COLERIDGE SUMMER CONFERENCE 2006
ABSTRACTS

 

 

 

Afar in the Desert: Thomas Pringle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 

P. R. Anderson

pra@humanities.uct.ac.za

 

The ageing Coleridge pronounced Thomas Pringle’s ‘Afar in the Desert’ ‘among the two or three most perfect lyric Poems in our Language’, a lofty estimation that today suggests more about Coleridge than it does about Pringle’s poem.  When, in 1828, Thomas Pringle rejoiced in Coleridge’s high praise he was recently returned from a period of attempted settlement on the eastern frontier of the Cape colony, with a body of, now generally neglected, poetry and a lively commitment to the anti-slavery cause.  He (and his poetry) is a figure of the greatest interest to the history of liberalism and the press in South Africa, as well as being widely considered as a ‘father’ to its poetry.  What Coleridge’s praise suggests is a certain self-recognition on his part, perhaps in the figure of the poem’s lonely traveller, and perhaps in the figure of the young poet living out the politics of a life in poetry, journalism and the unbounded imaginative exercise of colonisation.  This paper traces Coleridge’s interest in the new society of the wildernesses of the empire, and the continuities he recognised between the writings of his youth and those of Pringle.

 

 

 

Between Wesleyan Methodism and Oxford Tractarianism:

Sara Coleridge as Victorian Theologian

 

Jeffrey W. Barbeau

jbarbeau@oru.edu

 

Previous studies of S.T. Coleridge’s daughter Sara have focused on her life, difficult relationship with her father, and subsequent work as an editor of his works.  In this paper, I explore Sara Coleridge’s explicitly theological contribution to the history of English theology.  Two key essays appeared in the 1840s that may clarify Sara Coleridge’s role as a neglected ‘disciple’ of S.T. Coleridge in Victorian England.  In 1843, Sara Coleridge’s ‘On Rationalism’, appended to an edition of her father’s Aids to Reflection, attempted to extend S.T. Coleridge’s insights on the relationship between faith and reason through an often complex discussion of rationality and mystery in Christianity.  In an effort that frequently brings to mind her father’s philosophical theology, Sara Coleridge attempts throughout the essay to steer a middle path between English Methodism and a perceived sacramentalism in Newman’s Oxford Movement.  Later, in 1848, Sara Coleridge once again entered the theological fray by publicly defending her father’s late work on Scripture and inspiration, Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit.  Through an explication of the central lines of argumentation of these two works, I hope to show that Sara Coleridge’s contribution to Victorian theology has been neglected and, moreover, that further attention to these works may distinguish Sara as one of S.T. Coleridge’s most authentic disciples.

 

 

 

‘Some wilderness-plot, green & fountainous & unviolated by man’:

Coleridge and Bartram’s Travels

 

David M. Baulch

dbaulch@uwf.edu

 

While the claims John Livingston Lowes made in The Road to Xanadu (1927) for the influence of William Bartram’s Travels on ‘Kubla Khan’ have long since been challenged, this paper proposes a re-evaluation of Bartram’s significance for Coleridge’s work with particular attention to the year 1797.  The passages Coleridge copies into his notebook in 1797 arguably are the source for particular phrases and images in ‘Kubla Khan’, but they also draw attention to Bartram’s Travels as displaying an aesthetic vision directly relevant for the study of Coleridge’s work more broadly.  Beyond a possible source of particular words and images, Bartram’s Travels artfully weaves together the ecological, political, and spiritual themes Coleridge also constructs in his ‘This Lime-Tree Bower’, ‘The Wanderings of Cain’ and ‘The Ancient Mariner’.

 

My paper maintains that key moments in Coleridge’s work reflect an intuitive grasp of, and lasting intellectual engagement with, the complexity of the issues that Bartram’s book expresses.  As contemporary criticism has studied Bartram’s experiences of liberty in nature and claims for the natural world as the face of the divine power, it has also made visible this text’s anxieties about the dangers of revolution and the human ability to envision a nation.  It is the work of this paper to explore Coleridge’s interest in Bartram’s Travels as an unrecognized site of Coleridge’s notoriously complex engagement with nature as the ground upon which an interdependent ecological, revolutionary, and spiritual aesthetic merges. 

 

 

 

I pass, like night, from land to land;

I have strange power of speech…

Ahasuerus and the manifestation of his presence

in selected works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 

Katy Beavers

kebeavers_uk@yahoo.co.uk

 

Many writers of the Romantic period, including gothic novelists, were fascinated by the myth of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, who, according to popular belief in the 13th - 16th centuries, was cursed for insulting Christ on his way to the Crucifixion, and as a result, was doomed to wander the Earth for eternity, or in another version of the story, until the Second Coming of Christ.  The story is referred to frequently in 18th century German Literature, as well as other works such as Percy’s Reliques, Lewis’s The Monk, Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with each version introducing its own variations of the tale.

 

Writers of the Romantic era were also attracted to Ahasuerus as the eternal storyteller, who was compelled to share his experiences with others during his wanderings. In the works of Coleridge in particular, the presence of Ahasuerus is implied or felt in ways such as the physical presence of characters which appear to be based on Ahasuerus, who are travellers or wanderers much like Coleridge himself, who spent much of his adult life drifting from one place to another whilst writing. Many of Coleridge’s works also wander across a range of different ideas and intellectual areas, such as the Biographia Literaria, or ‘Kubla Khan’ for example.

 

I will identify these themes as they arise in a selection of Coleridge’s major poems, focussing mainly on ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ‘The Wanderings of Cain’ and ‘Christabel’.

 

 

 

Coleridge’s Romantic Collaborations

 

John Beer

jbb1000@cam.ac.uk

 

Although well known even in his own time, for monologue style of talk (his conversations, as he once admitted, were more often ‘oneversations’) Coleridge was also unexpectedly addicted to collaboration.  Particularly during his early years, but also throughout his career, he often worked best when he could feel that he and one or two accomplices were striking sparks off one another.  I shall be discussing one or two instances of such collaboration, which can be traced throughout his career, and their romantic implications

 

 

 

‘JEALOUS OF THE LISTENING AIR’:

SILENCE AND THE GOTHIC SUBLIME IN CHRISTABEL

 

Richard Berkeley

berkeley55@hotmail.com

 

Silence plays a key conceptual role in Coleridge’s poetry.  As I have previously discussed, silence is established in The Eolian Harp as a thematic reference point that is richly imbued with spiritual implications that interconnect his theological and poetic interests.  The significance of this reference point is continually refashioned as Coleridge’s poetry develops in the conversation poems, and even twenty years later in the Biographia, Coleridge is still presenting the image of silence as a pre-condition for authentic spiritual experience.

 

But in Christabel the role of silence is dramatically different: it has become an active force, a force that stands for evil and the destruction of the individual.  Silence both surrounds Geraldine and amounts to her means of exerting power.  In this paper I explore the contrast between the use of silence in the early poetry where it marks out a moment of potential encounter with the infinite, and in the supernatural poetry where silence has become silencing—a sinister encroachment on the individual by an alien absolute.  In doing this I also speculate on the specific relationship of this reversal to the ambivalences that characterise Coleridge’s later thought, and especially his peculiar ambivalence over the creative imagination.

 

 

 

‘WILD AND SINGULARLY BEAUTIFUL’ CHRISTABEL MEETS ‘PASSIVE’ ZAPOLYA: COLERIDGE’S FAILED ATTEMPT AT FRAMING GERALDINE

 

Thomas J. Brennan

tbrennan@sju.edu

 

Zapolya, Coleridge’s reworking of The Winter’s Tale, is perhaps his most forgettable play.  Yet the circumstances of his attempt at producing it in 1816—especially his connection with Lord Byron—cast some light on his perspective on Christabel which was published that same year and also with Byron’s assistance.  Byron famously praises Christabel as ‘that wild and singularly beautiful and original poem’ in his Preface to The Siege of Corinth.  Yet when Coleridge encourages Byron to read Zapolya and consider it for production at Drury Lane, he stresses the Queen Zapolya’s ‘passiveness’ in the final act of the play as ‘the greatest’ and a trait he hopes any production would retain (Griggs 627).  Since Coleridge knew that Byron remembered Geraldine as the ‘heroine’ of ‘wild’ Christabel, I will argue that Zapolya’s passivity—both the character’s and the play’s as a whole—represents Coleridge’s attempt to re-read and contain the wildness of Geraldine—a feat neither the character Christabel, nor the narrator, nor Coleridge himself can manage. Byron, however, refuses to join this undertaking. He recognizes Coleridge’s ‘daring sympathies with power’ in Christabel and refuses to see them as misguided. By saluting the incomplete poem as ‘wild’, he thereby preserves the jouissance of the young Coleridge – manifested in Geraldine—over and against the older Coleridge’s attempt to erase this trait in the character of Christabel and her completed counterpart—Zapolya.

 

 

 

COLERIDGE’S TRANSLATION OF GOETHE’S FAUST

 

Frederick Burwick                                                                   James C. McKusick

fburwick@humnet.ucla.edu                                                     james.mckusick@mso.umt.edu

 

Coleridge had originally been commissioned by John Murray in 1814 to translate Goethe’s Faust.  After working at the task for a couple of months, Coleridge gave it up.  But in 1820 Boosey persuaded him to continue, accepting Coleridge’s original plan to translate the work into dramatic blank verse, and agreeing as well to Coleridge’s insistence that his translation must be published anonymously.  It is well known that Coleridge introduced in English Romanticism the German thought of Friedrich Schlegel, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schelling, and other important philosophers and literary critics.  He is also credited for having provided fine translations of Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein and Piccolomini.  His poetic work includes translations of many contemporary German poets.  Since the time of its appearance in 1821, the recognition that Coleridge translated the outstanding German work of the period, Goethe’s Faust, has remained hidden from the general public.  James McKusick has conducted a stylometric analysis that demonstrates that this translation has a significantly high degree of stylistic correlation with Coleridge’s Remorse, but only minimal correlation with other Faust translations of the same period.  This evidence is corroborated by an examination of verbal echoes of Coleridge’s other poetic works that abound in the translation of Faust.  Drawing upon the statistical techniques developed by Frederick Mosteller and David Wallace in their landmark study of the Federalist Papers, McKusick examined the relative frequency of word-lengths and of functional keywords.  Results of this statistical analysis show a strong stylistic correlation between the anonymous 1821 translation of Faustus and Coleridge’s Remorse.  McKusick also compared the 1821 Faustus text with other contemporary translations of Goethe’s Faust. In spite of the fact that all were translations of the same text, none showed a significant stylistic correlation with the 1821 Faustus.  These findings indicate a high degree of probability that Coleridge was the author of the 1821 Faustus.

