Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(1772-1834)
Adams Anthology Main Points:
- influence of Kant and Schelling
- distinction "beautiful," "agreeable," "good"
- imagination and fancy
- universality and particularity
- art: the universal in the particular
- influence of Plotinus
- the beautiful as "multeity in unity"
- symbol: mediation between universal and particular, vehicle of the
beautiful
- psychology of creation: art work and artist's activity
- artist joining subject and object, reconciliation with nature
- art as special mode of knowing
- organicism: organic vs mechanical form, "the work of art must
grow organically from within itself"
Shakespeare's Judgment Equal to His Genius (1836)
defense of Shakespeare; attack on critics who considered him "a great
dramatist by mere instinct" "a delightful monsterl, wild, indeed,
and without taste or judgment"
"a dangerous falsehood" which "enables a vain man ... to
treat as contemptible what he has not intellect enough to comprehend"
"the mere dreams of a pedantry that arraigned the eagle because it
had not the dimensions of the swan"
"in all points from the most important to the most minute, the judgment
of Shakespeare is commensurate with his genius, nay, that his genius reveals
itself in his judgment"
problem of enslavement to narrow tastes and conceptions, "peculiarities
of their education"
true critic: central point, founded on reason, tolerance, independent of
circumstances, emancipated from prejudice
"art cannot exist without, or apart from, nature"
Shakespeare's difference from the ancients: living power vs lifeless mechanism,
originality. "true imitation of the essential principles"
form, law, organization, parts and whole
organic form vs mechanical regularity
"organic form ... develops itself from within"
"Nature, the prime genial artist"
On the Principles of Genial Criticism (1814)
the agreeable, "congruous with the primary constitution of our senses"
the beautiful, "multeity in unity", "each part in some harmonious
relation to each and to all"
"preestablished harmony between nature and the human mind"
"that which is not pleasing for its own sake ... is neither beautiful,
nor capable of being a component part of beauty"
beauty: "simultaneous intuition of the relation of parts, each to each,
... without intervenence, therefore, of any interest, sensual or intellectual"
"subjection of matter to spirit so as to be transformed into a symbol"
"the good consists in the congruity of a thing with the laws of the
reason and the nature of the will"
"the beautiful arises from the perceived harmony of an object, whether
sight or sound, with the inborn and constitutive rules of the judgment and
imagination: and it is always intuitive"
The Statesman's Manual (1816)
confusion of symbol and allegory
"allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture language"
"a symbol ... is characterized by a translucence of the special in
the individual, or of the general in the special, or of the universal in
the general ... the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal"
Biographia Literaria (1815)
subject and object
truth: "coincidence of the thought with the thing"
natural science and natural philosophy, "nature as an intelligence"
primary imagination: "living power and prime agent of all human perception"
law of association
"a poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of
science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth"
"synthetic and magical power"
"balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of
sameness, with difference"