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47 pages 1 hour read

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Biographia Literaria

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1817

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Important Quotes

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“Our genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous undercurrent of feeling!” 


(Chapter 1, Page 7)

Coleridge’s measure of literary masterpieces is the continuity of pleasure that they provide. This continuity is twofold: first, the continual and lasting pleasure that such works excite in readers, and second, as the integrity of the whole. Coleridge goes on to expound his aesthetic theory in terms of the unity and unifying capacity of a poetic work.

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“The men of the greatest genius, as far as we can judge from their own works or from the accounts of their contemporaries, appear to have been of calm and tranquil temper in all that related to themselves.” 


(Chapter 2 , Page 11)

Coleridge presents artistic creation as a form of self-awareness or consciousness. In the opening of this work on aesthetics Coleridge rejects the traditional association between fame, reputation, and writing. In part this may be a defensive move, since creative geniuses are sometimes accused of presumption, an idea that was especially pertinent in Coleridge’s Christian Britain. Significantly, Coleridge sees poetic genius as the capacity to reflect clearly “the world without” (11).

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“The man of genius lives most in the ideal world, in which the present is still constituted by the future or the past.” 


(Chapter 2 , Page 15)

In this and in many other places in Biographia Literaria, Coleridge’s ideas echo those of the Neoplatonists. Genius is thus construed from an ideal, Form-filled world that exists outside of time. Coleridge maintains the original sense of the term “genius,” in association with the divine, conferring on the genius the role of mystic, or the power to provide access to the divine.

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“In times of old, books were regarded as religious oracles […] at present they seem degraded into culprits to hold up their hands at the bar of every self-elected, yet not the less peremptory, judge.” 


(Chapter 3 , Page 19)

Here the degradation of the literary contrasts with the biblical primacy of the “word that affirmeth,” as Coleridge puts it on Page 226. Words fell into more hands after the mechanization of printing, and the word of God could be accessed by the unlettered layperson in the Protestant church. Coleridge instates the poet in the role of mediator of the divine—a function that was previously performed by the Catholic clergy.

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“The characters of the deceased, like the encomia on tombstones, as they are described with religious tenderness, so are they read, with allowing sympathy.” 


(Chapter 4 , Page 23)

In contrast with Coleridge’s critics, critics of the deceased are more forgiving, he claims. The mention of writing on tombstones refers to the Romantic fascination with memorialization and elegy. This is an important aspect of the context of Biographia Literaria, the purpose of which becomes clearer in relation to these lines of Wordsworth’s Essays Upon Epitaphs: “The composition and quality of the mind of a virtuous man, contemplated by the side of the grave where his body is moldering, ought to appear, and be felt as something midway between what he was on earth walking about with his living frailties, and what he may be presumed to be as a Spirit in heaven.” Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria is itself a kind of monument.

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“The poetic Psyche, in its process to full development, undergoes as many changes as its Greek namesake, the butterfly.” 


(Chapter 4 , Page 27)

In the Romantic movement, psyche was a simultaneously conventional and personal metaphor for poesies. For Coleridge, introspection is a process of inner transformation required before the butterfly of the soul can achieve flight and attain freedom. This recalls the progress of the soul from Christian mythology and suggests that, for Coleridge, artistic evolution was a form of liberation.

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“To admire on principle, is the only way to imitate without loss of originality.” 


(Chapter 4 , Page 28)

Coleridge addresses the traditional subject of debate among literary critics, which is the question of imitation. Aristotle wrote that poetry was an art of imitation, or mimesis, as he called it. When the Early Modern writers took an interest in the classics, influenced by the Italian Renaissance, the question of imitation in art became even more complex. Awareness of the classics was a given for the educated, such that Sir Philip Sidney defined poetry as “a speaking picture, to this end, to teach and delight.” It is this double function of poetry to which Coleridge refers here. Only the poetic genius will capture the spirit or “principle” of the original work.

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“The law of association being that to the mind, which gravitation is to matter.” 


(Chapter 5 , Page 31)

Coleridge’s lengthy exposition of the nature of association in Chapter 5 may appear extraneous to a discussion of literary theory. However, what Coleridge terms the “law of association” is at the center of conventional debates about literary theory. For Coleridge, the resemblance between things in the mind is more scientific than the laws of physics that are observable in the external world. Coleridge returns to Aristotle and Plato to discredit Hartley’s theory of mind and to lend credence to his own notion of the “esemplastic power” of Imagination.

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“Never could the eye have beheld the sun, had not its own essence been soliform […] neither can a soul not beautiful attain to an intuition of beauty.” 