 

 

 

MARY SHELLEY’S COLERIDGE

 

Julie Carlson

jcarlson@english.ucsb.edu

 

‘Mary Shelley’s Coleridge’ considers the influence of Coleridge as family friend and writer on the life/writings of Mary Shelley.  It departs from the two Coleridgean vignettes with which most readers are familiar—the image of a spell-bound young Mary listening to Coleridge recite The Ancient Mariner in the Godwinian household, and Robert Walton’s reference to the poem as source of inspiration for his voyage of discovery in the frame narrative to Frankenstein—and argues that the linkage is neither accidental nor incidental but instead underscores the depth and manner of Coleridge’s presence in Shelley’s life/writings.  Recent interpretations of The Ancient Mariner as commenting on Britain’s participation in the slave trade join readings of Frankenstein that foreground its analysis of the inhumanity of slavery to specify a topic (slavery, oppression, humanity’s inhumanity) and, equally, an affect (guilt, remorse) that Shelley imbibes from Coleridge.  The paper focuses on several instances of Coleridgean borrowings in Shelley’s writings to show how frequently they occur in the context of an exploration of trauma, individual or collective, often understood by Coleridge as a structure of Life-in-Death (examples include the impact of Christabel on Proserpine, of Sibylline Leaves on The Last Man, and Remorse on Faulkner).  It considers the extent to which Shelley understands Coleridgean trauma as foregrounding repetition/compulsion not only as symptom but also a working-through of trauma.

 

 

 

FROM INFANT’S SOUL TO BLACK BOOK:

COLERIDGE’S USE OF NOTEBOOK 21

 

Paul Cheshire

friendscol@btinternet.com

 

Joseph Cottle gave a red leather-bound notebook to his ‘valued friend S.T. Coleridge’ in Bristol on December 6th, 1797.  Notebook 21, which Coleridge called his Cottle-book, returned with him to Nether Stowey and thence on to Germany, the Lakes, Malta and Syracuse where it was substantially completed in 1805.  It then survived the hazardous sea voyage home during which many of Coleridge’s papers were thrown overboard.  But it has not survived intact in printed form; a great Coleridge scholar has effectively dismembered it by merging its contents with those of eighteen other notebooks that were also in use during the same period. 

 

Coleridge started filling his notebooks from the front, the back and anywhere in between; he left pages blank and filled them years later with unrelated matter; he sometimes grabbed the nearest available notebook to catch the thought of the moment.  Ordering these zigzagging accretions chronologically fulfils the primary need to know what Coleridge was thinking when.  The publication of Coleridge’s notebooks in chronological sequence has considerable benefits, but its undesirable side-effects are worth noting.  It obscures the occasions when Coleridge did choose between particular notebooks.  It also cuts his associative links and his dialogue with himself when thematically connected entries, written adjacently, are separated on chronological grounds and printed several pages apart.

 

I shall illustrate these issues with facsimile pages from Notebook 21, and see what can be gained from viewing it as an integral work.

 

 

 

COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH IN THE SOUTH-EAST OF ENGLAND: ODIOUS COMPARISONS OF TWO SEASIDE HOLIDAYS

 

Allan Clayson

pamandallan@tiscali.co.uk

 

I offer my apologies for so radically deflecting attention away from this year’s theme of ‘Coleridge and Wordsworth in the West of England’, but perhaps this paper may prove of some general interest to delegates.  It seemed a useful exercise to contrast the two still more or less estranged ageing poets engaged in roughly similar activities in an environment other than their familiar territory.  The paper revolves around their respective social lives and circles of friends, seen largely through their letters while on holiday in seaside resorts only a couple of miles apart—Coleridge at Ramsgate in 1833 and Wordsworth at Broadstairs in 1837.  Coleridge came much into contact with the Lockharts—Lockhart being then editor of the Quarterly Review, his wife Scott’s elder daughter—while Wordsworth spent virtually all his time either with his publisher Edward Moxon or the banker poet Samuel Rogers and his sister.  The health of Coleridge and Wordsworth was far from robust by this stage and their great days of composition were nearly over, but there are still sparks to be seen of the old fire that possessed them in their youth in the West Country.  We can, in addition, observe two very different personalities when playing away from home, one of the old men serene, the other, to be frank, grumpy, and by the end of the paper, hopefully, it should be clear as to which of the two men, apart from anything else, had the more fun. 

 

 

 

JOSEPH COTTLE AND WEST-COUNTRY ROMANTICISM

 

Richard Cronin

R.Cronin@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk

 

Cottle was moved to write his Early Recollections by his surprise at the ‘extraordinary circumstance that Mr. Coleridge in his “Biographia Literaria” should have passed over in silence, all distinct reference to Bristol, the cradle of his literature, and for many years his favourite abode’.  Cottle writes to reassert his own (characteristically slightly inaccurate) claim ‘to have been the friend, in early life, of such men as Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Lamb: to have encouraged them in their first productions, and to have published, as it respects each of them, his first Volume of Poems’.  Even more boldly, Cottle presents himself in Early Recollections not just as their publisher but as their fellow poet.  All four robustly and with very good reason denied his claim, and yet I shall argue that Cottle did set out in Bristol to found a school of poetry, the key tenets of which are most clearly displayed in Cottle’s own poems, and that Cottle’s principles left their mark on Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth.  In Early Recollections Cottle claims for himself ‘a distinction that might never occur again to a Provincial bookseller,’ and it is a claim that, I shall argue, ought perhaps to be allowed him.

 

 

 

Coleridge and ‘Intellectual Intuition’

 

William S. Davis

WDavis@coloradocollege.edu

 

The elusive concept ‘intellectual intuition’ figures prominently in those areas of German idealist thought that impinge most directly on Romantic poetics.  Among philosophers, Schelling makes most frequent use of the term.  Hölderlin has been called the poet of intellectual intuition, and his Hyperion the novelistic embodiment of the concept.  Bate and Engel suggest the term is of prime importance for Coleridge as well, but primarily in reference to his philosophical and aesthetic views as outlined in Biographia Literaria.  I wish to argue that Coleridge and intellectual intuition deserve more careful attention, particularly as the concept—with its attendant images and metaphors—finds its way, not only into Coleridge’s theory, but into his poems.

 

Controversy around the term begins with Kant’s denial of its very possibility.  Schelling, in his philosophy of nature, however, argues that a non-sensory form of intuition is not only possible, but implied in Kant’s own conception of the Subject, suggesting further that intellectual intuition is not simply a moral necessity, but can appear as lived experience.  There are, as it were, spots of time in which material limits become porous, and we are no longer constrained by the limitations of time and space, no longer dependent on sensory data.  It is at this level of intellectual experience that the philosophical concept is particularly relevant to Coleridge’s poems.  In ‘Lime Tree Bower’ and ‘Pains of Sleep’, for example, we find contrasting forms of intellectual intuition as poetic experience.

 

 

 

Revisiting Coleridge’s Religion:

The Equivocal Evidence of the Opus Maximum

 

Murray J. Evans

m.evans@uwinnipeg.ca

 

Coleridge’s treatment of religion in the Opus Maximum (OM) sheds new light on the place of religion in our reading not only of OM, but also of his larger oeuvre.  My discussion arises from Elinor Shaffer’s narrative of how Coleridge redraws Kant’s boundaries between the religious and non-religious in Aids to Reflection, which thus exemplifies a new parergonal genre in philosophy for aesthetic, not dogmatic effect.  OM provides a special case of this aesthetic-religious appeal by three means.  First, Coleridge repeatedly insists that he cites Scripture for illustration, not authority.  Second, he persists in arguing ‘hypothetically only’ from ‘postulates’, with as yet no ‘proofs of the reality or realization of any position’, such as the existence of God; these proofs will come ‘hereafter’, in a projected (but not extant) section of OM.  Third, when extrapolating from the actual fact of evil in our experience, to its possibility in his philosophical system, Coleridge uses ‘real’ and ‘possible’ not as opposites but on a shifting spectrum that, I will illustrate, problematizes the boundaries of religion and non-religion in OM.  On the one hand, Coleridge’s rhetoric evidently does not require immediate Christian belief of his readers, but invites a more heuristic entertainment of his postulates.  On the other hand, our philosophical consideration of his postulates and the cumulative and intuitive force of his unfolding extrapolations, may also invite, or come to compel, our commitment to Coleridge’s ideas as inseparable from their religious context.  This spectrum of reading religion I call ‘faith’ (as defined in OM).  It is cognate with, but distinct from what the Biographia calls ‘the willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith’, that ‘negative faith, which simply permits the images presented to work by their own force’.  Religion in OM is therefore multiform, an insight that will revise some received notions of religious ‘dogmatism’ in Coleridge’s work at large.

 

 

 

Putting his Poems Together: Coleridge’s 1796 Volume

 

David Fairer

D.Fairer@leeds.ac.uk

 

In assembling his poems for his first published volume, Poems on Various Subjects (1796), Coleridge faced problems of organization, both poetic and personal.  The collection signals an uneasiness about the emergence of his poetic personality, and the relationship between ‘juvenile’ and ‘mature’ voices that alternate through the volume.  The strategic disingenuousness of its ordering and juxtapositions suggests that the volume was conceived as revealing to the public what Coleridge later called ‘buds of hope’, a promise of future powers from a voice that struggles to grow in confidence.  In the 1796 Poems a dynamic impulse is repeatedly checked, renewed, blasted, and revived.  There is no easy progress here, but an unsettling negotiation with his poetic materials, and with his own past, present, and future.

 

 

 

Capability Coleridge And West Country ‘delicacy of character’

 

Jonathan Farina

jvf204@nyu.edu

 

Connoting assumed roles and unchangeable identity, recognizable types and unique individuals, moral and literary quality, facial features and typographical marks, ‘character’ was ‘punic’ without the ‘Greek’, just the kind of ambiguous, self-conflicted word Coleridge loved to use.  This paradox and ambiguity made ‘character’ imply capability and negative capability before Keats wrote his important letters.  With this in mind, in this paper I will examine what Coleridge calls ‘delicacy of character’ in the prefaces, introduction to the sonnets, and poetry of Poems (1797).

