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, CHRISTIANITY AND THE INSPIRED PREACHER

 

Jeffrey W. Barbeau

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, 25^th  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.

 

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‘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.

 

 

 

Coleridge on War

 

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.

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Resisting the Silence: Coleridge’s Courtship of the Sublime

 

Nora Meurs

Nora.Meurs@vub.ac.be

 

According to George Steiner in Language and Silence, the retreat from the word in the face of a growing awareness of the limitations of language finds its birth in the nineteenth century.  The notion of ‘retreat’ is often adduced by critics who, for purposes of scholarship, delimit turns and successive phases in Coleridge’s thinking.  One such turning point is 1802, signalling the decline of Coleridge’s poetic output, or, as Raimonda Modiano has it, the end of ‘Coleridge’s courtship of nature’.  What seems like a retreat into poetic silence, is in fact very different from the silence of, say, a Rimbaud, Hölderlin or Plath.  Rather than retreating from the word altogether, Coleridge substitutes his poetry of encounter/confrontation, the poem as handshake (Celan), for a (in the private space of message-in-a-bottle notebook entries and fragments) parallel ‘tending towards’ a dynamic, meridian structure of symbols serving as a ground for a theology of hope which ‘gives’ rather than ‘finds’ the sublime.  In answer to a world growing increasingly less responsive, Coleridge’s synthetic turn towards what David Vallins calls a ‘mantra-like repetition of the framework of mysterious unities which he constructs around logos and the Trinity’ is not a denial of essence, nor, I will argue, is it an abandonment of the exploratory pursuit of truth.  What Coleridge does is raising the stakes.  In fixing his gaze on ‘the infinite I AM’ (which is by definition ‘something that resists’), Coleridge both extinguishes all possibility of disappointment, and perpetuates his search sub as well as super limen, underneath and above the threshold of the expressible.

       I take the image of Odysseus tied to the mast as a starting point of my investigation into the fabric of this ‘silence’, which in Coleridge manifests itself as almost compulsive phrasing in defiance of the limitations of verbal statement. The poet, while drinking straight at the fountain of the sublime song of inspiration, is unable to record the ultimate truth revealed to him, as his hand are bound.  My paper traces the expressive-linguistic as well as philosophic strategies Coleridge deploys to address this predicament. His Opus Maximum plan ‘to seek a rational ground for the belief in God’, the very idea of constructing a system of ‘insulated fragments of truth’, may, as Steiner says about nineteenth-century historians’ tendency ‘to formulate ‘laws of history’’, be ‘a gross borrowing from the sphere of exact and mathematical sciences’, and thus also a symptom of ‘the crisis of poetic means’.  Yet, Coleridge’s later thinking is marked by an overriding attempt to counter the retreat from the word, and to reconcile by virtue of drawing on an increasingly abstract and symbolic mode of expression, which, I will argue, lend to Coleridge’s discourse on language and the sublime a very modern lustre (cf. Lyotard who sees abstraction as a necessary ‘device’ to equip the sublime for the twentieth century).

 

 

 

Tescalipoca and Moloch:

 Adam Smith, Burke and Coleridge on the Love of Systems

 

Robert Mitchell

e-mail: rmitch@duke.edu

 

In this paper, I consider several Romantic era claims about the role of “systems” in advancing (or hindering) the progress of cosmopolitan civilization.  I focus my comments through a consideration of the significant revisions Adam Smith made to his The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1790.  Smith had argued in the original 1759 edition of his text that the progress of civilization depended upon individual sacrifices that were caused by the “love” of beautiful systems.  In 1790, following the revolution in France, he felt compelled to revise that statement somewhat, arguing that system love became pathological when it became so fully self-referential as to become an end in itself.  However, he nevertheless persisted in his claim that the love of systems was necessary for the progress of the state in particular, and civilization more generally.  Smith’s revisions are a useful—though curiously neglected—starting point for a reconsideration of the role of systems (and the love of systems) in Romantic political discourse of the 1790s and early 1800s, and this paper, I suggest that his claims—and especially his understanding of the sacrifices systems entail—provide a point of linkage between Edmund Burke’s distrust of system and S. T. Coleridge’s initial enthusiasm for them. My presentation builds on Clifford Siskin’s, David Simpson’s, and Tilottoma Rajan’s work on the role of systems in British Romantic discourse, but my focus on Smith highlights connections between the love of systems and sacrifice that so far have remained underdeveloped.

