine. Indeed, Gustave Dore portrays them as
bare-breasted females in two of his woodcuts.
Coleridge depicts the Mariner as evolving to a point wherein he is
capable of recognizing their intrinsic value.
Only then does the albatross fall from his neck. However, the healing is only temporary. The Mariner turns back toward the masculine
domain in an attempt to find absolution from the Hermit, who is unable to
forgive him for crimes committed against the feminine realm. The Mariner, doomed to endlessly relive his
pain, serves as a warning to Coleridge’s male readers that they must respect
women if they are to avoid a similar destiny.
How
Incompletability Diverges in The Ancient Mariner
Peter Larkin
Peter.Larkin@warwick.ac.uk
Theological interpretations of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner have not
been judged either successful or adequate.
The poem is thought of as too Gothic, too recondite or too multi-layered
for such a privileged focus. My paper
looks at a little-read essay by the Anglo-Welsh poet David Jones which
challenges the poem for being theologically incoherent and therefore not
imaginative enough, before considering ideas on language and liturgy in recent
postmodern theology. What emerges from Coleridge’s
poem is an increasing divergence between the interminability of obsessionally
repeated narration, and the uncompleted and under-realised walk to the kirk
“With a goodly company”. This latter mode of incompletion, a being on the way,
eludes the main body of the tale but hints at a mode of repetition with difference rather than the
obsessive replay of a self-cursed narration.
It may be the Gothic moment in Coleridge’s imagination can’t walk with
this any further, but this secondary thread in the Rime has implications for the rest of his writing career, in particular its drift from the
imperiousness of imagination towards the “weaker” poetries of speculative
prose.
Versions of ‘Christabel’
Paul Magnuson
pm1@nyu.edu
I'll discuss the versions of ‘Christabel,’ its manuscript circulation, its publication along with ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Pains of Sleep,’ the responses of its first readers, and Coleridge's revisions in response to reviews. ‘Christabel’ is a different poem in its various versions and locations: the poem in manuscript, a ‘wild and singularly original and beautiful poem,’ as Byron called it; the poem published in l8l6 as a fragment of a failed poet; the obscene poem reviewed by Hazlitt and others, and the later poem for which Coleridge offered contradictory explanations. These versions raise questions about Coleridge as a public poet, that is, a poem whose work is in part constructed in dialogue with an audience.
coleridge preaching and lecturing to the west country
Tom Mayberry
Coleridge's arrival in Bristol early in 1795 marked the beginning of one of the most public periods of his life. Living in College Street with Robert Southey and George Burnett, he entered into the vigorous and combative intellectual life of the city, and established his reputation as a lecturer capable of inflaming 'Mobs and Mayors, Blockheads and Brickbats, Placards and Press gangs'. Mixing sanctity and sedition he preached from Unitarian pulpits, and all the time was forming the relationships which would determine his future course. In words and pictures, I shall recall the formative public years Coleridge spent in Bristol, before, at the beginning of 1797, he determined to renounce public life and to find seclusion in West Somerset.
Coleridgean-Plotinian Creation—Divine Self-constitution as an Act of Will
Karen McLean
karen.mclean@stonebow.otago.ac.nz
At the last Coleridge Conference, I concentrated specifically on the parallels between Plotinus’ theory of evil and how closely it related to Coleridge’s ideas of potentiality, the finite will and the apostate will or Satanic principle. This time round, I am hoping to lighten things up a bit, and will talk about the divine act of creation as Plotinus and Coleridge explained it. I wish to point to a few fundamental parallels between the two thinkers, particularly concerning the concept of divine self-constitution as an action, not in the Aristotelian sense of actus purissimus, whereby the Creator creates itself ex nihilo, but in a creation that requires a dynamic and reciprocal correspondence between the unmade Creator, its act, and itself as an ongoing self-made and self-comprehended product. I will explain the Plotinian concept of seer and seen, describe the self-willed actualisation of the One and the status of its existence in contrast to the rest of creation which partakes in the potentiality of being other than the One. I then hope to show how these Plotinian terms find correspondence in Coleridge’s own ideas of the divine self-actualisation, the reciprocal relationship between God and Logos, and how this communion underlies our own relationship to each other, God and the world around us.
Resisting
the Silence: Coleridge’s Courtship of the Sublime
Nora Meurs