 

In the poems of 1797 character proves ‘delicate’ because it is found, like Keats’ poetical character, outside of the poet ‘and yet’—as Seamus Perry has shown Coleridge to say with so much significance—inside of the poet at the same time.  In ‘To the River Otter’, for example, Coleridge looks through the river at himself as much as he looks at the river.  Coleridge looks through the ‘bright transparence’ of the water as he looks through himself, to see both the ‘bedded sand … veined with various dies’ and his own ‘Visions of Childhood’.

 

‘Delicacy of character’ thus labeled the capability attached always to negative capability, the inevitability of always being able to find one’s character expressed outside of oneself—in nature, in things, or in other people—whenever one nobly abandoned oneself and sympathized deeply with something external.  The phrase proves to be a productive description of Coleridge’s early poems and later criticism.

 

 

 

The Speaking Face of Things and the Bride of Quietness

 

Marilyn Gaull

mg49@nyu.edu

 

 

 

 

 

Tintern and the Wye: A Stereographic Tour

 

Bruce Graver

beg@postoffice.providence.edu

 

I would like to retrace, through the lenses of 19th-century stereo photographers, William and Dorothy Wordsworth’s July 1798 walking tour of the Wye.  I am interested in the ways in which early photographers used the technology of the stereoscope to create what we would now call virtual reality experiences.  I am also interested in the ways in which they relied upon, and extended, the conventions of the picturesque.  And I am interested in the ways in which stereographs represent writers and their works, forming a photographic iconography of poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge.

 

I will concentrate on the stereographs of four photographers: Francis Bedford, Thomas Ogle, G.W. Wilson, and William Sedgfield.  Bedford’s photographs of the Wye valley and the West Country are the finest of the nineteenth century; Ogle, whose work is primarily associated with the Lake District, made at least three sets of Wye valley stereographs, very different in conception from Bedford’s; Sedgfield and Wilson also give alternative ways of seeing the ruins of Tintern and the Wye.  By setting their work side by side, I will explore the different ways in which they used their new technology to experiment with effects of space and light, especially in the stereographs of Ogle, who regularly used watercolor tinting. 

 

Besides digital images of the stereographs, I will bring along both stereoscopes and stereographic cards, so that we can all get a full sense of the stereographic experience.

 

 

 

The first poem to Coleridge: a dialogic reading of Intimations

 

Richard Gravil

richardgravil@hotmail.com

 

Stimulated inter alia by Anya Taylor’s treatment of Wordsworth’s argument from desire (‘Religious Readings of the Immortality Ode’, SEL, 26:4 (1986)) and Patrick Keane’s Emerson, Romanticism and Intuitive Reason: the transatlantic ’Light of All our Seeing’ (2005) this paper will examine some of the numerous cruces of interpretation in the Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, as they appear in responses by Thomas Noon Talfourd, through Richard Henry Dana, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allen Poe, Alexander von Humboldt and Gerard Manley Hopkins.  What Intimations did, by way of providing transcendental life-preservers, is encapsulated in Emerson’s indirect and allegorical interpretation: ‘The thoughts of youth, & first thoughts’, are the revelations of Reason.  But Understanding that wrinkled calculator the steward of our house to whom is committed the support of our animal life contradicts evermore these affirmations of Reason & points at Custom & Interest & persuades one man that the declarations of Reason are false & another that they are at least impracticable.  Yet by and by after having denied our Master we come back to see at the end of years or of life that he [Reason] was the truth.  I conclude by noting the contribution made by Intimations to the argument of Aids to Reflection.

 

 

 

Coleridge and the ‘Heavenly-minded Seer’

 

Alan Gregory

AGregory@etss.edu

 

 

Coleridge claimed that he first began reading the work of the ‘extraordinary’ Jacob Boehme, whilst still at school.  Later, he annotated his four volumes of Boehme’s translated works over such a long period and so extensively that, in 1818, he provided a brief introduction for the benefit of any future owner of the books.  Coleridge worries that some notes may express views unbecoming to the Trinitarian orthodoxy he now holds.  Nevertheless, he continues to speak most affectionately of the ‘great German Theosopher’, commending his work, and even comparing his conception of Lucifer favorably with that of Milton.  Given the heterodox character of Boehme’s theology, and especially his approaching ‘so perilously near to Pantheism’, Coleridge’s continuing regard for Boehme is intriguing.  This paper argues that despite, or perhaps because of, the mystic’s near pantheism, Boehme offers Coleridge vital aid in formulating his theological bulwark against any further ‘partak[ing] of the same error’.  In particular, when Coleridge expounds the doctrine of the Trinity in the Opus Maximum, it is Boehme’s treatment of the Divine Will that informs Coleridge’s anti-pantheist insistence on the priority of Will over Being.  That priority, though, Coleridge also interprets against Boehme’s tendency to posit the Divine Will as prior to Divine Triunity.

 

 

 

Radical Bible:

kerygma and politics in Coleridge’s early poetry and lectures

 

Anthony John Harding

scafell@eastlink.ca

 

This paper is prompted by my sense that there is a need to renew our understanding of Coleridge’s 1790s ‘West Country’ radicalism, particularly in its relation to the biblical prophetic call to justice and peace.  For anyone who pays attention to what the news media have been saying recently, it has surely become more difficult to keep clearly in view how it was that Coleridge could draw on biblical vocabulary to articulate his antiwar vision.  Or, how the prophetic imperatives with their emphasis on justice and mercy were infused into and became a motivating impulse of Coleridge’s political radicalism and opposition to war.

 

I want to argue that Coleridge’s political radicalism did not merely adopt biblical allusions, and that it cannot even be described as a marriage of political goals with religious ideals.  It was biblical in that it articulated a vision of justice and peace that was sourced deeply within the traditions of the Law and Prophets, simultaneously political and religious.  What is sometimes forgotten, though, is that among Unitarians a commitment to liberty and pacifism went along with a deep interest in the historical and textual study of the Bible, the very opposite of the illiberal fundamentalism that some materialist critics associate with religious belief.  As Coleridge’s 1795 lectures show, this was a radicalism that challenged the militant secularism of Tom Paine (and of d’Holbach and the Encyclopédistes), as well as the establishment religion of the bishops, at the same time that Unitarian scholars were engaged in developing new critical approaches to the Bible.

 

 

 

Like Fathers, Like Son: Derwent’s Portrait of Hartley

 

Nicola Healey

njh7@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

This paper analyses one aspect of the reception of Hartley Coleridge’s poetry from 1833 to the present day, arguing that the misrepresentation which persists in contemporary criticism is due, in part, to the fragmented portrait of him offered in Derwent Coleridge’s Poems by Hartley Coleridge (1851).  Focusing on the relationship between Derwent, Hartley, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, through an examination of Derwent’s memoir and STC’s notebooks, I examine the conflicted familial loyalties which complicated Derwent’s view of Hartley.  Derwent was, I argue, unable to extricate his reading of Hartley’s work from his memories of their father; a confusion which leads to his presentation of Hartley as an immature or somehow incomplete poet.  I also show how Hartley’s relationships with STC and William Wordsworth have conditioned his reception and subsequent literary reputation.  By tracing the rare lines of reception that did recognise Hartley’s original poetic merits, I show the extent to which Hartley’s individual achievements have been occluded or distorted by STC’s mesmeric presence, and casually inherited critical assumptions: nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics often prefer to focus attention on Hartley the man (or child), rather than poet.  My paper stresses the necessity of a more serious engagement with Hartley’s verse in order to recognise his distinctive poetic voice—this approach pulls him out of the shadow of his literary and familial forefathers and places him within very different traditions of Romantic writing. 

 

 

 

The Illustrated Ancient Mariner

 

Stephen Hebron

stephen@endmoor.com

 

(informal evening talk illustrated with slides as described below)

 

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is perhaps the most illustrated poem in English literature.  This talk with slides presents a selective survey of the many illustrated edition that have been published in the last two centuries, from the first by David Scott in 1837, to contemporary approaches.  The illustrations offer very different readings of Coleridge’s poem, and in the best cases combine with the typography, paper and binding to create an eloquent and expressive unity of form and content.

 

An exhibition (with catalogue) on this subject will be mounted in autumn 2006, first as part of the Ilkley Literature Festival, and then at Dove Cottage, Grasmere.

 

The early, deluxe editions:

·         David Scott (1837)

·         J. Noel Paton (1863)

·         Gustave Doré (1886)

 

Early twentieth century to World War 2:

·         David Jones (1929)

·         Bruce Rogers (1930)

·         Mervyn Peake (1943)

·         Duncan Grant (1945)

 

Late twentieth century:

·         Patrick Procktor (1976)

·         Hunt Emerson (1989)

·         Garrick Palmer (1994)

 

American editions:

·         Elbert Hubbard (1899)

·         Gordon Grant (1938)

·         Alexander Calder (1946)

 

Foreign editions:

·         André Lhote (Paris, 1920)

·         Mario Prassinos (Paris, 1946)

·         Frantiska Ticheho (Czechoslovakia, 1949)

 

 

 

Coleridge The Saviour

 

Alistair Heys

alistair_heys@hotmail.com

 

In this paper, I contrast the relationship of Coleridge and Wordsworth to Calvinism in terms of what Coleridge christened the active and the passive processes of mind.

 

In Coleridge’s opinion, Goethe provides a point of comparison with Wordsworth: ‘they both have this peculiarity of utter non-sympathy with the subjects of their poetry.  They are always, both of them, spectators ab extra—feeling for, but never with, their characters’.  While criticising Wordsworth’s portrayals of rural characters, Coleridge writes that they possess ‘negative faith’ rather than constituting a real language of men: ‘The reader not only knows that the sentiments and the language are the poet’s own, and his own too in his artificial character, as poet’.  Hazlitt describes Shakespeare as ‘the least of an egoist that it was possible to be’, whereas Keats thought of Wordsworth as the ‘egotistical sublime’, and hence Watson remarks upon the nearness of the phrase ‘negative faith’ to its opposite, or ‘negative capability’.  Expostulation and Reply begins with a gentle question indicative of societal unease with the figure of idleness:

 

            Why William, sit you thus alone,

            And dream your time away?