(Chapter 6 , Page 35)

Coleridge posits the discernment of reality as a form of reciprocity, a kind of recognition. Recognition, re-cogitation, or memory, is essential to communication for Coleridge. Thus, the individual contemplates beauty as Narcissus does, recognizing his own image in the water. Yet the narcissist in the contemporary sense, mesmerized by the image of themselves, ironically lacks the capacity to self-reflect, introspect, or intuit, the capacity for which Coleridge is arguably advocating here.

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“The act of consciousness is indeed identical to time considered in its essence.” 


(Chapter 7 , Page 39)

Coleridge’s notion of consciousness draws on Kant’s idea of the Noumenon, or the thing itself, which is unknowable via the senses as a phenomenon. Coleridge acknowledges this heritage on Page 46, where he writes that Kant’s ideas “took possession of me as with the giant hand.” Not subject to the laws of the phenomenal world or time and space, consciousness is nonetheless the essence or source of these laws. Though it is outside of time, consciousness is the ultimate “act,” not the consequence of the origin of life in the phenomenal world.

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“The term, Philosophy, defines itself as an affectionate seeking after truth, but Truth is the correlative of Being.” 


(Chapter 9 , Page 43)

Coleridge explains the intimate connection in his theory of aesthetics between philosophy and poetics. While philosophy seeks to approach an understanding of the nature of reality, ultimate reality for Coleridge resides in being itself. Thus, a direct approach to the real is possible only through Imagination, a power akin to consciousness, which is possessed by the poetic genius.

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“Philosophy is employed on objects of the inner SENSE […] Nevertheless, philosophy, if it is to arrive at evidence, must proceed from the most original construction.” 


(Chapter 12 , Page 83)

Coleridge arrives at the junction between what he calls transcendental philosophy and poetry. He asserts that poetry is a way of knowing what is most real. That Coleridge locates knowledge of reality in the inner rather than the natural world, as Wordsworth does, offers him a privileged position as a literary critic.

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“To know is in its very essence a verb active.” 


(Chapter 12 , Page 88)

Where Wordsworth takes literary walks through nature, Coleridge makes language itself the site of journeying. Knowledge has telos and is therefore closely associated with the dynamic process of writing. Yet contemplation also implies consciousness and, for Coleridge, is associated with being alive. Knowing is therefore both the original sin through which mankind fell and the pathway to our redemption.

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“The poet […] brings the whole soul of man into activity […] He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination.” 


(Chapter 14 , Page 102)

While the aesthetic aim of bringing harmony to chaos has a long and Neoplatonic history, Coleridge’s notion of Imagination as a “magical power” is a marked divergence of his ideas from those of Renaissance Neoplatonists. Perhaps as a reprieve from the Industrial Revolution, Coleridge’s aesthetic is irreducible to mechanization, with ultimate reality the preserve of the Imagination.

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“Good Sense is the Body of poetic genius, Fancy its Drapery, Motion its Life, and Imagination the Soul that is everywhere, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.” 


(Chapter 14 , Page 103)

Coleridge neatly articulates his aesthetic theory as it applies to poetry. The “genius” is envisaged as a person comprised of both body and soul, wearing the clothes of society and convention. Notably, Coleridge envisions the poetic genius arrayed in “drapery,” implying either ceremonial or classical, toga-like attire. Thus the poetic genius is flowing, moving, and timeless, yet retains authority.

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“In that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and consequently may be more accurately comprehended, and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of real life germinate from those elementary feelings; and […] because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.” 


(Chapter 17 , Page 114)

Wordsworth’s reliance on the natural world as a source of truth is the primary point of difference between the aesthetic ideals of these two poets. Yet in pursuing the germination of reality, Wordsworth too enters into a dreamlike meditation. Coleridge’s quibble with Wordsworth’s idea that rural language offers greater directness is arguably overly literal: Wordsworth’s pursuit of the essential reality also leads him to being. While Coleridge’s metaphor for reality is Imagination, Wordsworth’s “ground” is also ultimately the tabula rasa of consciousness itself.

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“Essence, in its primary signification, means the principle of individuation, the inmost principle of the possibility of any thing, as that particular thing. […] Existence, on the other hand, is distinguished from essence, by the superinduction of reality.” 


(Chapter 18 , Page 123)

Coleridge refers to the source of consciousness at the close of Biographia Literaria as the “infinite I am,” a performative statement that Coleridge substitutes for the name “God” or the ultimate consciousness. This may be because the name of God in the Hebrew tradition is unspeakable, and to do so would be profanation. In this sense, Coleridge’s poetics, far from “Naming Places” in consecration of them as Wordsworth does, replaces the noun with a verb.

