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Al Drake, UCI, Criticism 100A, 1996

1. What exactly is the "dangerous falsehood" about Shakespeare that Coleridge seeks to combat? How exactly is the title of this essay a refutation of that falsehood?

Coleridge will claim that genius generates its own laws; it is not wild and lawless, but a power that creates in accordance with its own laws. The point will be to grasp the basic capacity that allows Shakespeare's poetic creation to occur, not to marginalize it to something beyond explanation. Remember that Coleridge calls imagination "the esemplastic power"; it is a power that reconciles and balances discordant qualities into dynamic unities. This power could not perform such a function if it were lawless. In contrast to neoclassical critics like Pope, Coleridge makes poetic or creative imagination central to his entire theory of poetry. Pope had said that "Great wits sometimes may gloriously offend,/ And rise to faults true critics dare not mend;/ From vulgar bounds with brave disorder part,/ And snatch a grace beyond the reach of art" (pg. 275, lines 152-155). It is easy to see that Coleridge would find this statement to be an inadequate, and even misguided, attempt to account for the role of imagination in poetic creation.

For Coleridge, "genius" does not simply drop in on the poet as a kind of happiness or random visitation; where Pope, in writing about wit, seems to throw up his hands, Coleridge insists that genius is in fact the living power that makes us fully human and allows us to create the reality we know. Poetic creation, therefore, depends upon genius--there is nothing "disorder[ly]" about it.

2. What is the necessary relationship between the "spirit of poetry" and the "rules"? Are these rules imposed from without, in mechanical imitation of the ancients?

Coleridge calls for "a true imitation of the essential principles" of nature, not "a blind copying of effects." We can see his romantic reaction against the supposed sterility and mere prescriptiveness of neoclassical rules. Coleridge opposes the Newtonian "universe of little things" and the mental passivity of Lockean psychology, in which the mind, at least during the initial stages of sensory perception, receives sense impressions as if it were a mere wax tablet being stamped with some external seal. He takes neoclassical rules as an injunction to copy a dead material universe in the most servile way, or perhaps to traffic in pale abstractions derived from unprincipled observation of this dead, empirical nature.

Over against this allegedly mechanical copying of the ancient poets, Coleridge wants to set up a "free and rival originality" that will allow contemporary authors to create anew and in their own way. The poet creates something in accordance with the same living power by which nature creates. Why, then, should he limit himself to "copying Homer"? We know by now that Pope and his fellow neoclassical critics would have had a ready-made answer to such romantic insurrectionism--Pope would have said, "Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem;/ To copy nature is to copy them."

But again, the problem with this answer, at least for any good romantic, is that the rules are not "out there" in some externality that can be imitated by the poet. "Rules," for a philosophical idealist like Coleridge, are part of the very structure of the human mind. What else are space and time, Immanuel Kant's "two pure forms of sensible intuition, serving as principles of a priori knowledge" (Critique of Pure Reason 67) but the basic "rules" that allow human beings to process the raw data of the sensible manifold into some intelligible form? (By a priori, Kant means that the categories of space and time, for example, exist in the mind prior to any sensory experience.) They are the rules by which the mind construes or processes what we call reality. Space and time are to be associated with the "sensibility"; the scheme of categories for the power of understanding is as follows:

Table of Categories

I

Of Quantity
Unity
Plurality
Totality

II

Of Quality
Reality
Negation
Limitation

II

Of Relation
Of Inherence and Subsistence (substantia et accidens)
Of Causality and Dependence (cause and effect)
Of Community (reciprocity between agent and patient)

IV

Of Modality
Possibility--Impossibility
Existence--Non-existence
Necessity--Contingency

Clearly, with Kant, Fichte, Schelling, several other German idealists, and Coleridge, we have moved from a mimetic theory of the universe and poetic creation to an expressive theory of the universe and poetic creation. The mind constitutes the reality we are able to know.

3. How is a literary work like a "living body"? What characterizes the organization of a literary work (i.e., an embodiment of the creative "spirit of poetry")?

Coleridge says that "the spirit of poetry" must "circumscribe itself by rules"; it must "embody [itself] in order to reveal itself." A living organism consists of many parts, but one life courses through them all, and they all work together to serve that one life or living principle. Each part simultaneously serves as both an end in itself and a means sustaining the harmonious existence of the whole. As with plants, take the part from the whole, and the whole dies; neither can a part exist independently of the whole.

It is interesting to note how Coleridge spiritualizes this idea about organization when he writes of the human soul. Since he was such a prolific thinker, his interest in one field of thought tends to have implications for his other concerns as well. I am thinking of a passage from Aids to Reflection: "Life is the one universal soul, which, by virtue of the enlivening BREATH, and the informing WORD, all organized bodies have in common, each after its kind. This, therefore, all animals possess, and man as an animal. But, in addition to this, God transfused into man a higher gift, and specially inbreathed:--even a living (that is, self-subsisting) soul, a soul having its life in itself" (Portable Coleridge 394). Aside from this rather abstruse point of mine, I should refer you to what Meyer Abrams writes in The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1953) about Coleridge's use of the organic metaphor in relation to "organic imagination." From pages 470-75, Abrams lists the five properties of a plant according to Coleridge: primacy of the whole; growth; assimilation of outside elements; spontaneous evolution "from an internal source of energy"; and "organic unity." See Abrams's book for the details.