 

Wordsworth’s reply is that the senses work, ‘Against, or with our will’, the eye cannot choose but see and the equally active ear cannot be still.  There is sense that Wordsworth’s passiveness is a defiant response to the ideology of Puritanism, or that need to be busy-all-the-time, which so dominates his task of poetic self-election:

 

            Nor less I deem that there are powers,

            Which of themselves our minds impress,

            That we can feed this mind of ours,

            In a wise passiveness.

 

In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge claims that there are two powers at work in the mind, which relative to each other are active and passive, but that imagination is an intermediate faculty at once both active and passive.  Wordsworth’s wise passiveness is relatively passive; the poet does not mean that his mind is that of ‘a lazy looker-on’, as in Coleridge’s attack upon the empirical theories of Newton.  The other faculty in Coleridge’s definition of Imagination is Fancy; Wordsworth equates fancy with laziness and merely associative empiricism: ‘Copying the impression of the memory-/…things remembered idly do half seem/ The work of Fancy’ (VII: 145-147).  If the mind is its own place and has the power to actively meld sensory impressions then there is a sense that Wordsworth’s entire aesthetic project is underpinned by a spry Calvinist ethic.  In ‘Expostulation and Reply’ the negative faith of the puritan ethic challenges the negatively capable poet as he passively waits for nature to surprise him.  Negative faith is purely active, whereas negative capability is relatively passive, which suggests that Wordsworth tends to the Miltonic more than the Shakespearean.  How different this ethic of hard northern graft (albeit dependent upon passiveness before nature) seems to the southern Coleridge:

 

            But how can he expect that others should

            Build for him, sow for him, and at his call

            Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all?

 

As Weber states, ‘Unwillingness to work is symptomatic of the lack of grace’.  Here is Coleridge on the horror and self-torture of opium addiction: ‘During this sleep, or recession of the spirit, the lower or bestial states of life rise up into action…It is an awful thing to be eternally tempted by the perverted senses’.  During these moments the senses work against Coleridge’s will, which is dominated by the sensual craving for opium.  Coleridge associates Tubal Cain with materialism and the nadir of transcendental philosophy, or those who shape their convictions from without: ‘They built cities, invented musical instruments, were artificers in brass and iron, and refined on the means of sensual gratification…fraternized readily with cruelty and rapacity: these being, indeed, but alternate moods of the same sensual selfishness’.  Yet, in ‘Frost at Midnight’, Coleridge anticipates that the spirit of God, as discernible in the processes of nature, shall mould the spirit of Hartley:

 

The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible

Of that eternal language, which thy God

Utters, who from eternity doth teach

Himself in all, and all things in himself.

Great universal Teacher! He shall mould

Thy spirit…

 

Coleridge inherits Dryden’s proposal that Shakespeare was a force of nature and hence Shakespearean influence crackles in Coleridge’s notebook remarks on nature; here freed from the exigencies of Miltonic pentameter and the need to submerge the Romantic ego in character, the reader is ‘continually engaged by coinages, rhetorical twists, bold metaphors, and sustained image-clusters, as we are when reading Shakespeare’.  Consequently, there is a suspiciously Shakespearean tinge to both Coleridge’s opium visions and his mercurial notebook writings on the subject of nature, a negative faith in his own Unitarian sense of salvation in Christ and negative capability for the damning horror of blank nought all.

 

 

 

Coleridge’s Imagining Salisbury Plain

 

Waka Ishikura

ishikura@shse.u-hyogo.ac.jp

 

Coleridge was strongly impressed with Wordsworth’s poem, Salisbury Plain, when he first heard Wordsworth’s reciting in 1795.  He assured, even after more than twenty years, that ‘I shall hardly forget the sudden effect produced on my mind’, at that moment.  For Coleridge, the poet Wordsworth represented the ‘manly sentiment, novel imagery, and vivid colouring’, and in the mean time Coleridge began drawing various images out of Wordsworth’s early poems when writing his verses.  In this paper I would like to suggest that Salisbury Plain, while being revised by Wordsworth, was becoming a seedbed for Coleridge’s imagination.  The traveller in the poem, for example, together with various sources of images, became transformed into the old Mariner, while with Gothic images the woman dwelling in the dead house of the plain was supernaturalized into Christabel.  These figures are the destitute suffering physically or mentally, burdened with stories to be told and heard.  It was as if Coleridge shared his new friend’s property with a spirit of pantisocratic fraternity.  This literary process parallels the process of making a new volume, titled Lyrical Ballads, in which Coleridge’s negotiation with Joseph Cottle about the publication of Wordsworth’s long poems gradually became the planning of a joint project. The fate of Christabel, however, was not a happy one—the poem was enjailed within somehow malnourished plots so as to suppress the development of ‘the witchery of daylight’ to remain as a potential of a shared vision of the Salisbury Plain.

 

 

 

Reason to Lament:

Causes for Melancholy in Coleridge’s Circle, ca. 1796-8

 

Noel Jackson

njackson@mit.edu

 

My paper is about the frequent association of reason with sadness in the early Romantic lyric.  Looking at work by Charles Lloyd and Coleridge, I plan to discuss how expressions of melancholy by these poets address the impasse of Revolutionary hopes in the wake of the Terror.  It is hardly surprising that these poets would later posit a cause for melancholy in the perceived failure of the Revolution and its authorizing fantasies of ameliorative thought; to Wordsworth in 1805, for instance, this period was seen as a ‘melancholy waste of hopes o’erthrown’.  Yet these are generally not the terms in which these poets wrote in the mid- and late 1790s, during which time the historical causes of melancholy are often only hinted at or provisionally supplied.  One important early example of such poetic indirection is Lloyd’s poem of 1795, ‘The Melancholy Man’, which speculates in its closing stanzas on the political sources of the man’s depression, as well as Coleridge’s short poem ‘To a Young Man of Fortune’, written while Lloyd was a pupil and lodger with the Coleridges in 1796, in which Lloyd is rebuked for ‘an Indolent and Causeless Melancholy’ that blinds him to more pressing scenes of misery and social injustice.  My paper will examine the aesthetic importance and political ambivalence of these reflections on the causes of melancholy, concluding with a brief reading of Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’, a poem that implicitly locates the speaker’s ‘reason to lament’ not only in the speaker’s apprehension of the war going on outside his secluded grove, but in the faculty and exercise of reason itself.

 

 

 

Coleridge and the Unitarian Ladies

 

Felicity James

felicity.james@christ-church.oxford.ac.uk

 

Coleridge’s well-known exclamation in a notebook entry of 1799: ‘Socinianism Moonlight – Methodism &c A Stove! O for some Sun that shall unite Light and Warmth’ (CN, I, 467), has often been taken as representative of his difficulties with the chilly rationalism of Unitarian thought.  This paper, however, seeks to contextualise Coleridge’s early Unitarianism more fully, through an exploration of the important encouragement given to him by the Unitarian community in the 1790s.  Arguing that its structures of sociability, friendship, and domestic affection were a crucial part of his attraction toward Unitarianism, I focus on the ‘Light and Warmth’ of his relationships with two Unitarian ladies: Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Elizabeth Evans (née Strutt).

 

In summer 1796, Coleridge spent several weeks at the house of Elizabeth Evans, sister of the prosperous Derbyshire manufacturers William and Joseph Strutt, exploring the possibility of tutoring her children.  In 1797 he was to write to Thelwall that the visit was ‘a sunny spot in our Life!...  She is no common Being who could create so warm & lasting an interest in our hearts’ (CL, I, 306).  The story of Elizabeth Evans, ‘without exception the greatest WOMAN, I have been fortunate to meet with in my brief pilgrimage thro’ Life!’ (CL, I, 306), deserves to be told, and I argue that in many ways, the warm sociable encouragement she offered Coleridge echoed the poetic support given to him at the same time by Anna Barbauld, both relationships being rooted in their shared Unitarian faith.  Having discussed the practical support offered by Evans, I then close with a reading of some poetic exchanges between Coleridge and Barbauld, focussing in particular on Barbauld’s 1797 poem ‘To Mr. Coleridge’, published in the Monthly in 1799.

 

 

 

Wordsworth and Coleridge: Panoramic Vision,

Urban Technology, and Poetics

 

Jennifer Jones

jjjones@mail.uri.edu

 

Tradition has often labeled Wordsworth as the quintessential poet of nature.  It ought no longer to be suppressed and ignored, however, that the ‘poet of nature’ was also a lover of the city and an observer of some of the most powerful technologies and aesthetics of that urban space, including the panorama, which he visited at least twice around 1800.  Two years later Wordsworth composed his poem on Westminster Bridge.  Wordsworth thinks carefully about ways to answer questions pertaining to immersion, aesthetic experience in relation to urban architecture & new visual media, and commercial enjoyment.  When Wordsworth describes London from his position on Westminster Bridge, he suggests that it actually changes London, providing observers with a prospect of the city at once distant and involving.  London becomes a panorama.  My thesis here is that Westminster Bridge altered the way urban space was conceived, displayed, and represented, and that it ultimately became a technological model through which Wordsworth imagined—and in turn modeled—his poetics.

 

It is the case, of course, that Coleridge too is traditionally held up as an unequivocal hater of the City—’I love Bristol & do not love London’ (CL i 226-7)—as much as Wordsworth, and that the two of them together are most often understood to mutually reinforce the romantic ideology that identifies Romanticism itself as anti-urban.  And yet, as Nicola Trott has persuasively argued (Coleridge Bulletin, Spring 2002: 41-57), not only was Coleridge frequently in London, but his writings about the city give ‘amusingly mixed signals’ (43).  In these writings, ‘[t]he allure of London’, writes Trott, ‘is almost palpable’ (44). 