 

 

 

The Scandal of Dahomey’s Rites of Human Sacrifice in the Debates

about the Abolition of the Slave Trade in England

 

Raimonda Modiano

MONA@server.english.washington.edu

 

My paper aims to provide a largely ignored context for the pervasive interest in human sacrifice among Romantic writers, drawing attention to one of the most spectacular and highly publicized sites of  violence in the nineteenth century, namely the kingdom of Dahomey in Western Africa, where yearly rituals of mass human sacrifice were taking place, comparable, according to many observers, to ancient Aztec practices.  I will show that these rituals came to the center of public attention during the investigation of the slave trade by the British Parliament in the 1780s and that anti-abolitionists routinely invoked Dahomey as a justification for the continuation of the slave trade, as revealed by one of their slogans: Suppress the Slave Trade, and it is evident human sacrifices would be endless.  On the other hand, abolitionists like Coleridge or Thomas Clarkson rarely mention Dahomey and suppress references to its notorious rites of sacrifice.  My paper will attempt to investigate this phenomenon and suggest that the case of Dahomey may have actually influenced  Coleridge’s as well as Wordsworth’s articulation of the endurance and uncanny presentness of ritual human sacrifice, a sign of “the dereliction and dismay” of the times in which they lived. 

 

 

Discussion Panel

 

The Norton Critical Edition of Coleridge's Poetry and Prose

 

Paul Magnuson will speak briefly about the principles used for the selection of particular versions of  poems by Coleridge and the reasons for the arrangement of the poems according to their publication in individual volumes in the order in which they appeared in those volumes.  He will reflect on new perspectives about Coleridge's public poetic career that open thanks to this arrangement.

       Raimonda Modiano will focus on the representation of Coleridge's political career in the Norton edition, on the difficulties of giving a comprehensive selection of Biographia Literaria, and on discoveries made concerning Coleridge's plagiarisms that challenge previously held opinions regarding, for example, his relationship with Fichte.

       Nicholas Halmi will concentrate on the prinicples of selection in the so-called miscellaneous prose, explaining the choice of an alphabetical (as opposed to generic or chronological) arrangement of the topics, in answer to the objections raised by Paul Cheshire in his review of the book.

 

 

 

“Kubla Khan”: The Waking Dream

 

Anita O'Connell

A.M.O’Connell@durham.ac.uk

 

While the dream origins of “Kubla Khan” as expressed in the preface are frequently considered to be questionable, the poem is nevertheless often referred to as a dream poem.  In this paper I argue that in “Kubla Khan,” Coleridge was seeking to create for the reader a state similar to that of dreaming, but one reconcilable with the waking judgement.  Some of Coleridge’s most famous speculations on literature concern the relationship between poetry and dreams.  In 1804 he called poetry a “rationalized dream” (Notebooks 2, 2086), and years later, a “waking dream” (Lectures on Literature 2, 425).  In the Biographia Literaria and in his 1818 lecture on The Tempest, he aligned the ideal imaginative state of readers with that in dreams.  “Kubla Khan” is a dream poem precisely because Coleridge was aiming to create a waking dream experience for his readers.  With the hypnotic rhythm, scenic transitions, provocative symbolism, and invocations of the mythical dream worlds of romance, readers are led into a state of illusion where they are solicited “only to yield [themselves] to a dream” (Biographia 2, 218).  It is here that the dream is realized as poetry, both for the poet and for the reader.  Through a close reading of the poem in the light of Coleridge’s speculations on poetry and dreams, I hope to demonstrate how “Kubla Khan” achieves its success as one of the ultimate Romantic dream poems.

 

 

James Losh, an anti-Coleridgean philanthropist?

 

Kaz Oishi

kazoishi@hotmail.com

 

James Losh, a Unitarian reformer of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, was a mentor and close friend of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey in the late 1790s.  Their shared initial enthusiasm for the French Revolution suffered a gradual decline when the event took an increasingly violent turn.  This disenchanting experience did not necessarily lead to their immediate abandonment of the philanthropic ideals derived from the revolution and the English radicalism. Even after his withdrawal from radical politics, Losh continued to engage himself with contemporary welfare issues. It is also of some note and interest that, while he kept a favourable opinion on Wordsworth and Southey even when their relationships went somewhat sour, he dismissed Coleridge’s ‘genius and learning’ quite bluntly as unbeneficial to mankind. Losh’s stance to Coleridge as well as to Wordsworth and Southey will illuminate the disconcertingly complicated ideological context of Britain during the Napoleonic War period. Based on Losh’s diaries, this paper examines the important role he played in cultivating the Romantics’ interest in political and philanthropic activities in the 1790s and then goes further to explore the ideological ramifications and historical significance of their literary and philanthropic works.

 

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‘The Gleam of Those Words’:  Coleridge and Shelley

 

Michael O’Neill

 

The Galignanis’ edition of the Poetical Works of Colerige, Shelley and Keats  (1829) brings together, in Jonathan Wordsworth’s elegant formulation, ‘the great poet who failed to sustain an early brilliance, with the two younger men who didn’t get the chance’. My lecture will explore parallels and differences between the work of that ‘great poet’ and the older of the ‘two younger men’.  Its title is drawn from Peter Bell the Third, where Shelley describes the impact on Peter of a friend evidently modelled on Coleridge.  This friend ‘was a mighty poet - and / A subtle-souled Psychologist: / All things he seemed to understand / Of old and new - of sea or land - / But his own mind - which was a mist’.  Although there is criticism in that last line, the metaphor expressing it has a Coleridgean inflection (‘And now there came both mist and snow’) and the passage suggests the younger poet’s complicated admiration for the older writer.  Shelley emerges as a subtle, discriminating reader in his response to Coleridge, as he does in his responses to Wordsworth and Byron.  His poetry’s intertextual relations with Coleridge’s work will be at the heart of the lecture, which will offer comparisons and contrasts between two writers, who would, Coleridge once intimated, have understood one another, had they ever met.

 

 

Coleridge and the Unpoetic

 

Seamus Perry

 

Coleridge is often acclaimed (or deplored) as our most influential theorist of the autonomy of poetry, whose criticism of Wordsworth is based on a conviction that poetic language should maintain its aesthetic distance from ordinary speech and the language of prose. This paper argues that such a view of matters, while doubtless in large part true, is not all there is to be said, and that one of the most striking characteristics of Coleridge's literary thinking, both in his prose and in his own verse, is a recurrent fascination with what's unpoetic—the idea of what he calls the 'poematic' invests the unliterary with a paradoxical allure and charges the uncertain boundary between art and what's outside art with a compelling imaginative interest.

 

 

 

The Recantation of Liberty in Coleridge’s France: An Ode

 

Michael Raiger

raiger@bc.edu

 

It is largely agreed by Coleridge scholars that France: An Ode (1798) marks a decisive shift in Coleridge’s political career.  In general, this shift has been understood as a retreat from politics, which is also at the same time seen as a retreat from a particular political position—the commitment to the radical politics of English Jacobinism.  In France: An Ode, the poet announces this shift in the first line to stanza IV as an apology for a past position taken up against Liberty: “Forgive me, Freedom! O forgive these dreams!”  But as both Paul Magnuson and Morton Paley have pointed out, the precise nature of the transgression for which Coleridge is here apologizing is not explicitly stated, and so, the apology remains undecideable.  In this lecture, I propose to explain the precise nature of Coleridge’s apology to Liberty in this poem. Through an analysis of the images of the grotesque and the sublime as employed throughout France: An Ode, I will argue that Coleridge is here rejecting the religious position, accepted from David Hartley and Joseph Priestley, which held that the passage to the looked-for new millennium must necessarily pass through Apocalyptic violence.

       Paul Magnuson’s idea of “recantation”—as both a mode of defense of an earlier position and as a recitation of previous song—suggests the general framework for understanding Coleridge’s apology in France: An Ode.  In this poem Coleridge’s is recanting—singing again in order to criticize—an earlier belief, articulated in Religious Musings and Ode to the Departing Year, which interpreted violence in the political order as a herald of the new millennium.  In rejecting these images of violence, Coleridge apologizes for holding to a Unitarian interpretation of human history, thereby renouncing the main tenets of the Hartleyan doctrine of necessity.  Grotesque images of violence are now replaced by images of the beauty of nature which serve as a sublime representation of the presence of God.  No longer seen according to the Scriptural hermeneutic of Unitarian religious belief, France: An Ode establishes the dominant poetic form for the conversation poems.  However, this announcement does not constitute a radical renunciation of poetic or political principles previously held. Rather, France: An Ode alludes to principles previously articulated in The Fall of Robespierre (1793) and his political lectures (1795), which are now recanted (in the sense of being resung) as a restatement of fundamental political and poetic principles held in the earliest stages of his public career.  The Romantic lyric of the conversation poems finds its original source in Coleridge’s early political position. 

 

 

 

In Defense of Coleridge as Prophet: Holy Matrimony or a Poet’s Sacred Word

 

Linda L. Reesman

LLReesman@aol.com

 

At the entrance to the wedding celebration, the Ancient Mariner grabs an unsuspecting guest, mesmerizes him with “his glittering eye,” and not until his entire tale is told does he release him, only to walk companioned with this guest towards the church to pray together.  Framing his dramatic tale with this wedding scene, Samuel Taylor Coleridge encourages the reader of “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” to further experience an ocean setting within the marriage setting along with a tale within a tale.  The juxtaposition of a joyous scene of socialization in contrast with the foreboding atmosphere of a ship’s isolation at sea permeates the entire structure of the poem and raises deep philosophical and religious questions about a mystery, a sacred or holy mystery of matrimony vital to the Christian sacraments and to the poet’s own integrity. 

       This paper will examine Coleridge’s emphasis on matrimony as a sacred element revealed in the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and as an integral part of his poetic theory of organic unity reconciling nature and God.  Coleridge brings to the idea of marriage its mysterious nature, its secrecy from a neoplatonic source discerning the religious essence of an internal union with God and an external isolation from human nature.  A close analysis of this poem illustrates Coleridge’s method to synthesize his system of the imagination with his explication of reason as he wrestles with the ambiguities that pervade his writings.

 

 

 

‘Restore me to Reality:’  Revisiting the Figure of ‘MY pensive SARA’

 

Catherine Ross

Catherine_Ross@mail.uttyl.edu

 

This paper considers the figure of Sara in the earliest version of Coleridge’s lyric “The Eolian Harp,” which Coleridge originally published as “Effusion XXXV” (1796).  While many scholars have made important contributions to critical understanding of “The Eolian Harp,” none, to my mind, has ever done justice to Coleridge’s early representation of “SARA." 

       The paper  uses a modified form of the close historical and dialogical reading methods of Professor Paul Magnuson to look at Coleridge’s early correspondence, poems, sermons, and lectures as they pertain to the poet’s representation of “SARA.”  I use Coleridge’s own words to clarify the status of his personal relationships not only with his wife Sara, but also with his sister-in-law, Edith Fricker Southey, and his first love, Mary Evans, at the time he was composing and publishing “Effusion XXXV.”  The paper reviews some of the pertinent and quite pressing spiritual and social beliefs Coleridge held from 1790 to 1796 which inflect the language of the poem.

       Using the new data I have assembled, I re-interpret the figure of “SARA” and how Coleridge uses her to underscore some of his own beliefs about the source of his poetic power.  Finally I argue that the poem offers a surprising revision of Milton’s representation of Eve.  In my view, Coleridge creates in “SARA” a sensual woman who is also rational, committed to her God, and responsible in a positive and loving way towards her partner.  In fact, she helps him to recover his poetic strength (because it is linked, in the poet's world view, with his relationship to his God).   

 

 

'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’:

Coleridge’s Multiple Models of Interpretation

 

Elizabeth A. Rubasky

erubasky@u.washington.edu

 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was published in many distinctly different versions.  In 1798, the narrative poem was published anonymously and was meant to mimic the ballads of medieval minstrels popularized by Thomas Percy.  By 1817, Coleridge republished the poem under his own name, adding a Latin epigraph and also marginal glosses from a fictional editor.  Both Jerome McGann and Anthony Harding have explained Coleridge’s procedures by placing the poem in the context with the “higher criticism” of the Bible.  McGann and Harding suggest that the “Rime” is Coleridge’s attempt to create a poem similar to the primitivism of Biblical narrative, but in a distinctly British poetic form and setting.  My argument is that in the “Rime” Coleridge dramatizes the act of interpretation for both the primitive mind and also the later more learned mind, and that his ideas of interpretation are informed by his reading of the higher critics.  In order to discuss Coleridge’s ideas about interpretation, it is first necessary to recount the central methods of the higher criticism that apply to Coleridge’s poem.  In the second part of this paper, I will look at the 1798 “Rime” as an illustration of how the primitive mind, as defined by the higher critics, interprets phenomena.  The third section of this paper will address how Coleridge’s 1817 additions of epigraph and gloss, also formed by ideas of the higher critics, dramatize the act of interpreting texts.

 

 

 

Coleridge and Jews

 

Chris Rubinstein

B.Rubinstein@ukgateway.net

 

The young Coleridge learned as a schoolboy and then as a University student, soldier and free lance journalist and poet about persons of cultures, religions, races and nationalities other than his own. Probably inevitably, his outlook sometimes became tainted by objectionable stereotypes.

       In relation to Jews, his first interests centred on the singular importance of the Old Testament and the legend of The Wandering Jew. Later, though fragmentarily,  difficulties met with by Jews who lived in isolated communities fed his imagination leading sometimes to colourful articulations.

       In broadly the second half of his life intellectual contributions of Jews to that vast edifice of theologically based thought which he nurtured and cherished and publicised became one preoccupation of his systematic attention. He enjoyed one highly valued and several lesser friendships with Jews in this context.

       Coleridge himself may not have known whether his sympathy for or aversion to Jews was generally in the ascendant. It seems the case may be argued either way.

       This paper deals with themes arising from this outline and may illuminate both human and abstract properties of Coleridge’s personality. Eventually, despite his limitations and some display of generosity of spirit, he came to terms with different cultures in ways which a majority of contemporary English persons would hardly have followed let alone agreed with.

 

 

 

The Dangers of Imagination:

Dreams and Nightmares in the Biographia Literaria.

 

Alexander Schlutz

aschlutz@jjay.cuny.edu

 

In his 1995 study The Ideology of the Imagination, Forest Pyle has described the ideological power of the discursive figure of imagination in the Romantic period as its function in Romantic texts to (re)present and thus to create by means of aesthetics a unity that can empirically only be described as absent. As ideological discourse seeks to construct and implement a particular vision of social coherence and unity, Pyle contends, it necessarily relies on the ability to imagine such a unity in the face of existing social divisions.

       There can be no doubt that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s definitions of imagination and fancy in Chapter 13 of the Biographia Literaria constitute one of the prime textual sites that institute this ideological function of imagination. Situated at the critical hinge between the two parts of the Biographia, the definition of imagination, as is well known, is called upon to fulfill one of Coleridge’s greatest dreams: to ensure the unity of the self and of the philosophical system, and thus to secure the non-contingent principles that lay the ground for the political unity of the nation.

