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Samuel Taylor ColeridgeBiographia Literaria
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1817A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Picturesque and Travel Writing
William Gilpin published his influential Observations on the River Wye in 1782. In this and other works he expounds an aesthetic theory based on his training in landscape painting. Gilpin’s travel journals circulated among his literary friends, popularizing the connection between the travelogue and the aesthetic or literary. Gilpin most valued the “peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture.” (Gilpin, William. Essay on Prints. 1768.) The influence of the picturesque on Lyrical Ballads is pervasive. Wordsworth went so far as to make the link between walking and thinking essential to his poetics. “Poems on the Naming of Places,” for example, opens quite literally in Gilpin’s footsteps, following a river that carries associations with the Lethe of the Greek underworld:
“It was an April morning; fresh and clear
The rivulet, delighting in its strength,
Ran with a young man’s speed” (Lines 1-3)
Like other Wordsworth poems, such as “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge,” the poem flows in tandem with the stream, a literal precursor to Modernist stream of consciousness literature.
Coleridge was no less impacted by Gilpin. In outlining his reasons for writing Biographia Literaria in Chapter 1, he recounts his “friendless wanderings” on leave days: “For I was an orphan, and had scarcely any connections in London” (5). Soon, the young Coleridge found direction in poetry. Finding purpose in literature was an organizing force, one couched in the language of Christianity. Coleridge figures his directionless wanderings in Spenserian language, reminiscent of the Christian soldiers who roam through the numerous stanzas of the Faerie Queene. Literature, like Christ, represents a teleos that brings an end to morally errant meanderings and madness, and Coleridge’s poetry never loses this tension. The poet is at once a Christ figure, supping the milk of paradise, and an errant wanderer into forbidden territory.
As he glides down the Elbe in the Satyrane Letters that recount his travels in Germany, Coleridge writes that he was invigorated by “the confused sense that I was for the first time in my life on the continent of our planet” (197). Yet in the conclusion he writes that “all confusion is painful” (220). Though invigorating, this sense of newness is disruptive for Coleridge, who swiftly returns such explorations to familiar literary ground. Writing of Bartram’s Travels through the American South, Coleridge claims, “in reading Bartram’s Travels, I could not help transcribing the following lines as a sort of allegory, or connected simile and metaphor of Wordsworth’s intellect and genius” (172). The chosen lines feature rocks that alarmingly “break through” clay strata, anthropomorphically “lifting their backs” (172). Breakthroughs in science were still disturbing the religious order when Mary Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818, just as breaking new ground in archaeology in Pompeii and other classical sites threatened to disturb the parameters of British life. So too were the first rumblings of meaningful resistance to the oppression of slaves of foreign lands who were “lifting their backs,” which had been scarred by whips of English “masters” (172).
Coleridge’s vow that “my ‘travels’ will consist of excursions in my own mind” (196) retreats from the dangerous and destabilizing natural world into the inner one. During his explorations of Germany, Coleridge muses, “I wished myself a painter” (189), again mediating the natural with the aesthetic. He also writes: “Something analogous to the materials and structure of modern poetry I seem to have noticed in our common landscape painters” (111). In Coleridge, the mind and its palimpsest of literary memories is prioritized over the natural world. This is Coleridge’s main critique of Wordsworth, whose “shepherd’s calling” (116) and reliance upon rustic characters and subjects is at odds with Coleridge’s preference for Platonic introspection. Coleridge praises the portrait of Lessing in Klopstock’s collection not for its brilliant “observation of actual life, but in the arrangements and management of the ideal world, that is, in taste, and in metaphysics” (192). He refers to Cowper’s couch-based mental flaneurism in “The Task” as “admirable” (61) and prefers Platonic Form-like abstractions such as geometry and semiotics to the manifestations of the material world. While Wordsworth uses walking and writing to arrest time, Coleridge retreats into the timeless, where progress is possible only through quasi-mystical contemplation. As Coleridge writes, “To know is in its very essence a verb active” (194).
Liberty
Jesus College, Cambridge, which Coleridge recounts attending in Biographia Literaria, was a major beneficiary of the slave trade (an ethical failure the college only formally sought to redress in July 2019). However far away the ivory towers of Coleridge’s Cambridge may have seemed from the manacled foreigners, their shackles can be heard and felt in Romantic literature. Although slavery was not abolished until 1833, abolitionist anxiety reverberates in Blake’s famous poem “London” (1794), for example.
Although Coleridge sees nothing amiss in his travel companion being served by “a black eyed Mulatto” (192), he writes that upon entering into political life, he “sank into a state of thorough disgust and despondency” (64). The question of slavery runs throughout the period, from the French Revolution, to the 1773 Enclosure of the Land, to British colonization of foreign lands.
The hellish life of enslaved Africans is audible in these lines from “France: An Ode,” which frame the black-skinned as both different and devilish in association with the word “rebel,” and thus somehow morally culpable for their own enslavement:
“The sensual and the dark rebel in vain,
slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game
they break then manacles, to wear the name
of freedom, graven on a heavier chain.
Oh liberty! With profitless endeavour
have I pursued you doing many a weary hour;
but thou nor swell the victor’s pomp, nor ever
did breathe thy soul in forms of human power!” (65).