 

In this presentation, I wish to put Wordsworth’s ‘Westminster Bridge’ sonnet and the great panoramic simile of Book VIII of The Prelude (1805) that describes the narrator’s recollection of his first view of London (lines 711-741) into dialogue with Coleridge’s imagination of the city.  Trott draws our attention to a tremendous set of images that compose what she describes as Coleridge’s ‘panoramic cityscape’ (57).  These urban images include, perhaps most significantly for me, ‘a city looked at in the polish’d back of a Brobdignag Spoon, held lengthwise—so enormously stretched-up…!’ and a comparison of the city to ‘an old Plate of Montserrat’ (CL ii 988).  How fascinating that the panoramic sweep of Wordsworth’s images of London, huge testaments of audio-visual absorption, are echoed a year later in Coleridge by a sublimely minute imagination—a spoon, a plate.  And moreover, Wordsworth’s poetic forms, an embedded simile within a larger poem and a sonnet, are themselves literally contained, small, while the very minuteness of Coleridge’s images produce excesses of rather huge proportion.  To what degree can we discern a dialogue between these two poets in this regard?  I will explore that possibility in this presentation.  Moreover, I hope to show that the effort is a useful one, because these moments in the two poets’ writings on the city are not isolate but rather significant to their aesthetic theories more generally, making the space of the urban in the Coleridgean and Wordsworthian imaginations of real importance to our understanding of Romanticism more generally. 

 

 

 

Hartley Coleridge: Son of the Mariner; King of Ejuxria

 

Andrew Keanie

aj.keanie@ulster.ac.uk

 

The reviews of Poems (1833) in Blackwoods Magazine argued that Hartley Coleridge was deeply indebted as a poet to Wordsworth.  Hartley disputed that argument in a letter to his mother in 1834.  Today, in line with other critics, Lisa Gee suggests that Hartley’s poetry is more Wordsworthian than Coleridgean.  I wish to test that theory again.  Like his father before him, Hartley saw his own poetry as poor, even embarrassing, when compared to Wordsworth’s, yet he also felt that his poetry needed to be judged by different criteria from Wordsworth’s.  In 1839 he said he could not bring himself to show Wordsworth his latest poem, explaining that Wordsworth’s ‘austere taste would be mortally bored with the confusion of Astrology Mythology, Scripture, and Hylozoism’ in it.  His poetry shows that to an extent Hartley played out, in real life, some of the hypotheses projected by his father and Wordsworth.  He became like Wordsworth, the observer at one with nature; and like his father, he regarded writing as an experience.  He was interested much more in the process of composition rather than in crafting a finished poem.  Like his father, he continued to ‘work without hope’ finding in that very hopelessness something powerful to write about, something viable, even though at the time hopelessness was not considered a viable literary commodity, and was only perceived as such much later.

 

 

 

Mongols, Khans and Manchus:

Coleridge and the Romantic Discourse of Tartary

 

Peter J Kitson

p.j.kitson@dundee.ac.uk

 

Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ is the most famous Romantic poem about a ‘Tartar’, and possibly the most famous representation of such a people in all of English literature.  Readers then and since identified Kubla Khan as a ‘Tartar’ but the term itself, as a description of a south-east Asian people, is extremely vague, indeterminate and contested.  This paper will explore Coleridge’s poem in the context of the Romantic period discourse about the Tartars and Tartary.  In addition to Coleridge’s poem the paper will also discuss Sir William Jones’s ‘Discourse on the Tartars’, Thomas De Quincey’s ‘Revolt of the Kalmuck Tartars’ and other more fugitive manifestations of Romantic Tartary in Byron and contemporary travel writing.  The paper will argue that Tartars and Tartary were important sites of Romantic fantasy, an in-between world and peoples, surrounded by the three great Eurasian Empires of Orthodox Christian Romanov Russia, Confucian and Buddhist Qing China and Muslim Ottoman Turkey defined more by what they were not in terms of religion, race or ethnicity than what they were.

 

 

 

Coleridge’s ‘Cousin-German’: Narrative Alter-Egos in the ‘Satyrane Letters’ and ‘The Historie and Gests of Maxilian’

 

Julian Knox

juknox@ucla.edu

 

My paper will examine Coleridge’s employment of the ‘Satyrane’ and ‘Maxilian’ personae in, respectively, the two versions of The Friend (as well as in the Biographia) and the 1821 Blackwood’s piece, ‘The Historie and Gests of Maxilian’, with particular attention to the ways in which these ‘alter-egos’ enable a unique fusion of autobiography and ideology.  In addition to investigating the key differences between the ‘Satyrane’s Letters’ in The Friend and the original 1798 letters to Sara Coleridge from which they are adapted, my paper also pays close attention to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tale The Golden Pot, of which Coleridge’s ‘Maxilian’ (who is a ‘Cousin-German’ of ‘Satyrane’) is a loose translation.  In the years surrounding the tumultuous break of his friendship with Wordsworth in 1809-10, Coleridge’s literary career increasingly followed the trajectory of journalism, public lectures, and literary criticism.  When he revisits his formative experiences as a budding poet visiting Germany in The Friend, the fact that Coleridge here takes on the Satyrane-guise for the first time is telling: it allows him to comment on an earlier manifestation of himself from the perspective of a seemingly-detached witty narrator.  Coleridge’s Maxilian, as ‘Cousin-German’ to Satyrane, bears a similar function: much like Hoffmann’s protagonist Anselmus in The Golden Pot negotiates the disjunct between the world of art and imagination and that of empirical reality, so Coleridge-as-Maxilian reflects upon the same divide with a pervasively autobiographical perspective.  Where Hoffmann maintains this disjunct in The Golden Pot—the ‘two worlds’ never come together—Coleridge’s intentions are, by 1822, strikingly reconciliatory.

 

 

 

Coleridge, The Rime and Romantic Melancholy

 

Michael John Kooy

M.J.Kooy@warwick.ac.uk

 

One of the curiosities of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner is that alongside the Gothic excesses of the Mariner’s ordeal lies the restrained melancholy of the Wedding Guest, the reluctant interlocutor whom the tale renders ‘A sadder and a wiser man’.  The aim of this paper is to contextualise the Wedding Guest’s melancholy in broader cultural and philosophical terms.

 

My starting point is the view that Romantic melancholy is a modern form of scepticism.  It emerges in a world already de-mythologized by Enlightenment narratives of rationality and material progress; and while it is critical of such narratives, it is also resistant to a return to pre-modern forms of aesthetic or theological consolation. 

 

My reading of the poem will suggest a way beyond this impasse.  Borrowing a distinction from Paul Ricoeur, I will suggest that in receiving the tale, the Wedding Guest’s attitude shifts from a hermeneutic of ‘suspicion’ to a hermeneutic of ‘belief’.  I’ll argue that the melancholy in which he finds himself at the end of the poem represents neither an uncritical longing for metaphysical certainty, nor an extension of scepticism, but rather a mode of reception, essentially passive, which is best described as a listening out for a kerygma, a manifestation or announcement.

 

So, while melancholy elsewhere in Coleridge’s oeuvre is associated with creative blockage, here, oddly, it seems to figure as part of an economy of recovery.

 

 

 

Religious Transformation in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

 

Lisa Lappin

ljleisure@yahoo.com

 

Seamus Perry has pointed out the puzzling fact that the Mariner in The Ancient Mariner is a Medieval Catholic, while Coleridge himself was a staunch anti-Catholic.  This apparent inconsistency can be resolved when the poem is read as a conversion allegory that depicts the Mariner’s transformation from Catholicism to Protestantism.

 

One overlooked detail of the poem is that a ship is a traditional symbol for the Catholic Church.  The Mariner’s torment and futile attempts to find lasting reprieve for his ‘sin’ serve to depict the invalidity of Catholic rituals, which Coleridge considered as examples of superstition on par with atheism.  The albatross draped around the Mariner’s neck resembles the liturgical vestments worn by Catholic priests.  When the albatross falls from the Mariner’s neck through spontaneous prayer, Coleridge depicts the Mariner’s ability to find peace without the assistance of outside intermediaries.  Although the Mariner does continue to reach toward Catholic symbols, his conversion culminates in his words of advice to the Wedding-Guest, instructing him that the best way to approach God is for men, women, and children to seek Him through direct prayer upon ‘bended knee’.  This counsel does not come until after the rotting ship, an apt symbol for Coleridge’s antipathy toward Catholicism, has sunk: a fitting fate for what he would have considered a mistaken and superstition-ridden approach to God.  Relevant to this argument, Huntington Brown’s research contends that The Ancient Mariner was most likely written in the vernacular of England during the reign of Henry VII: a timeframe that would have paralleled the dawn of Protestantism and the decline of Catholic hegemony in Europe.

 

 

 

Coleridge Conversing: between Soliloquy and Invocation

 

Peter Larkin (University of Warwick)

Peter.Larkin@warwick.ac.uk

 

This paper continues a reading of the Conversation Poems drawing on resources from French phenomenology already underway (see Coleridge Bulletin, NS 26, Winter 2005, 22-36).  Moving off from some initial remarks on voice in Merleau-Ponty, I consider the problematically ‘conversational’ element in the poems with the aid of a phenomenology of call and response (as formulated by Jean Louis Chretien) in order to reflect on the role of voice within conversational style.  Where Merleau-Ponty suggested that it is only retrospectively the meaning of dialogue can be integrated into a private history (The Phenomenology of Perception (1962), pp.354-5), I shall ask whether Coleridge’s Conversation Poems can’t more appropriately be viewed as ‘prospective’ dialogues, imaginary scenes (though biographically convergent) which experiment with the poet’s own capacity for participation.  As such, Coleridge seeks to pro-voke conversation rather than recall it.  The poems evoke a lyric condition of the conversational rather than offering any dramatisation of it: they are uneasily poised between relapsing into soliloquy at one moment or tentatively verging on invocation at another.  Two theological paradigms for the ‘conversational’ in this sense will be suggested.  The paper will conclude by attempting to show how invocation involves a calling voice which desires to be called into a response along lines suggested by Chretien, and this may involve some desynonymization of related terms like ‘address’ and ‘apostrophe’ along the way.

 

 

 

‘There worketh a spell’: Coleridge and the Languages of Paganism

 

Gregory Leadbetter

gmleadbetter@brookes.ac.uk

 

Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) describes itself as ‘the first full-scale scholarly study of the only religion England has ever given the world: modern pagan witchcraft’.  Hutton contends that modern pagan witchcraft, despite claims to the contrary, is not a continuation of actual religious practices from pre-Christian Europe.  Instead, he argues that, ‘if it is the child of any single phenomenon, then it is the belated offspring of the Romantic Movement’ (p. viii).  He locates its origins in both German and English Romanticism and discusses the ensuing entanglement with Christian sensibilities, but in this milieu Coleridge is depicted as a non-participant, ‘admiring both nature and Schiller but not Greek mythology’ (p. 22).