       In his deconstructive reading of Coleridge, Pyle has demonstrated that the “double articulation” of imagination as both primary and secondary, however, necessarily articulates a division within the self that undercuts the text’s ultimate goal to create unity. Coleridge’s definition, Pyle contents, is a prime example of the “double gesture” of ideology, which can only assert a unity in view of a prior division, a division that is thus inevitably reinforced and reinstituted in the very definition of imagination itself. Pyle acknowledges that Coleridge was quite aware of the problem: Far from simply falling prey to a mystification, he suggests, Coleridge indeed recognizes the divisiveness of subjectivity, which the ideological project of imagination is conceived to heal. The power of Coleridge’s theory of imagination lies for Pyle precisely in the fact that it does not presuppose the unity of the subject and by extension the cohesiveness of the nation but rather in that it projects them as a future potential, an “imaginary outcome.”

       What Pyle neglects in his discussion, however, is the fact that Coleridge was also quite aware of another aspect of imagination, an aspect that is ultimately even more threatening to his philosophical and political project. Imagination in its secondary incarnation after all “dissolves, diffuses, and dissipates” and thus also contains a negative and disruptive potential that, quite in opposition to the faculty’s purported synthetic powers, possibly endangers the integrity of the self. For while the secondary imagination dissolves “in order to re-create,” the success of this process of re-creation is far from certain, and the “struggle[s] to idealize and to unify” in case this success “is rendered impossible” might after all quite conceivably fail.

       Coleridge’s discussions of his terrifying nightmares provide ample proof for his awareness of this vertiginous “dark side” of imagination. As the source of dreams against whose terror the self seems powerless, imagination here comes to threaten, rather than to heal the unity of the autonomous self, and it holds, in political terms, a real potential for uncontrollable anarchy. By reading Coleridge’s deep-seated fears about the potential lack of unity and control at the center of the self back into the definition of imagination in the Biographia, one can thus move a step beyond Pyle’s observations about the inherent contradictions of Coleridge’s ideological project: The definition of imagination in Chapter 13 of the Biographia is not only the site of a counterfactual dream, but also the locus of potential nightmares, while the self is threatened by the very faculty that is called upon to save it.

 

 

 

Coleridge, Gibbon’s Mahomet and the Socratic Daemon

 

Matthew Scott

thomas.scott@hertford.oxford.ac.uk

 

 

During the course of his discussion of the rise of Islam in the Decline and Fall, Gibbon pauses momentarily to focus his attention directly on the moral character of Mahomet. His purpose, he tells us, is to examine the motivation of the prophet with a view to deciding whether he was an ‘enthusiast or impostor.’ As he censures the rhapsodic enthusiasm of the Koran, Gibbon promotes a wide-ranging criticism of all faith based upon the ‘fervour of enthusiasm’, a position in which he is influenced by Hume. But he is also concerned to highlight the potential proximity of this enthusiasm to mere pious fraudulence, a matter to which Coleridge turns notably in The Friend.  Beyond the specific case of Mahomet, there is a larger issue: ‘From enthusiasm to imposture, the step is perilous and slippery’. If imposture is grounded in pretence, the hallmark of enthusiasm is rhapsodic excess and the production of faith through rapture. Gibbon is, however, interested in a middle state in which, while unsure of the righteous basis for individual actions, we forego our duty to local moral inquiry through a religious conviction that our larger purpose is just. Moreover, he enlists the example of Socrates to support his case. He reminds us: ‘the daemon of Socrates affords a memorable instance, how a wise man may deceive himself, how a good man may deceive others, how the conscience may slumber in a mixed and middle state between self-illusion and voluntary fraud.’

       In this paper, I aim to suggest that the terms of this condition run to the very core of Coleridge’s thought in the late 1810s. Lecture 3 of the Lectures on the History of Philosophy provides a deliberation upon Socrates’ assertion that he was accompanied by a daemon, ‘a presentiment which, whenever he was about to do that which would be injurious either temporally or morally, withheld him.’ Because he takes seriously the question of our choosing to be deceived by external phenomena that we know to be untrue ­ as we see from both his notebooks and from his investigation of artistic representation ­ Coleridge does not accept Gibbon’s explanation of Socrates state. Moreover, he is drawn to dwell upon this moment of supernatural assertion precisely because it is one that Socrates himself questions, in so doing focusing our attention upon the possibility of being at once acutely self-aware and yet awake to a state that appears to be governed by illusion. Beginning from the opposition with which Gibbon provides us, that between self-illusion and voluntary fraud, I will suggest that there is much in the text of the lectures to suggest that we need to reconsider not only the relationship between religion and philosophy in Coleridge’s thought at the time. but also that between art and philosophy, a relationship that had concerned him throughout the 1810s both in notebook entries and in his published writings and preceding lectures.