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“The composition of a poem is among the imitative arts; and that imitation, as opposed to copying, consists either in the interfusion of the same throughout the radically different, or of the different throughout a base radically the same.” 


(Chapter 18 , Page 127)

The reconciliation of the difference between opposites or dissimilar things is at the heart of Coleridge’s theory of poetry. This is also conventional, as in the conceit of the Metaphysical poets, which is constructed through an exploration of a simile. For Coleridge, though, this unification of opposites is possible through recourse to the absolute reality, through Imagination’s particular “esemplastic power.”

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“The poet should paint to the imagination, not to the fancy.” 


(Chapter 22 , Page 159)

Coleridge’s criticisms of his early works proceed from his idea that they employed extraneous ornamentation and lacked originality of thought. He suggests that poetry, far from being a bourgeois pursuit at odds with the reality of the working man, is in its ideal form the direct apprehension of reality. The workings of class consciousness are perhaps discernible in Coleridge’s conventional annexation of reality in the appreciation of beauty.

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“Without his depth of feeling and his imaginative power his sense would want its vital warmth and peculiarity; and without his strong sense, his mysticism would become sickly—mere fog, and dimness!” 


(Chapter 22 , Page 166)

The “sickly mere fog” Coleridge imagines is reminiscent of William Blake’s famous 1794 poem “The Sick Rose”: “O Rose thou art sick. / The invisible worm, / That flies in the night In the howling storm: / Has found out thy bed / Of crimson joy: / And his dark secret love / Does thy life destroy.” The notion is one of delusionary consciousness, which Coleridge, despite his own opium consumption, is careful to distinguish from his notion of poetic Imagination. Poetic genius is associated with perspicacity in Coleridge, which complicates his vision of the poet-as-mystic in “Kubla Khan.” Traditionally, the mystic braves “The Cloud of Unknowing” to access the divine. Coleridge’s ideal poet possesses the “power” of a somehow more immediate communion.

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“For such readers the sense is sufficiently plain, and they will be as little disposed to charge Mr Wordsworth with believing the Platonic pre-existence in the ordinary interpretation of the words, as I am to believe, that Plato himself ever meant or taught it.” 


(Chapter 22 , Page 169)

Perhaps as a form of rebuttal to the critics, Coleridge asserts that those whose Imaginations are capacious will be able to fathom the true meaning of Wordsworth’s own critical theories in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge also resists being labelled a Neoplatonist.

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“The poet does not require us to be awake and believe; he solicits us only to yield ourselves to a dream; and this too with our eyes open.” 


(Chapter 23 , Page 208)

Coleridge’s concept of “esemplastic Imagination” is the capacity for divining the “center” of reality. Though it is easy to conflate Coleridge’s waking dream with an opioid-induced reverie, Coleridge claims that the Imagination provides access to an awareness of reality that transcends the sensory world.

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“It is Eternity revealing itself in the phaenomena of Time: and the perception and acknowledgement of the proportionality and appropriateness of the Present to the Past, prove to the afflicted Soul, that it has not yet been deprived of the sight of God.” 


(Chapter 24 , Page 220)

This allusion to the biblical tale in which God is too majestic to behold directly suggests that via the power of Imagination, the individual may maintain a form of communion with the divine that would be obliterating if direct, yet is longed for and sought.

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“I had the additional misfortune of having been gossiped about, as devoted to metaphysics, and worse than all, to a system incomparably nearer to the visionary flights of Plato, and even to the jargon of the mystics, than to the established tenets of Locke.” 


(Chapter 24 , Page 222)

John Locke’s defense of empiricism and rational enquiry in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) was hugely influential. Yet Locke’s empiricism did not preclude faith or approach atheism. Locke recommends that reason is properly employed in fathoming the will of the divine and the natural world. Coleridge is thus writing in a tradition that saw no discrepancy between reason and the existence of a divine being. Instead, reason was a godlike capacity in humanity for the comprehension of reality.

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“To preserve the soul steady and collected in its pure act of inward adoration to the great I AM, and to the filial WORD that re-affirmeth it from eternity to eternity, whose choral echo is the universe.” 


(Chapter 24 , Page 226)

Having grounded his ideas in the “established tenets” (222) of Locke, Kant, Aristotle, and the Neoplatonists, Coleridge imagines the collective insight into reality as a “choral echo” of writings by poets and philosophers. Coleridge refers at last to biblical scripture as a basis for his aesthetic theory: The idea that the “word was God” and gave shape to the universe is clearly associated in Coleridge’s thought on poetic creation. His final point about aesthetics refers his readers to the creator-as-poet, working in the image of God and pointing through language to the contemplation of the mystery and source of life.

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