 

My paper challenges this position, and argues that the four ‘languages’ Hutton identifies ‘in which paganism was instinctually characterized in British society between 1800 and 1940’ (p. 4), namely of (i) primitive savagery, (ii) Classical standards, (iii) syncretic religion, and (iv) ecstatic, revivifying, creative spirituality, all feature in Coleridge’s vocabulary, with particular significance in relation to the fourth ‘language’.  Consequently, I argue that the competing forms of Coleridge’s creative and intellectual life—his poetry, his Christianity, and his syncretic approach to philosophy and religion—enact tensions germane not only to the emergence of an identifiable ‘religion’ of witchcraft, but also to the intellectual conditions in which spiritual beliefs relate to poetic practice in contemporary Britain.

 

 

 

The Historicity and Inheritance of Romantic Style:

Coleridge and Prosody

 

Tilar J. Mazzeo

tjmazzeo@colby.edu

 

This talk grows out of the work that I have recently completed on plagiarism in the Romantic period, in which I argued that questions of legitimate and illegitimate literary appropriation focused primarily on issues of style for writers such as Byron, Wordsworth, and especially Coleridge.  However, how exactly were style and its related terms of persona, voice, tone, spirit, and genius defined for the poets of the Romantic period?  Did they generally agree as to what constituted style, or were there disagreements among these writers on the question of style—and what sorts of aesthetic contests might those disagreements mask?  What is clear to me is that style was an element of literary property in the period.  This was confirmed as a legal precedent in the 1760s with the case of Tonson v. Collins.  In the case of Coleridge, I argue that style included conventional elements such as diction and characteristic syntax.  However, it also seems to have included metrical innovations, particular psychological effects, and a characteristic attitude toward the development of a precise notion of lyric verisimilitude, all of which had implications for how the Romantic lyric poem engages the reader.  This historical section of the essay focuses primarily on the letters of Wordsworth and Byron and on the correspondence and Biographia of Coleridge.  I also offer readings of style in particular Romantic-period poems.

 

From this point of departure, I would then like to talk more generally about the ‘inheritance’ of the Romantic lyric and representations of Romantic poetry (and style particularly) in contemporary British and American poetry and poetic criticism, focusing particularly on attacks against a particular (mis)representation of the Coleridgean and of the Wordsworthian/Coleridgean strain of Romantic lyricism.  Here, I will be considering particularly recent discussions of the ‘failure’ of Romanticism and its stylistic and rhetorical functions as argued by prominent critics/poets.  This second part of the talk, then, interrogates contemporary attitudes toward Romanticism and Coleridge particularly in discussions of contemporary poetry and criticism, with an eye toward historicizing the Romantic aesthetic inheritance.

 

 

 

The Far-Reaching Singleness of Joy:

A Reading of ‘A Letter to – [Sara Hutchinson]’

 

Nora Meurs

Nora.Meurs@vub.ac.be

 

As we know from Coleridge’s 1796 letter to Lamb upon the death of his mother, faith is a cure against despair.  However, Coleridge’s ‘A Letter to – [Sara Hutchinson]’ testifies that the work of dealing with despair is more complicated than what his advice to Lamb seems to suggest.

 

My paper focuses on how Coleridge moves from the particular and individual to the universal in his exploration of the pitfalls of this state of being.  I will argue that the anatomy of despair implicit in the ‘Letter’ is an account of a repetition of failed attempts to communicate feeling accurately.  The first part of my paper focuses on how Coleridge dramatizes this history of miscommunication as an imaginary exchange of letters.  Instead of consoling his ailing correspondent, Coleridge appears to be writing the same letter over and over, a ‘complaining Scroll,’ that at every turn becomes more nightmarish, featuring fantasies of doom, and, even worse, the death of his children.

 

In the second half of my paper, I will look at how this downward spiral is brought to a halt by some sort of incantation of the elements in the ‘storm stanza,’ which, I will argue, does not result in an exorcism of despair, but rather in self-imposed exile.  By extracting himself (both the bearer of bad tidings and comforter) from his addressee’s world, he creates a context in which the ‘Spirit of Joy’ can ‘rise’ once more.  My closing suggestion is that by blessing her, Coleridge sets Sara free like his own Lucy Gray in a universe which, in the words of Philip Larkin, ‘is for others undiminished somewhere,’ but for himself wholly other and lost.

 

 

 

Coleridge and the Daemons of Oedipus

 

Chris Murray

C.M.Murray@warwick.ac.uk

 

This paper’s title originates in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, in which the blinded king’s self-mutilation is attributed to a possessing spirit or daemon.  Briefly examining the works of Sophocles and Plato, it will be proposed that Coleridge’s fascination with daemons originated in the works of these authors during youth, and not solely in his adult reading.

 

The daemon has received attention from Coleridge scholars such as Lowes, Beer and (more recently) Nick Groom in studies of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khan.  Rather than presenting them as apparitions, this paper will approach daemons in light of their Classical representations and the invitation, in the Ancient Mariner’s 1817 epigraph, to consider invisible beings.

 

Coleridge’s description of opium as a daemon suggests that he, like Sophocles and Plato, understands the daemon to be an invasive, guiding.  It will be suggested that it is under daemonic influence that the mariner shoots the albatross, blesses the water snakes, and recites his tale.  Subsequently, daemonic influence in texts such as The Fall of Robespierre, Christabel, Kubla Khan and Coleridge’s rendering of Wallenstein will be examined.  These will be presented as tragic texts whose characters are guided towards their transgression and/or destruction.  Ultimately, the paper will suggest that the role of the daemon in Coleridge’s works is to instigate a ritual of tragic sacrifice in which the protagonists become pharmakoi; both the causes of evil and the victims by whose suffering it is purged.

 

 

 

Coleridge, Wordsworth and Thelwall’s Fairy of the Lake

 

Patty O’Boyle

patty@oboylepj.demon.co.uk

 

Thelwall’s 1801 Poems Chiefly Written in Retirement was published by subscription in order to raise funds after the failure of his farming venture in Lyswen.  The volume contains the poem Lines Written near Bridgewater alluding to Thelwall’s visit to Nether Stowey, and refers, rather indiscreetly, to Coleridge, the Wordsworths, Poole and Chester; all of whom had been implicated in the local furore caused by Thelwall’s visit which ultimately led to Wordsworth’s not being granted the renewal of his lease on Alfoxden.  It also contains his verse drama The Fairy of the Lake. This Arthurian theme with comic overtones is, I will argue, a largely disguised account of Thelwall’s Stowey companions’ radical activities in support of liberty and opposing the Gothic Customary against which Thelwall is so vociferous in his lectures.  By alluding to the poets’ works and biographical details, such as their sponsorship by Cottle and the Wedgewoods, Thelwall dramatises the ongoing battle for freedom of speech and the rights of nature in the form of a semi-Shakespearean/ Arthurian comedy (not unrelated to Ireland’s Vortigern forgery), which may also display some bitterness on Thelwall’s part at his own relative neglect.  It may well be his personal response to Lyrical Ballads. Many of his characterisations are otherwise obscure and I would suggest that as his subscribers would have been familiar with Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey, it would have been easier for them to recognise some of the personal features he draws upon.

 

 

 

From Sight to Insight:

Coleridge’s Quest for Symbol in Nature

 

Kazuko Oguro

oguskm@io.ocn.ne.jp

 

In the Notebooks and other works of Coleridge, especially those of the first decade of the 1800’s, we find the poet observing and describing the objects of nature with unusual keenness.  Those descriptive passages, in poetical, philosophical or fragmentary writings, reveal his desire to seek in the outer world something that corresponds to his own inner nature and thus enables him to realize the unity of being through that sense of correspondence.  His act of ‘looking at nature’ often frustrates him as we see in ‘Dejection: an Ode’—he ‘sees’ but not ‘feels’ the beauty of the object.  At some happy moments, however, his soul is liberated from the material world, and the objects he beholds are transformed into a kind of medium through which the poet sees into a higher form of existence.  They come to be seen as different manifestations of the same principle on which his own existence is grounded.  This paper attempts to consider, through some of the exemplary passages, the development of Coleridge’s idea of ‘symbol’ in nature as distinguished from mere ‘images’ of sense perception.  It also aims to suggest that his idea of nature as divine symbol or divine language is the basis of thought that differentiates his faith from pantheism.  A brief reference will be made in this connection to the seventeenth century theologians, Richard Hooker and John Smith.

 

 

 

Coleridge and an Ambiguous Heritage of the Language of Sensibility

 

Kaz Oishi

oishi@u-air.ac.jp

 

Coleridge’s early poems are immersed in the culture of sensibility.  Of all influential sources, the works of William Leslie Bowles are certainly of particular importance in the making of Coleridge as a poet.  This early identity of Coleridge, however, is not something purely aesthetic, as is often discussed: it has more political dimensions than it appears.  In fact, Bowles acted as a supporter for the Philanthropic Society, which was established in 1788 for the purpose of preventing crimes by vagrant children.  His poetical tribute to the Society adopts the language of sensibility, acclaiming its ‘pure Benevolence’ and ‘Charity’ towards those in ‘the mournful vale of tears’.  Coleridge naturally absorbed the philanthropic spirit intrinsic to such language.  All this provides the basis even for his radical writings in the mid-1790s.  This curious, often seemingly contradictory association of sensibility and political radicalism is ingenerate in the culture of sensibility itself.  As recent scholarships have shown, the culture of sensibility has deeply complex ideological foundations: it has a resonance to the Evangelical Revival, as well as to the growth of middle-class power, the reformation of manners movement and the expansion of the sphere of female activities.  In this paper, I am hoping to examine the ideological ramifications inherent in the language of sensibility as we can witness in the case of Coleridge’s early writings.  I should like to trace further its political implications in his later works also.

 

 

 

Coleridge and the Page

 

Seamus Perry

seamus.perry@balliol.oxford.ac.uk

 

Coleridge has a well-deserved reputation for the intense musicality of his verse: he was, said Wordsworth, ‘quite an epicure in sound’, and Coleridge himself asserted as a general principle in Biographia that ‘[t]he man that hath not music in his soul can indeed never be a genuine poet’.  This paper suggests that, while the noise that poems make is certainly crucial to Coleridge’s verse, the look of them often matters to; that Coleridge had a highly developed sense of the eye and the page (as well as of the ear and the sound); and that he frequently utilised the potential of the printed page visually to create kinds of literary meaning.  The implications of this line of enquiry for editors of Coleridge are briefly discussed.

 

 

 

The Craft of Translating Hebrew: John Bellamy, Hyman Hurwitz,

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the Vindiciae Hebraicae (1820)

 

Mike Pino

amphiboly@hotmail.com

 

The first two decades of the nineteenth century witnessed renewed interest in the validity of existing Biblical translations. Driven by Denon’s, Fourrier’s, and Dupuis’s archaeological discoveries in Egypt (which culminated in challenges to Biblical chronology), text-critical advances of the Tubingen school on the Peshitta and other ancient near eastern texts, and a host of other causes, this earnest reappraisal of scriptural translations resulted in a few noteworthy attempts at retranslating the scriptures from Hebrew into English.

 

One of these attempts—The Holy Bible, newly translated from the original Hebrew; with Notes critical and explanatory (1817-18)—was produced by classicist and quondam contributer to the Classical Journal and the Gentleman’s Magazine, John Bellamy.  Bellamy’s contribution to Biblical scholarship, on the whole eminently forgettable, was nonetheless provocative: instead of dismissing the Deist writers who continued to seize upon the inconsistencies in the Bible, Bellamy argued that the Bible’s inconsistencies and contradictions were unfortunate errors due to the King James translators’ unfamiliarity with Hebrew.  Over the course of of two volumes of heavily annotated text, Bellamy attempted to right this wrong, at least within the Pentateuch.

 

Bellamy’s ‘translation’ provoked some impressive responses by a who’s who in early nineteenth-century Biblical studies: William Goodhugh, George D’Oyly, and Richard Mant.  Each of these scholars took Bellamy to task in the major journals of the time for contradictions in his own formal equivalence, highlighting moments in which Bellamy’s work was little more than dynamic equivalence, idiomatic translation, or even a very loose paraphrase from the original.  Bellamy’s rejoinders are instructive as they reveal the class, religious, and political motivations behind each review.

 

In the longest and perhaps the most conclusive response, Vindiciae Hebraicae, or a Defence of the Hebrew Scriptures as a Vehicle of Revealed Religion, Hyman Hurwitz (future first professor of Hebrew at University College, London) marshalled his vast knowledge of Hebrew grammar, Torah, and centuries of Hebrew commentary to the task of dismantling Bellamy’s translation.  Calling upon his neighbor and good friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge for some assistance, Hurwitz made a strong case for the accuracy of the formal equivalence of the King James authorized version.

 

In this presentation, I will discuss key passages from Vindiciae Hebraicae, the methodology Hurwitz used in defending translation (as witnessed in letters between Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hurwitz, and John Murray), a series of entries from Coleridge’s notebooks (including entry 4702, which is apparently in Hurwitz’s hand), and related passages from Coleridge’s The Friend (1818).  Each of these texts will be used to illustrate the battlelines and the stakes of the art of translating Hebrew scriptures but also the politics of translating these religious texts in Great Britain in the period immediately following the Napoleonic wars.

 

 

 

‘I shot the Albatross’: A Causal Explanation of the Mariner’s Act

 

Michael Raiger

raiger@bc.edu

 

Scholars who have attempted to make moral sense of the Ancient Mariner’s act of shooting the albatross in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner have been troubled by the overdetermined consequences of that act—the death of the shipmates, and the transformation of nature into a horrid nightmare of death and disease.  The final lines of the poem suggest the only clue to this problem, and those lines have been read as trite reiterations of Anna Barbauld’s moral primers.  I would like to argue that the act of the Mariner in shooting the Albatross is in fact an explanation of all moral transgressions, a representation of the mechanics of original sin, in its implication of all human beings and its casual effect on nature.  The lacunae in the narrative—the expression of the act of shooting the albatross in the past tense, without any motive given—is the key to my interpretation.  Book VII of Augustine’s Confessions, in which Plato’s philosophy is seen to rescue Augustine from Manicheanism while also explaining the origin of sin, is the seminal text for my reading. My argument also explains the Mariner’s act in the larger political contexts that have emerged as surrounding the poem—the issue of the slave trade, and the emerging discourse of animal rights. It also situates the poem in the context of Coleridge’s recent rejection of Hartleyan Necessity. Anna Barbauld’s moral primers, I will argue, do offer a moral clue to understanding the complexity of the various consequences of the Mariner’s transgressive act.

 

 

 

High English Drama:  Romantic Artifact,

or Revolutionary Voyage in Coleridge’s Linguistic Style

 

Linda L. Reesman

LLReesman@aol.com

 

Modern critical works offer several conflicting views on the dramatic form of the nineteenth century, delimiting its dramatic value to an historical significance with little recognition of its creative contribution to the genre and the period of poetical invention which defined the Age of Romanticism.  This perspective confines works of the imagination and sentiment to poetry and the novel but ignores their participation in a dominant social diversion such as theatre, the cause of which remains something of a mystery.  This paper will examine the effect of the poetic form on drama and the dramatic intentions of the poet in a climate unreceptive to shifting aesthetic tastes in literary forms.

 

Charged with establishing a moral basis for his political and dramatic expression, Samuel Taylor Coleridge stretched the form or structure of a poem into poetic dialogue enriched with an emotional element and a cognitive awareness that challenged the linguistic tradition of dramatic performance.  To begin to understand the effect of the transformation of the drama form, it becomes necessary to examine these socio-political elements alongside the literary dynamics of a changing age.  Coleridge, who has been noted as the father of Romantic drama, offers a critical platform from which to mount a more definitive perspective of Platonic and Aristotelian influences on a Romantic poetic philosophy that continued into the later nineteenth century.

 

 

 

Passion’s rhetoric: Coleridge on King Lear and poetic language

 

Veronika Ruttkay

v.ruttkay.1@research.gla.ac.uk

 

In Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare, ‘passion’ is embodied in a single emblematic figure: King Lear on the heath, ‘the open and ample Play-Room of Nature’s Passions’.  Lear’s language is the ‘language of nature, ‘where the deep anguish of a Father spreads the feelings of Ingratitude & Cruelty over the very Elements of Heaven’.  It thus represents the transforming power of uncontrolled passion—however, it is also Coleridge’s chief example of imaginative control in poetic language.  My aim in this paper is to show that Coleridge’s connection between the ultimate forms of passion and the imagination is hardly accidental.

 

Some of the terms of Coleridge’s analysis had been anticipated by previous critics, namely by the ‘new rhetoricians’ Lord Kames, Hugh Blair and Joseph Priestley, whose rhetoric was grounded in a philosophical analysis of the passions.  These critics treated Lear’s speech as the grand example of ‘the language of passion’, with its bold reliance on rhetorical figures (above all, personification and apostrophe).  Thus Kames, for instance, regards the storm scene as ‘the first example [...] of sentiments dictated by a violent and perturbed passion’, where Lear ‘personifies the rain, wind, and thunder; and in order to justify his resentment, believes them to be taking part with his daughters’.  But passion is an ambivalent force for these critics: Joseph Priestley discusses the ‘blind’ and ‘mechanical’ passion in Lear (where personification ‘obtrudes itself’ upon the mind), in opposition to the self-controlled play of the imagination.

 

Like Priestley, Coleridge associates passion with blindness (a metaphor also central to Shakespeare’s play), but attempts to reconcile the opposition by implying that poetic imagination is a self-conscious recreation of the excess of passion.  Imagination, therefore, is passion without blindness: ‘Passion, Eagle-eyed’.  But, as he also suggests, it is continually at risk of becoming excessive, and thus, of revealing itself as pathological ‘mania’.

 

 

 

‘Coleridge, Cavell and American Exceptionalism’

 

Matthew Scott

thomas.scott@ell.ox.ac.uk

 

In this paper, I propose to look closely at some of Stanley Cavell’s rather controversial readings of Coleridge and in particular of his supernatural poetry, which he sets slightly uncomfortably against the backdrop of an encroaching Kantian idealism.  I want to ask whether Cavell’s understanding of Coleridge as an extreme idealist sceptic really stands up and then question what it is that he intends to gain by that very position.  In part, I will argue, Cavell hopes to present Coleridge as a progenitor of the tradition of philosophical scepticism, which he sees exemplified in much of American nineteenth-century thought and then in the tradition of ordinary language philosophy.  I want to provide some clues, by reading Coleridge through Cavell, for ways in which we can envisage the former as an exemplary figure for the American nineteenth-century tradition, a figure who is characterised, if we are to accept Cavell’s sceptical vision, nowhere more adroitly than in James’ Frank Saltram from The Coxon Fund.  I shall end by suggesting that the intellectual alienated from the public sphere, and parodied so acutely by James, is a figure that runs throughout Cavell’s writing, one consoled by the promise of the habitual.  This, I shall contend is itself a theme in Coleridge’s own writing about which Cavell is himself oddly quiet.

 

 

 

Massaging ‘Erotic Coleridge’

 

Anya Taylor

anyataylor1@juno.com

 

My book, Erotic Coleridge: Women, Love, and The Law Against Divorce, was published six months ago, and probably seems to many at first impression an idiosyncratic, not to say preposterous, way of thinking about the usually depressive genius whom we celebrate and lament every other summer.  This paper will explain the contexts and sources of this unusual approach and attempt to justify it if it has not yet justified itself.  The paper will include a number of poems never before mentioned at the Coleridge Conference, and will move toward an appreciation of Coleridge’s mature recommendations for how women should live with integrity.  It suggests how attention to women’s voices steered Coleridge towards an ethics of reverence for the person.

 

 

 

Coleridge, the Morning Post, and the Autumn of 1802

 

Heidi Thomson

Heidi.Thomson@vuw.ac.nz

 

In Reading Public Romanticism (1998) Paul Magnuson argues beautifully for the necessity of reading Romantic poems in their original publication on the basis that, ‘without precise location, there is no cultural significance’ (3).  This paper explores the cultural significance of Coleridge’s prolific contributions to the Morning Post in September, October and November 1802.  Despite Coleridge’s own dismissal of the poetry as ‘merely the emptying out of my Desk’ (STCL 876), many of those newspaper contributions rank prominently in the canon of Coleridge’s work.  He published or republished a dozen poems (including Dejection. An Ode, France. An Ode, a large extract from Fears in Solitude), many satirical epigrams and shorter pieces, major articles on the situation with France and England’s response, and a series of pieces on the Keswick Impostor. 