 

 

 

 

 

Infinite Blindness and the Want of Sight in Coleridge’s “Allegoric Vision”

 

Thomas A. Stuby

tstuby@u.washington.edu

 

Coleridge’s now famous opposition of symbol to allegory has been treated at length in recent critical commentary, especially since the work of Benjamin and de Man has sought to re-institute allegory.  Yet too little attention has been given to Coleridge’s own short allegorical piece, “Allegoric Vision,” as it has received almost no attention outside of cursory references to its obvious political and religious intent.  Coleridge, though, possessed a curious fondness for this work, and having originally included the piece in his 1795 lectures on politics and religion, he continued to revise it and use it as a prefatory piece in various contexts, particularly in the 1811 Courier, the 1817 Lay Sermons, and even into editions of his Poetical Works.  Coleridge’s “Vision,” I argue, should be read as a sort of allegory of reading, or more specifically, as an allegory about allegorical understanding itself.  Following the trope of “blindness” through “Allegoric Vision” as well as in some of his poetry and prose, it becomes clear that much of Coleridge’s concern here is with the current interpretive difficulties involving what he stresses as, “the first [propaedeutic] of the mind.”  My paper will offer a reading of the “Allegoric Vision” in its re-visionary contexts that sees its work as a preface primarily betraying Coleridge’s own more ambivalent thought on allegory and his greater anxieties about the interpretive process: his uneasiness about notions of causation, the historical situation of language, and his awkward recognition of the inevitable need in the end for human consciousness to supply imaginative allegories to the understanding.

 

 

 

“Love” ’s Love and The Act of Story-Telling

 

Anya Taylor

anyataylor1@juno.com

 

As Jim Mays asserts in his headnote to “Love,” “the poem was inspired by Coleridge’s first visit to Sockburn in Oct-Nov 1799, when he met and fell in love with SH” (PW 1, 2, p.604).  This poem declares the mutuality of this love in the interplay of the frame—where the singer methodically seduces his woman through the rhythms and watchful pauses of his technique—and the tale itself,  which narrates the violent death of a devoted lover and the mistress’s regret that she has scorned him too long.  The woman listening in the frame heeds the intended lesson of the tale and responds to this warning by turning actively and erotically to embrace the singer.

       The love in “Love” is comprehensive in looking, listening, communicating, and torridly embracing.  Coleridge quickly and proudly publishes his poem in The Morning Post and in the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (where it does not appear preceded by the 107 lines of “The Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladie”), and thus announces to the world that at 27 years old he has fallen totally in love, despite the well-known fact that he is ineluctably married to someone else. He has been pierced by love’s arrow. Although this medieval vocabulary sounds passive, he in fact describes a love that is forceful, active, and determined. 

       This love is accomplished by means of telling or singing a story.  It thus follows the model of the story of Paolo and Francesca in Inferno 5, lines 88- 145, where the lovers read aloud together the parallel and suggestive story of Launcelot and Guinevere, and are so overcome by each other’s nearness and the meanings of the story that they cease reading: “That day we read no further” (line 135), a text that Coleridge read in the Rev. Henry Boyd’s 1785 translation, if his Italian was not yet refined enough for such passionate texts.

       “Love” draws from Coleridge’s earlier love poems and establishes the grounds for his later definitions of love in verse and prose.  Its passion gives him something to lose when he loses it. Reading is the fiery center of the intimacy between Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson, as I go on to show in the chapter on “Love” in my just finished book, Erotic Coleridge: Women, Love, and the Law against Divorce.

 

 

 

What Is the Sound of One Icicle Shining?

Silence and the Koan of "Frost at Midnight"

 

Lou Thompson

l.thompson@charter.net

 

My speculation in this paper grows out of a discussion at the last Coleridge conference concerning the difference (and whether or not one exists) between “quiet” and “silence” for Coleridge in general, in “Frost at Midnight” in particular, and for Coleridge’s readers.  Using support from the OED and Johnson’s dictionary for contemporaneous usages of those words, concordances for indications of any differentiation on Coleridge’s part, and the text of the poem itself, and building on previous scholarship on sound and silence in the poem, I will argue that the poem explores many layers and varieties of dialogue, nonverbal communication, and meaningful silence.  According to Buddhist monk Tich Nhat Hanh, “There is a big difference between a kung-an [koan] and a math problem - the solution of the math problem is included in the problem itself, while the response to the kung-an lies in the life of the practitioner.”  In “Frost at Midnight” Coleridge characteristically reconciles opposites much like a Zen koan, defying and transcending explanation, logic, or reason.  

 

 

 

Dream Weaver: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the prefigurings of Psychoanalytic Dream Theory

 

Kiran Toor

windigo_01@hotmail.com

 

In his own words, Coleridge only ever “seem’d” a poet; what he was was a sort of Sandman, a weaver of elusive “Day-Dreams”, “Sorts of Dreams”, “Reveries”, “Visions in Dream”, and “Fragments from the life of Dreams”.  What he might have been was one of the earliest dream analysts. This paper examines the relationship between Coleridge the poet and Coleridge the dreamer, and re-examines claims by David Miall and Nicholas Halmi that Coleridge “offer[ed] no alternative model” to previous etiological explanations of dreams, that he provided only “occasional remarks about dreams” and no “single focus” with which to satisfactorily account for dreams before the psychological advances of the next century. Insisting on the absence of coherent dream theorizations in Coleridge’s notebooks and recorded dreams, critics have repeatedly overlooked the burden of proof lying in the poetry before them.  Not only did Coleridge devise a special prosody of dreams never before realized, his notion of poetry as a “rationalized dream dealing out …our own Feelings – that never perhaps were attached by us consciously to our own Personal Selves” can be assimilated to an explanation – indeed even a theory – of nocturnal dreams that foretells analytical psychology’s diagnosis of dreams: “What is repressed, ignored or neglected by the conscious is compensated by the unconscious.”  As manifestations of the ‘waking dream’, Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, Rime, and Christabel show remarkable foresight into psychoanalytic concepts of ‘lucid dreaming’, ‘repetition compulsion’, ‘active imagination’, and even collective archetypal memory as articulated nearly a hundred years later.  If, as Coleridge tells us, poetry is effectively a kind of dream, it is only suitable that a coherent dream theory be sought therein.

 

 

Coleridge and Wordsworth  [exact title tba]

 

Nicola Trott

 

 

 

‘The Mart of Nations’: Capitalism and Neoplatonism in Coleridge and Tennyson

 

David Vallins

dvallins@hiroshima-u.ac.jp

 

Both Coleridge and Tennyson celebrate scientific discovery as a means to mankind’s spiritual or intellectual advance (associating this with Christian and Neoplatonic ideals), yet at the same time criticize the competitive greed and exploitation resulting from Britain’s rapid industrial and commercial development in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. Whereas Coleridge sees these evils as symptoms of an ‘idolatrous’ preoccupation with material rather than spiritual aims, however, Tennyson sees them as resulting from an excessive emphasis on the interests of the individual rather than of humanity in general. In several of his poems, indeed, Tennyson celebrates the industrial and economic development of 19^th-century Britain as aspects of a ‘progress’ which is spiritual as well as material, thus associating these phenomena with the Neoplatonic ideals of Coleridge and other Romantics. This attempt to find spiritual value in the progress of commerce and colonialism is never wholly successful, and in Maud it is replaced by the ideal of war in pursuit of ‘liberty’ as purifying an otherwise helplessly-corrupted nation. Like several of Tennyson’s earlier poems, however, Maud echoes the Romantic ideal of a transition from personal loss to a ‘gain’ - whether material or spiritual - which is often envisaged as more universal; and what primarily connects Tennyson with Coleridge is this repeated vision of a transcendence of loss involving a unification of self-interest with the universal good.

 

 

 

Coleridge the Plagiarist

 

Alan Vardy

avardy@hunter.cuny.edu

 

In the autumn of 1834, Thomas De Quincey first catalogued STC’s plagiarisms in his series of essays devoted to Coleridge in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine.  The Coleridge family found themselves in the position of having to defend his reputation at a point where that reputation was far from secure.  Luckily, Henry Nelson Coleridge had only to acknowledge the debts in his Introduction to the Table Talk, while following De Quincey’s own reasoning that despite the fact that Biographia Literaria included a ‘verbatim translation from Schelling’ Coleridge was nonetheless ‘as entirely original… as any one man that ever existed’.  The family was more upset by the personal revelations in De Quincey’s series than the plagiarism charge.  Sara Coleridge was particularly outraged by what she took to be a mean-spirited and inaccurate estimation of her mother’s intelligence, and railed against De Quincey’s general portrait of STC as an overindulgent, erratic genius, and irresponsible parent.  The more serious attack occurred six years later with the appearance of J.F. Ferrier’s essay ‘The Plagiarisms of S.T. Coleridge’ in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine.

       Whereas De Quincey’s attack assumed that acts of plagiarism were psychological aberrations, part of a pattern of brilliant inconsistency, Ferrier carefully delineated Coleridge’s unacknowledged uses of Schelling in the most damning intellectual and moral terms.  Coleridge was a thief.  My paper focuses on this attack (after briefly sketching the De Quincey controversy).  Ferrier’s charges demanded a serious philosophical response, and this task fell to Sara Coleridge.  In 1843 she threw herself into a systematic study of Schelling, and her subsequent defense has greatly influenced critical and editorial views.    

 

 

 

Coleridge and Modernity:

Some Implications of the Reason/Understanding Distinction

 

Ron Wendling

rwendlin@sju.edu

 

Like his contemporary, Hegel (1770-1831), Coleridge lived at a time of increasing reaction against the Enlightenment and the modernizing of Western societies it sanctioned.  In The Critique of Pure Modernity: Hegel, Heidegger and After (University of Chicago Press, 1986) David Kolb describes modernity and explores the attitudes toward it of some especially significant post-Enlightenment thinkers.  Accepting Kolb’s description, I propose to use Coleridge’s distinction between Reason and understanding to situate his attitude toward modernity among those that Kolb reviews.

       Coleridge’s varying definitions of “understanding” indicate that he saw in the empirical tradition from Aristotle to Locke the epistemological foundation of the modern world. They also indicate the practicality of the form of idealism that Coleridge developed and the respect for modernity implicit in it.  The empirical understanding, he thought, adequately explained how we classify and rationally account for the particulars of experience.  Matter and history can be signs of spirit in Coleridge only when they retain in the mind the solid, if secondary, reality that understanding gives them.

       But since understanding processes the world in a way that places it “out there,” separate from us and available for use, Coleridge thought it insufficient to satisfy our need for forms of knowledge more intimate than the conceptual.  The manipulation of the world through distant observation that characterizes modernity, successful as it has been in satisfying external needs, does not touch the depths of human individuality.  For that, Coleridge was enough of an idealist to maintain, we have to discover a reality in nature and other people as independent of use as reflection tells us we ourselves are.

       Coleridge’s “Reason” is the agent of that discovery.  The “other,” in which understanding sees objects of potentially useful inspection, Reason regards as autonomous.  Coleridge did not deplore the empirical mindset itself, which is compatible with that of Reason, but its dominance after the Enlightenment.  He appears to have foreseen, as a result of this dominance, the frequently empty freedom of the modern individual whose “options” lack sufficient content to be durably fulfilling and weaken community by equating established social roles with unneeded, inauthentic constraints.

 

 

 

“Intimations of Immortality:  Tom Poole to John Sheppard, 2 February 1837

An Unpublished Autograph”

 

Timothy Whelan

timwhel@georgiasouthern.edu

 

In 2002 I discovered a box of letters at the Angus Library, Regent's Park College, Oxford, that contained a number of letters by literary figures of the early 19th c., including a letter by S. T. Coleridge to Samuel Purkis, a MS. poem by Southey, a George Dyer letter,  and a letter by Tom Poole to John Sheppard [formerly of Frome], dated 2 February 1837, about six months before Poole's death.  The paper will be in two parts:  (1) a brief discussion of the provenance of the letter.  The letter belonged to Joseph Angus, Principal of Regent's Park (at that time in London) from 1849 to 1893.  Angus was keen on creating a showcase in his college library of literary letters, and he attained many of them from Thomas Raffles of Liverpool, a major antiquarian, in exchange for letters of Baptist figures, which Raffles desired for his collection.  These literary letters Angus put  on display in the library at Holford House, Regent's Park, but when the college moved to Oxford in 1928, these letters were stored away and  forgotten;  (2) a discussion of the Poole letter, beginning with background on John Sheppard, at that time a fairly well-known Baptist writer and lay-preacher from Frome.  The occasion of the letter concerns a long poem by Sheppard, An Autumn Dream, that he had recently published and sent a complimentary copy to Poole.  In the letter Poole provides an interesting critique of the poem, which concerns death and the afterlife, something very much on Poole's mind in 1837.  Poole seems somewhat uncertain about the exact nature of "consciousness" after death and bliss in heaven, something the poem has much to say about.  At one point he asks, "What would be my feelings if those whom I had loved were not there?  Could it be Paradise to me if they were in torment?  Could I be happy, even if they were in a higher Mansion (as you have placed the patriarchs and apostles,) separated from them?"   The letter breaks off at this point due to the sudden death of Poole's sister, Mrs. John King of Bristol, who according to Poole, died at the very moment he was writing to Sheppard about death!  This leads Poole to more thoughts of the afterlife and the resurrection, in which he mentions the recent phenomenon of spontaneous life that had arisen after the discovery of a "bulbous root in an Egyptian mummy."  Some of this is the outgrowth of his friendship with his neighbor scientist, Crosse.    In closing, Poole mentions that Southey had recently spent 3 days with him, agreeing on "everything but politics." 

 

 

 

On All Sides Infinity:  Coleridge and Astronomy

 

Dometa Wiegand

wiegandd@mail.wsu.edu

 

       Peter Whitfield, author of Mapping the Heavens, says “It is the duality of Precise observation and religious awe that gives the early history of astronomy a double fascination” (11).  One can see why a science of duality would appeal to Coleridge.

       Recent scholarship has done much to explore the interrelationship of science and the poetic and political ramifications of Romanticism.  This work has centered on biology and geology as being the most “radical” of sciences.  My paper instead explores the influence of astronomy in general, and the contributions of William and John Herschel in particular on Coleridge, who ushered in literary Romanticism in England with his Lyrical Ballads.

       Astronomical challenges to traditional concepts of the universe and man’s place in that universe, seem to simultaneously accept and reject those traditional concepts through the “double fascination” of astronomy with exactness and infinity, natural law and religious awe, and consequently social status quo and revelation.

       My work centers on Coleridge’s poetry, including important early works like “Frost at Midnight” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and continuing through his system of logic as expressed in the Maximus Opus.  From the expression of the aesthetics of infinity to the integration of this inherent duality in a coherent system of sublime philosophy, astronomy and particularly the Herschels, exerted a grip on Coleridge.  Careful use of the notebooks, correspondence, and shorter publications can be assembled to support this imbrication of astronomical inspiration and logic into his works as a whole—and hence, the nineteenth century literary imagination.