Notably, the colonialist here also feels enslaved by the system of oppression, although Coleridge himself and Britain at large benefited from the labor and wealth of the empire.
Coleridge positions poetry as a form of redress for, or escapism from, such an exploitative political and economic system: “In Pindar, Chaucer, Dante, Milton, and many more, we have instances of the close connection of poetic genius with the love of liberty and of genuine reformation” (73).
Likewise, Wordsworth’s definition of poetry is predicated on an experience of liberty: “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” (Wordsworth, William. “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.” 1801.) Coleridge’s “esemplastic power” also contrasts the dynamic and spiritual work of the Imagination with the rigidity of “fancy” (30). The longing for freedom is palpable in Coleridge’s literary theory—for instance, in his admiration for the character of Don Juan, or this moment, when he writes, “I seemed to myself like a liberated bird that had been hatched in an aviary, now, after his first sort of freedom, poises himself in the upper air” (198). Even in its formal aspects, poetry is a form of freedom for Coleridge. The metrical containment of “feeling” in poetry, and its capacity to “reconcile incompatible things” (132) is a kind of emancipatory “magic” (102) that brings a spiritual harmony to ameliorate the hellish realities of slavery.
Imitatio and the Natural
The juxtaposition of art with the natural world stretches for the history of Western literature. Early Modern poets and literary critics like Edmund Spenser, George Puttenham, and Sir Philip Sidney, influenced by the renaissance of interest in classical texts, became especially concerned with imitation. In contrast with the contemporary emphasis on originality, Coleridge writes that Shakespeare’s poems are powerful in their striking rendition of traditional themes. Likewise, Coleridge praises the “freshness” of Wordsworth’s poetry, which, like other works of the Romantic period, leans heavily on the natural world as its inspiration. Wordsworth’s poem “To Johanna” is such an example:
“I, like a Runic Priest, in characters
Of formidable size had chiselled out
Some uncouth name upon the native rock,
Above the Rotha, by the forest-side” (Lines 28-31).
Coleridge refers to this seemingly natural context of “native rock” as “a noble imitation of Drayton” (146). Thus, what Wordsworth presents as a poem literally inscribed upon the natural world is itself an imitation.
Wordsworth famously defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” (Wordsworth, William. “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.” 1801.) The poem is defined by its spontaneity, its “naturalness.” Wordsworth writes in his preface to Lyrical Ballads that “the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings […] in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.” (“Preface”). In Wordsworth’s poetry, nature and man are made to “coexist” harmoniously. Coleridge’s response to Wordsworth, Biographia Literaria, also intimately connects poetry with real life: “with this my personal as well as my literary life might conclude!” (226). Coleridge uses a natural metaphor in his own definition of poetry, calling it “the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language” (106). Yet, Coleridge is skeptical of Wordsworth’s claim that the “rustic” is necessarily more real. For Coleridge, reality is accessed through the imagination. This difference in the location and apperception of reality is a point of critical contention between the two friends.
For Coleridge, poetry was not only important but essential to the apprehension of reality. This may be far from our contemporary perspective, but Coleridge argues that scientific enquiry into the center of reality relies on our sensory perceptions of the world around us and on an awareness of consciousness itself. This is the critique Coleridge makes of Wordsworth’s focus on the rustic as a locus of truth in Chapter 18. Here, Coleridge debates the proper language for poetry, and his exposition is simultaneously aesthetic and ontological, as he writes, “existence is distinguished from essence by the superinduction of reality” (123). This “superinduction of reality” is essential for Coleridge, as it distinguishes poetry from prose. Coleridge cites Shakespeare’s Perdita, whose rejection of “streaked gillyflowers” because they are “nature’s bastards” (124) aligns with his own skepticism about the “naturalness” of Wordsworth’s poetry: “the composition of a poem is among the imitative arts” (128).
Yet Coleridge’s highest praise for Wordsworth is that “he cannot be imitated” (166). Coleridge claims “to admire on principle, is the only way to imitate without loss of originality” (31). In the conclusion, Coleridge resists “being gossiped about, as devoted to mystics,” asserting that he cleaves instead to the “established tenets of Locke” (222). Locke’s notion of consciousness as a tabula rasa upon which impressions are etched is transformed in Wordsworth’s poem “The Brothers”:
“In our churchyard
Is neither epitaph or monument,
Tombstone nor name—only the turf we tread,
And a few natural graves (Lines 12-15)”
Just as the infant arrives in the world unshaped by language and experience, so Wordsworth envisions a return to the natural in death. Yet Wordsworth’s “natural” world is, as Coleridge points out, a palimpsest of impressions and canonical references. Wordsworth does not hide the echoic quality of his “natural” poetry; echoes resound in his poems, in which the act of writing is a form of consecration. In “Poems on the Naming of Places” he confers a “memorial name,” while in “A Poet’s Epitaph” he refers to the poem as “this grave.” For Wordsworth, poetry functions as a form of memorialization. While for Wordsworth literature is inherently elegiac, for Coleridge life itself is literary, and literature is the most direct means of experiencing life.
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