 

Most critics have drawn attention to separate aspects of this flurry of activity by focusing exclusively on particular texts.  Biographical works (on both Coleridge and Wordsworth) have emphasized the fraught significance of the publication of Dejection on Wordsworth’s wedding day for instance, while others have focused, among other things, on the political aspects of the comparative essays on France and the Roman Empire.  In addition, however, I would like to demonstrate a few surprising connections between all of Coleridge’s Morning Post contributions during that period which illuminate, in particular, the emergence of Coleridge’s public construction of his complex relationship with Wordsworth.

 

 

 

Coleridge’s Chrysopoetics

 

Kiran Toor

windigo_01@hotmail.com

 

This paper has its rather unremarkable origins in a conversation overheard in the cafeteria queue at the last Coleridge conference.  Discussing the nature of Coleridge’s plagiarisms, Alan Vardy turned to Fred Burwick and asked: ‘well, if Coleridge wasn’t borrowing and he wasn’t plagiarizing, then what was he doing?’  Unable to suppress myself, I blurted out: ‘It was alchemy!’  Between Burwick’s laughter and Vardy’s bemusement at the outburst, this paper was born.

 

Most instances of source hunting and claims for historical precedence used as evidence for Coleridge’s plagiarisms are grounded in a binary configuration of identity and alterity (i.e. Coleridge is Coleridge because he is not Wordsworth; or, Coleridge’s writings are his own because they are not Schelling’s).  In this paper I would like to suggest that to examine Coleridge in this light is to examine him in a tradition in which he did not belong.

 

Writing of alchemy that: ‘The essence was truth, the form was folly: and this is the definition of Alchemy’, Coleridge details a metallurgical tradition in which it is possible to go beyond (meta) ‘allon’ (‘that which differences, makes this other than that’ (CM II 825)).  Tracing Coleridge’s various encounters with the Hermetic tradition in the works of Cudworth, Boehme, and Boerhaave, I proffer that for Coleridge, locating one’s own voice in the words of an ‘other’ was not merely a fanciful conjurer’s trick but a fundamental expression of a hermeneutic which goes beyond ‘otherness’ altogether and which employs a historical fraud to manifest a certain poetic truth.

 

 

 

Coleridge and the Aesthetics of Modernism

 

David Vallins

dmvallins@hotmail.com

 

Theorists of Modernism have often defined its aesthetics primarily by contrast with those of Romanticism, associating the latter with a ‘vague emotionality’ to be rejected in favour of the ‘dry’, ‘hard’ factuality of neoclassicism.  A detailed study of the writings in which this project was recommended and pursued, however, reveals a repeated attempt not merely to escape from subjectivism, but rather to reconcile it with the material or concrete by incorporating abstract and affective content as far as possible in the pictorial.  Not only Imagism, but also other Modernist attempts to reconcile subjectivity with a material or psychological essence, I will argue, thus imply a dialectical attempt to resolve the ‘infinite opposition’ of subjective and objective in the ‘finite product’ of the work of art resembling that which Schelling and Coleridge had earlier described as the distinctive function of poetic imagination.  In stressing not only the universal meaning of the concrete image, but also a rejection of the artificialities of modern, western culture, moreover, Pound and other Modernists often seek a reunification of consciousness and language with the objective forms of nature resembling that which Romantics such as Wordsworth and Coleridge sought to achieve through a neo-ruralist rejection of contemporary urban life.  At the same time, however, Modernist attempts to abolish individual divergences from a unifying material essence often imply an authoritarian principle contrasting with the emphasis on a continual process of dialectical inquiry which characterizes both Coleridge’s poetry and his theoretical writings.

 

 

 

Coleridge and ‘Common Sense’

 

Alan Vardy

alan.vardy@hunter.cuny.edu

 

Coleridge famously set himself the daunting task of justifying his religious belief ‘on a rational basis’, a process that led to his unique appropriation of German idealism and occupied him up until the moment of his death (he dictated clarifications to Green in his final hours).  Subsuming objective knowledge to subjective knowledge via Schelling and his theory of the ‘Imagination’, Coleridge worked to put belief on a solid philosophical foundation.  This project, often characterized as eccentric, bears strong resemblances to controversies in Scottish philosophy, especially in the years immediately following Coleridge’s death.  The Scotts had finessed the problem for generations through the ‘Scottish Common Sense School’ dominated by Thomas Reid and his disciple William Hamilton.  In brief, they retained the rigor of Humean skepticism but evaded its most extreme, and to their minds, dangerous tendencies.  On the one hand they held that questions that were apparent to the ‘common sense’ of ordinary people (the independent existence of physical objects, for example) need not be deduced, and on the other hand they argued that ‘belief’ could be exempted from the rational processes employed to establish ‘knowledge’.  This consensus was shattered by Hamilton’s student James Frederick Ferrier when he stated the obvious: the belief/knowledge distinction was arbitrary and had no justifiable basis in philosophy.  Ferrier then spent his career paralleling Coleridge in employing Shelling, a theory of apperception, etc. in attempting to rescue ‘belief’.  This paper will examine the course of these two parallel philosophical projects, and briefly reconsider Ferrier’s famous attack on Coleridge’s plagiarism of Schelling from this specific philosophical perspective.

 

 

 

Coleridge’s ‘Nature Naturing’ and John Gardner’s Moral Fiction

 

Ron Wendling

rwendlin@sju.edu

 

John Gardner, an American novelist of considerable celebrity in the nineteen seventies, died in 1982 at the age of forty-nine.  His two instructional books (On Becoming a Novelist and The Art of Fiction) are still widely used in writing courses, but only three of the eight novels he published during his lifetime (The Resurrection, Grendel and October Light) are currently in print.  Despite the recent appearance of a biography of Gardner, the decline in reputation that began with the stinging reception of his short theoretical book, On Moral Fiction (1978), has yet to be reversed.

 

My paper will argue that Coleridge influenced the central assumption of On Moral Fiction that solitude is avoidable because words may be used referentially.  Although Gardner has been ritually accused of reactionary moral absolutism, the issue that most divides him from contemporary culture is whether language is credible enough to make communication possible.

 

Gardner’s ‘moral’ fiction does not ask us to accept predetermined values; on the contrary, even its author cannot predict its outcome.  Gardner agrees with Aristotle that plot imitates action and that only in action is a character’s potential revealed.  As writers move a character through such a self-actualizing plot, they see an order unfolding that the character may or may not heed—one that attentive readers will notice as well.  They will sense that the writer is ‘onto something’—a process inhering in the way things are or, to the extent that we all share the same nature, the way we are.  A moral fiction is not preachy, therefore; rather, it is a fiction that resonates universally, like myth.

 

Gardner read Coleridge’s Rime as the story of the mariner’s rationally inexplicable movement from isolation toward community—an action the central characters of many of Gardner’s own fictions likewise experience.  Such stories are moral in so far as their language credibly refers the release of a character’s potential for communication to an energizing agency in nature itself.  Gardner called this agency ‘nature’s process’, a phrase similar in meaning to Coleridge’s ‘nature naturing’.  The language of Gardner’s moral fiction, like that of Coleridge’s imagination, engages this process while the language of ‘metafiction’, like that of Coleridge’s fancy, does not.  Metafiction revels in the linguistic texture and narrative effects of the story.  It complicates our expectation that the page we are reading refers to a world beyond it.  Gardner did not object to this self conscious playing with signifiers; indeed, he employed metafiction in his own work.  He did so, however, not to cast doubt on the representative and communicative functions of language, but to integrate that doubt into the natural process fiction imitates.

 

 

 

Coleridge and Two Bristol Baptists, Joseph Hughes and John Ryland, Jr.

 

Timothy Whelan

timwhel@georgiasouthern.edu

 

After Coleridge moved to Bristol in 1795, he met, through his Baptist friend Joseph Cottle, several other Baptists, including John Foster, Robert Hall, Thomas Roberts, and Josiah Wade.  He also met two other Baptist ministers, both of whom would become prominent figures within their denomination: Joseph Hughes, pastor of the Baptist congregation at Battersea (1796-1833) and the leading figure in the founding of the Religious Tract Society (1799) and the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804); and John Ryland, Jr., pastor of the two congregations (Baptist and Independent) at Broadmead in Bristol (1793-1826) and a founder and leader of the Baptist Missionary Society (1792-1826).  They would maintain cordial friendships with Coleridge thereafter and correspond occasionally with him the rest of their lives.  In this paper, I will discuss their involvement with Coleridge during his years in Bristol, their comments about Coleridge as found in their letters, and their meetings and correspondence with Coleridge after he left Bristol. In Coleridge’s letters to Hughes and Ryland, he comments upon the activities of the Baptist Missionary Society, expresses both his admiration and disagreement with the theology of Jonathan Edwards, confesses some lingering difficulties he has about accepted notions of the Trinity, desires feedback on his 1818 edition of The Friend as well as one of the Lay Sermons, speaks harshly about the ‘Spirit of Unitarianism’, and wishes to enter the public debate surrounding the creation of University College, London University.

 

 

 

Coleridge’s ‘Web of Time’: The Herschels, the Darwins, and Psalm 19

 

Dometa Wiegand

dwiegand@d.umn.edu

 

Darwinian theories at mid-century brought the conflict of an aging and extremely ancient origin for the earth to wide public analysis.  However, the Darwinian principles of evolution are dependent upon astronomical theories of origin and age.  Scientists of the day blatantly ignored the implications of Herschel’s developments in the evolutionary nature of globular clusters.  For example, in the 1797 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the same article that discusses some of Herschel’s most alarming theories as to the aging of the universe, opens with a discussion of the perfect state of astronomy from Adam to Noah, and the subsequent lapse of knowledge in the post-deluvians (414).  This paper examines the changing paradigms of the natural world using poetry of the notebooks such as ‘Coeli Enarrant’ and ‘Limbo’.  The connections between the astronomical theories as they play out in the world of biology, and subsequently in theories of race, with the psyche of the nineteenth century poet trying desperately to reconcile the empirical material evidence of science with the supernatural ‘evidence’ of religion, are the focus.  The inherent difficulties with the juxtaposition of these ideas of the eternal versus the dying in a new world tiny in the infinity of the heavens, lead to a shift as important as the shift away from the Ptolomeic.