4. Is true genius formless? Lawless? What sort of power defines genius?

Coleridge says that "No work of true genius dares want its appropriate form." Genius is itself constituted by "the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination." This is the sense in which "Shakespeare's judgment [is] equal to his genius"; it seems to me that the two terms are ultimately the same. Coleridge appears to be saying that the poet has the power of creating in accordance with the "rules" that emerge from his own imaginative acts. Perhaps acting in accordance with this power is what Coleridge means by the term "judgment," at least in the present essay.

5. How does Coleridge describe mechanical form? How does he describe organic form?

Perhaps it would be helpful to think of today's mass-produced statuary to see what Coleridge means by "mechanical form"--a pre-existing pattern is forced upon dead clay. Though sculpture is not the highest form of art for the romantics (they prefer poetry and music because these two media are freest of dependence upon gross sensuality and because in them form and content are most nearly indistinguishable), I'll work with Coleridge's comment on the plastic arts.

Here is how I would extrapolate from Coleridge: a true sculpture, a sculpture that will manifest "organic form," may at first involve an encounter between imagination and the properties of the clay or stone to be shaped; the sculptor would presumably engage in continual acts of imagination as he confronted the emergent form before him. I suppose the important thing, however, is that what the sculptor really confronts is not so much lifeless matter as the visible form of his own imaginative acts. If I remember my basic German idealism here, spirit must embody itself in order to reveal itself; there must be a dynamic tension between spirit and that in which it embodies itself.

If we view matters this way, we can agree with Schelling that "Form would indeed be a limitation of the essence if it existed independent of it. But if it exists with and by means of the essence, how could this feel itself limited by that which it has itself created?" For Schelling, then, form expresses or embodies essence. This idea may be parallel to Coleridge's suggestion that with respect to organic form, "the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form" (Adams 460, but as I pointed out above, Abrams traces Coleridge's commentary about organic form to August Wilhelm Schlegel). Here is the whole definition: Coleridge describes organic form as "innate"; he says that it "shapes, as it develops, itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form."

Coleridge's The Statesman's Manual

6. Of what is allegory "but a translation"?

In essence, allegory is no more than a translation of one set of abstractions into another. As you can tell even from the brief passage that Hazard Adams was able to include in his selection from The Statesman's Manual, the distinction between symbol and allegory has religious significance as well as poetic import. The distinction, then, is very important to Coleridge. He laments that it is "among the miseries of the present age that it recognizes no medium between literal and metaphorical." He continues, "Faith is either to be buried in the dead letter, or its name and honors usurped by a counterfeit product of the mechanical understanding, which in the blindness of self-complacency confounds symbols with allegories."

Deadness to the spiritual, metaphysical principles or ideas that inspire faith in religion, implies Coleridge, may be described partly by reference to an allegorical understanding of the scriptures and, presumably, of the universe. Coleridge further describes such an allegorical understanding as follows: it produces "but empty echoes which the fancy arbitrarily associates with apparitions of matter, less beautiful but not less shadowy than the sloping orchard of hillside pasture-field seen in the transparent lake below. Alas, for the flocks that are to be led forth to such pastures!" (Portable Coleridge 388)

7. What characterizes a symbol?

You all know the passage in question, which begins, "a symbol . . . is characterized by a translucence of the special in the individual . . ." In A Glossary of Literary Terms, Fourth Edition (New York: Holt, 1981), Meyer Abrams says succinctly, "[B]oth Coleridge and Goethe stress that an allegory presents a pair of subjects (an image and a concept) and a symbol only one (the image alone); that the allegory is specific in its reference, while the symbol remains indefinite, but richly--even infinitely--suggestive in its reference; and also that for this very reason, a symbol is the higher mode of literary expression." (197).

Allegorical productions of the sort outlined above never lead one beyond mere shadows, never allow one to hear "the annunciation of principles, of ideas . . . [at which] the soul of man awakes and starts up, as an exile in a far distant land at the unexpected sounds of his native language, when after long years of absence, and almost of oblivion, he is suddenly addressed in his own mother-tongue" (Portable Coleridge 387). Allegory gives us mere notions, a dead interplay between abstractions; but symbol, if I understand Coleridge correctly, is the living product of synthesizing imagination--it gives us access to ideas, living principles that spark life-sustaining enthusiasm. Religion, for Coleridge, seems to depend partially upon the capacity to understand scripture and all else in a symbolic manner. Here is a fine passage from The Statesman's Manual in which Coleridge describes his own symbolic interpretation of a natural scene:

[I]t has been the music of gentle and pious minds in all ages . . . to read . . . [the book of Nature] . . . in a figurative sense, and to find therein correspondencies and symbols of the spiritual world.

I have at this moment before me, in the flowery meadow, on which my eye is now reposing, one of its most soothing chapters, in which there is no lamenting word, no one character of guilt and anguish. For never can I look and meditate on the vegetable creation without a feeling similar to that with which we gaze at a beautiful infant that has fed itself asleep at its mother's bosom, and smiles in its strange dream of obscure yet happy sensations. The same tender and genial pleasure takes possession of me, and this pleasure is checked and drawn inward by the like aching melancholy, by the same whispered remonstrance, and made restless by a similar impulse of aspiration. It seems as if the soul said to herself: From this state hast thou fallen! (Portable Coleridge 393-94)

Can you see how, in this difficult passage, Coleridge connects organic life, his own mind's powers, and the spiritual realm via his capacity to interpret nature as a symbol, as (to use Abrams' words) something "richly--even infinitely--suggestive in its reference"? Coleridge reads nature as a symbol of "the higher life of reason" which in turn symbolizes humanity's aspiration toward its divine source. The symbol, as always, is both real in itself and indicative of something greater than itself. In Coleridge's terms, the symbol "partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible."