E491: History of Literary Criticism

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Study Questions

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from The Statesman's Manual (1816)

1. Of what is allegory “but a translation”? (673)

2. What characterizes a symbol? (673)

3. How, in Appendix C, does Coleridge tie his conception of the symbol to Christian theology? (674)

from Biographia Literaria, Part 1, Chapter 1 (1817)

4. How does Coleridge compare the relative faults and merits of poets before his time and of his contemporaries? (675)

5. What does Coleridge write concerning any poem whose words can be rearranged? What is wrong with such a poem? What method of composition does his observation suggest? (675)

from Biographia Literaria, Part 1, Chapter 4

6. How does Coleridge distinguish "fancy" and "imagination" in this chapter? (675-76)

7. What is "the only way to imitate without loss of originality"? Why? Against what doctrine of imitation is Coleridge writing here? (676)

from Biographia Literaria, Part 1, Chapter 13

8. According to Coleridge, what is the "primary imagination"? What relationship does this term posit between the human and the divine? (676)

9. What Coleridge calls, in Chapter 13, the “secondary imagination” is the creative imagination of the artist. How does he describe the relationship of this power to the world of objects? What characterizes all objects as objects, and how does the secondary imagination differ? What does it do to the world of objects? (676-77)

from Biographia Literaria, Part 2, Chapter 14

10. What two sorts of poems does Coleridge say became the stuff of the Lyrical Ballads? What seems to be the respective purpose of the two sorts? (677)

11. Before moving to his points of agreement and disagreement with Wordsworth, Coleridge, on 679 top, says that he must give us his notions about poems and poetry. What, then, distinguishes a poem from a work of science or ordinary prose? How does Coleridge further define poetry? (679-80)

12. What is the relationship of parts to parts in a “legitimate poem”? How does a genuinely satisfactory poem engage the reader’s attention with respect to its parts? With respect to the whole? (680)

13. What does the poet do? What comment, in other words, does Coleridge offer about the value of poets to their fellow human beings? (681)

14. What is the “synthetic and magical power”? In what special activity does this power reveal itself? (681)

15. What are some of the “opposite or discordant qualities” balanced or reconciled by imagination? (681)

Extra -- not in our anthology (From Biographia Literaria, Chapter 17)

16. Coleridge has his disagreements with Wordsworth about poetic language. What reasons does he give for disagreeing, and what are his own views about the matter?

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393974294.