Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born at Ottery St. Mary, in the
county of Devon, on October 21, 1772. He was educated at
Christ Hospital where Charles Lamb was among his friends. He
read very widely but was without any particular ambition or
practical bent, and had undertaken to apprentice himself to a
shoemaker, when his head-master interfered. He entered Jesus
College, Cambridge, in 1791. During the second year of his
residence at the University, he left Cambridge, on account of
an unsuccessful love affair, and enlisted in the regiment of
dragoons under an assumed name. He soon secured his discharge
from the army and went to Bristol where he met Southey. In
1795 he married Miss Fricker, and removed to Nether Stowey, a
village in Somersetshire, where he wrote the "Ancient Mariner"
and the first part of "Christabel." While here he became a
close friend of Wordsworth. Coleridge originally intended his
"Biographia Literaria" to be a kind of apologia, in other
words, to put forth his claims for public recognition; and
although he began the book with this intention, it
subsequently developed into a book containing some of his most
admirable criticism. He gives voice to a crowd of
miscellaneous reflections, suggested, as the work got under
way, by popular events, embracing politics, religion,
philosophy, poetry, and also finally settling the controversy
that had arisen in respect of the "Lyrical Ballads." The
autobiographical parts of the "Biographia" are confined solely
to his intellectual experiences, and the influences to which
his life was subjected. As a treatise on criticism, especially
on Wordsworth, the book is of supreme importance. "Here," says
Principal Shairp, "are canons of judgement, not mechanical,
but living." Published in 1817, it was followed shortly after
his death by a still more important edition with annotations
and an introduction by the poet's daughter Sara.
_I.--The Nature of Poetic Diction_
Little of what I have here written concerns myself personally; the
narrative is designed chiefly to introduce my principles of politics,
religion, and poetry. But my special purpose is to decide what is the
true nature of poetic diction, and to define the real poetic character
of the works of Mr. Wordsworth, whose writings have been the subject of
so much controversy.
At school I had the advantage of a very sensible though severe master. I
learned from him that poetry, even that of the loftiest odes, had a
logic of its own as severe as that of science, and more difficult,
because more subtle. In the truly great poets, he would say, there is a
reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of
every word. In our English compositions he showed no mercy to phrase,
metaphor, or image, where the same sense might have been conveyed with
equal force and dignity in plainer words. In fancy, I can almost hear
him now exclaiming: "Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean!" Nay,
certain introductions, similes, and examples were placed by name on a
list of interdiction.
I had just entered my seventeenth year when the sonnets of Mr. Bowles
were made known to me, and the genial influence of his poetry, so
tender, yet so manly, so natural and real, yet so dignified and
harmonious, recalled me from a premature bewilderment in metaphysics and
theology. Well were it for me, perhaps, if I had never relapsed into the
same mental disease.
The poetry of Pope and his followers, a school of French poetry
invigorated by English understanding, which had predominated from the
last century, consisted of prose thoughts translated into poetic
language. I was led to the conjecture that this style had been kept up
by, if it did not wholly arise from, the custom of writing Latin verses.
I began to defend the use of natural language, such as "I will remember
thee," instead of "Thy image on her wing, Before my fancy's eye shall
memory bring;" and adduced, as examples of simplicity, the diction of
Greek poets, and of our elder English poets, from Chaucer to Milton. I
arrived at two critical aphorisms, as the criteria of poetic style:
first, that not the poem which we have read with the greatest pleasure
but that to which we return with the greatest pleasure possesses the
genuine power; and, second, that whatever lines can be translated into
other words of the same language, without diminution of their
significance, are so far vicious in their diction.
One great distinction between even the characteristic faults of our
elder poets and the false beauties of the moderns is this. In the
former, from Donne to Cowley, we find the most fantastic out-of-the-way
thoughts, but the most pure and genuine mother English; in the latter,
the most obvious thoughts, in language the most fantastic and arbitrary.
Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion, and passionate flow of
poetry, to the subtleties of intellect and to the starts of wit; the
moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual yet broken and
heterogeneous imagery. The one sacrificed the heart to the head, the
other both heart and head to drapery.
_II.--In Praise of Southey_
Reflect on the variety and extent of his acquirements! He stands second
to no man, either as a historian or as a bibliographer; and when I
regard him as a popular essayist I look in vain for any writer who has
conveyed so much information, from so many and such recondite sources,
with as many just and original reflections, in a style so lively yet so
uniformly classical and perspicuous; no one, in short, who has combined
so much wisdom with so much wit; so much truth and knowledge with so
much life and fancy.
Still more striking to those who are familiar with the general habits of
genius will appear the poet's matchless industry and perseverance in his
pursuits, the worthiness and dignity of those pursuits, his generous
submission to tasks of transitory interest. But as Southey possesses,
and is not possessed by, his genius, even so is he the master even of
his virtues. The regular and methodical tenor of his daily labours,
which might be envied by the mere man of business, lose all semblance of
formality in the dignified simplicity of his manners, in the spring and
healthful cheerfulness of his spirit. Always employed, his friends find
him always at leisure.
No less punctual in trifles than steadfast in the performance of highest
duties, he inflicts none of those small pains and discomforts which
irregular men scatter about them, and which in the aggregate so often
become formidable obstacles both to happiness and utility. He bestows
all the pleasures, and inspires all that ease of mind on those around
him, which perfect consistency and absolute reliability cannot but
bestow. I know few men who so well deserve the character which an
ancient attributes to Marcus Cato--namely, that he was likest virtue,
inasmuch as he seemed to act aright, not in obedience to any law or
outward motive, but by the necessity of a happy nature which could not
act otherwise.
As a son, brother, husband, father, master, friend, he moves with firm
yet light steps, alike unostentatious and alike exemplary. As a writer,
he has uniformly made his talents subservient to the best interests of
humanity, of public virtue, and domestic piety; his cause has ever been
the cause of pure religion and of liberty, of national independence and
of national illumination.
When future critics shall weigh out his guerdon of praise and censure,
it will be Southey the poet only that will supply them with the scanty
materials for the latter. They will not fail to record that as no man
was ever a more constant friend, never had poet more friends and
honourers among the good of all parties, and that quacks in education,
quacks in politics, and quacks in criticism, were his only enemies.
_III.--Wordsworth's Early Poems_
During the last year of my residence at Cambridge I became acquainted
with Mr. Wordsworth's first publication, entitled "Descriptive
Sketches," and seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic
genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced. In the whole
poem there is a harshness and acerbity, combined with words and images
all aglow, which might recall gorgeous blossoms rising out of a hard and
thorny rind and shell, within which the rich fruit was elaborating. The
language was not only peculiar and strong, but at times knotty and
contorted, as by its own impatient strength. It not seldom, therefore,
justified the complaint of obscurity.
I was in my twenty-fourth year when I had the happiness of knowing Mr.
Wordsworth personally, and by that time the occasional obscurities which
had arisen from an imperfect control over the resources of his native
language had almost wholly disappeared, together with that worse defect
of arbitrary and illogical phrases, at once arbitrary and fantastic,
which alloy the earlier poems of the truest genius. There was only
evident the union of deep feeling with profound thought; and the
original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the
depth and height of the ideal world, around forms, incidents, and
situations of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the
lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dewdrops.
To find no contradiction in the union of old and new, to contemplate the
Ancient of Days and all His works With feelings as fresh as if all had
then sprung forth at the first creative fiat, characterises the mind
that feels the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it. To carry
on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood, to combine the
child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day
for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar--this is the character and
privilege of genius. And it is the prime merit of genius, and its most
unequivocal mode of manifestation, so to represent familiar objects as
to awaken in the minds of others that freshness of sensation which is
the constant accompaniment of mental, no less than of bodily,
convalescence.
This excellence, which constitutes the character of Mr. Wordsworth's
mind, I no sooner felt than I sought to understand. Repeated meditations
led me to suspect that fancy and imagination were two distinct and
widely different faculties, instead of being, according to the general
belief, the lower and higher degree of one and the same power. Milton
had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful, mind. The division
between fancy and imagination is no less grounded in nature than that of
delirium from mania; or of Otway's
Lutes, laurels, seas of milk, and ships amber,
from Shakespeare's
What! Have his daughters brought him to this pass?
_IV.--The Philosophical Critic_
As materialism has been generally taught, it is utterly unintelligible,
and owes all its proselytes to the propensity, so common among men, to
mistake distinct images for clear conceptions, and, _vice versâ_, to
reject as inconceivable whatever from its own nature is unimaginable. If
God grant health and permission, this subject will be treated of
systematically in a work which I have many years been preparing on the
Productive Logos, human and divine, with, and as an introduction to, a
full commentary on the Gospel of St. John.
To make myself intelligible, so far as my present subject, the
imagination, requires, it will be sufficient briefly to observe: (1)
That all association demands and presupposes the existence of the
thoughts and images to be associated. (2) The hypothesis of an external
world exactly correspondent to those images or modifications of our own
being, which alone--according to this system--we actually behold, is as
thorough idealism as Berkeley's, inasmuch as it equally removes all
reality and immediateness of perception, and places us in a dream-world
of phantoms and spectres, the inexplicable swarm and equivocal
generation of motion in our own brains. (3) That this hypothesis neither
involves the explanation nor precludes the necessity of a mechanism and
co-adequate forces in the percipient, which, at the more than magic
touch of the impulse from without, creates anew for himself the
correspondent object. The formation of a copy is not solved by the mere
pre-existence of an original; the copyist of Raffael's "Transfiguration"
must repeat more or less perfectly the process of Raffael.
The imagination, therefore, is essentially creative. I consider
imagination either as primary or secondary. The primary imagination I
hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and
as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the
infinite I AM.
The secondary I consider as an echo of the former; it dissolves,
diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is
rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to idealise
and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects are
essentially fixed and dead.
Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with but fixities
and definites. The fancy is no other than a mode of memory emancipated
from the order of time and space, and blended with, and modified by,
choice. But, equally with the ordinary memory, it must receive its
materials ready made, from the law of association.
_V.--What is a Poem?_
During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours our
conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of
poetry--the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful
adherence to the truth of Nature, and the power of giving the interest
of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm
which accidents of light and shade, moonlight or sunset, diffuse over a
familiar landscape appeared to represent the practicability of combining
both.
The thought suggested itself that a series of poems might be composed of
two sorts. In the one the incidents and agents were to be, in part at
least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the
interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as
would naturally accompany such situations. For the second class,
subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and
incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its
vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek them.
In this idea originated the plan of the "Lyrical Ballads," in which my
endeavours were to be directed to persons and characters supernatural,
or at least romantic. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to attempt
to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a
feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind's attention
from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the
wonders of the world before us--an inexhaustible treasure, but for
which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude,
we have eyes, yet see not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.
With this view I wrote the "Ancient Mariner," and was preparing, among
other poems, the "Dark Ladie" and "Christabel." But the number of Mr.
Wordsworth's poems was so much greater that my compositions appeared
rather an interpolation of heterogeneous matter.
With many parts of Mr. Wordsworth's preface to the "Lyrical Ballads," in
which he defines his poetic creed, I have never concurred, and I think
it expedient to declare in what points I coincide with his opinions, and
in what points I differ.
A poem contains the same elements as a prose composition; the
difference, therefore, must consist in a different combination of them,
in consequence of a different object proposed. The mere addition of
metre does not in itself entitle a work to the name of poem, for nothing
can permanently please which does not contain in itself the reason why
it is so and not otherwise. Our definition of a poem may be thus worded.
"A poem is that species of composition which is opposed to works of
science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and
from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is
discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole as is
compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part."
For, in a legitimate poem, the parts must mutually support and explain
each other; all in their proportion harmonising with, and supporting the
purpose and known influences of, metrical arrangement.
_VI.--A Criticism of Wordsworth_
Let me enumerate the prominent defects, and then the excellences, of Mr.
Wordsworth's published poems. The first characteristic, though only an
occasional defect, is the inconstancy of style; the sudden and
unprepared transitions from lines or sentences of peculiar felicity to a
style not only unimpassioned, but undistinguished. He sinks too often,
too abruptly, into the language of prose. The second defect is a certain
matter-of-factness in some of his poems, consisting in a laborious
minuteness and fidelity in the representations of objects, and in the
insertion of accidental circumstances, such as are superfluous in
poetry. Thirdly, there is in certain poems an undue predilection for the
dramatic form; and in these cases either the thoughts and diction are
different from those of the poet, so that there arises an incongruity of
style, or they are the same and indistinguishable, and then it presents
a species of ventriloquism. The fourth class includes prolixity,
repetition, and an eddying instead of progression of thought. His fifth
defect is the employment of thoughts and images too great for the
subject; an approximation to what might be called mental bombast, as
distinguished from verbal.
To these occasional defects I may oppose the following excellences.
First, an austere purity of language both grammatically and logically;
in short, a perfect appropriateness of the words to the meaning.
Secondly, a correspondent weight and sanity of the thoughts and
sentiments, won not from books, but from the poet's own meditative
observation. They are fresh, and have the dew upon them. Third, the
sinewy strength and originality of single lines and paragraphs; the
frequent curious felicity of his diction. Fourth, the perfect truth of
Nature in his images and descriptions as taken immediately from Nature,
and proving a long and genial intimacy with the very spirit which gives
the expression to all the works of nature. Like a green field reflected
in a calm and perfectly transparent lake, the image is distinguished
from the reality only by its greater softness and lustre.
Fifth, a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with
sensibility; a sympathy with man as man; the sympathy of a contemplator,
from whose view no difference of rank conceals the sameness of the
nature; no injuries of wind or weather, of toil, or even of ignorance,
wholly disguise the human face divine. The superscription and the image
of the Creator still remain legible to him under the dark lines with
which guilt or calamity had cancelled or cross-barred it. In this mild
and philosophic pathos, Wordsworth appears to me without a compeer.
Lastly, and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of
imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word. In the play
of fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always graceful, and is
sometimes recondite. But in imaginative power he stands nearest of all
modern writers to Shakespeare and Milton; and yet in a kind perfectly
unborrowed and his own. To employ his own words, he does indeed to all
thoughts and to all objects
Add the gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration, and the poet's dream.
* * * * *