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Teachers' Resource Web Study Questions on Samuel Taylor Coleridge Coleridge's Biographia and Statesman's
Manual, etc. 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. --------------------- Other Questions "Shakespeare's Judgment"; Statesman's Manual; Biographia Literaria Reading Questions "Shakespeare's Judgment Equal to His Genius" 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? 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? 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")? 4. Is true genius formless? Lawless? What sort of power defines genius? 5. How does Coleridge describe mechanical form? How does he describe organic form? Reading Questions From The Statesman's Manual 6. Of what is allegory "but a translation"? 7. What characterizes a symbol? From Biographia Literaria, Chapters XIII and XIV 8. What Coleridge calls, in Chapter XIII, 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? 9. How is a poem distinguished from a work of science? What is the special nature of poetic pleasure? 10. What is the relationship of parts to parts in a "legitimate poem"? 11. How does a genuinely satisfactory poem engage the reader's attention with respect to its parts? With respect to the whole? 12. What is the "synthetic and magical power"? In what special activity does this power reveal itself? 13. What are some of the "opposite or discordant qualities" balanced or reconciled by imagination? Discussion Questions 1. Is Coleridge's discussion of how Shakespeare's judgment is equal to his genius reminiscent of anything in Pope's "Essay on Criticism"? See especially lines 80-87. 2. How does Coleridge's insistence upon the "organic form" of a true poem tend to refute certain neoclassical assumptions about how poems should be written? What does this insistence do to the doctrine of the rules? 3. Can you give an instance of what Coleridge means by "allegory"? by "symbol"? Does Coleridge's theory of the symbol provide a theoretical way of understanding how, according to Johnson, a character in Shakespeare can be both a "species" and yet quite "distinct" from other characters in the plays? 4. Why must it be said that for Coleridge the symbol is produced by the imagination? Do you see any similarities between his description of the symbol (476) and his description of the power of the imagination (478 )? 5. Coleridge argues that the parts of a true poem "mutually support and explain each other." Do you think this is true of the words in a good poem; namely, that the meaning of any single word or phrase depends significantly upon the surrounding words, upon the context? Are the meanings of words in a poetic context significantly transformed by that context? Can you give instances of such transformations? Is this a special or unique characteristic of poetic language? 6. Try to think of as many concrete examples as you can of the "opposite or discordant qualities" listed by Coleridge on page 480. 7. Do Coleridge's remarks about the sort of pleasure the parts of the poem give suggest anything about the special nature of poetic language and how it differs from non-poetic discourse, especially with respect to the question of how exactly poetic language engages a reader's attention? 8. Would you use the metaphor of a mirror or the metaphor of a lamp in explaining Coleridge's theory of the relationship between the secondary or creative imagination and the world of objects? Between the creative mind and the world of appearances? Explain. More Questions, from CSUF E312: Brit. Lit. since 1760, Fall 2002) from The Statesman's Manual (on symbol and allegory) 1. Of what is allegory “but a translation”? 2. What characterizes a symbol? from Biographia Literaria, Chapter 13 (XIII) 1. What Coleridge calls, in Chapter XIII, 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? From Biographia Literaria, Chapter 14 (XIV) 1. What distinguishes a poem from a work of science or ordinary prose? How does Coleridge further define poetry? 2. 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? 3. What does the poet do? What comment, in other words, does Coleridge offer about the value of poets to their fellow human beings? 4. What is the “synthetic and magical power”? In what special activity does this power reveal itself? 5. What are some of the “opposite or discordant qualities” balanced or reconciled by imagination? From Biographia Literaria, Chapter 17 (XVII) 1. 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? "The Eolian Harp" 1. What is the relationship between the poem's setting and the speaker's state of mind? 2. What is the speaker's attitude towards his own powers of intellect or imagination? Why does he reject his pantheistic claims? "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" 1. What power enables the Mariner to stop the wedding guest in his tracks? What is the value of "superstition" in this poem"? 2. Why should it matter that the man stopped was on his way to a wedding? 3. Why does the Mariner shoot the Albatross? Is any reason given in the poem? 4. How is the albatross more than a plain old albatross -- what is its spiritual significance, if any? What do you make of the "breeze" that blows through the poem -- i.e. that at certain points the Mariner's ship is becalmed or takes sail? 5. What event or process leads the Mariner to bless the sea-snakes unawares? Why does the Albatross then fall from his neck? 6. Why must the Mariner continue with his penance -- why must he repeat his tale to everyone he can fix with his gaze? "Kubla Khan" 1. What allows the speaker to compose this poem? How does the enabling factor or power differ from memory, which is especially important to Wordsworth and often to Coleridge as well? 2. If you agree that Kubla Khan is a poet-figure, how does he compose his "poetry"? What significance does the descriptive imagery of his poem hold? In what sense might this poem be said to delve into what we would now call "the Unconscious"? 3. "I would build that dome in air" (46), declares the speaker -- why can't he do it? Or is that what the fragmentary poem we have amounts to -- the dome he would like to build in air? "Frost at Midnight" 1. How is the child (i.e. the speaker when he was a child) the "father of the man" in this poem, to borrow a phrase from Wordsworth? 2. What is the "stranger"? What effect did it have upon the speaker as a child, and what effect does it have upon him now, as he utters the poem? 3. What is "the eternal language that thy god utters" (60-61)? How is God a poet? 4. What is the speaker's hope for his child as that child grows up? How should the child's growing up differ from the speaker's? 5. What is the "secret ministry of Frost," and why is it "quietly shining to the quiet moon"? "Dejection: an Ode" 1. What relationship between mind and nature does this poem posit -- that is, what is that relationship between the speaker's mind and nature at present, and what should it be? How do the speaker's ideas concerning this relationship invoke the basic claim of Kant's philosophical idealism, as we discussed it in class? 2. What is the significance of the stormy weather in this poem? 3. We have seen that what Meyer H. Abrams has called the "Greater Romantic Lyric" may be divided into three stages -- a description of the natural scene, an analysis of that scene and the problem it reminds the speaker about, and an emotional or "affective" resolution of the problem. "Dejection" is a rather short "ode," which term the romantics use somewhat loosely. Is there any resolution of the speaker's problem in this poem? *Edition: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2. 7th. edition. Ed. Meyer Abrams et al. New York: Norton, 2000.
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