Coleridge's Metaphors of Being


Book Description

In an original and provocative demonstration that Coleridge's later poetry took on a powerful metaphysical conception, Edward Kessler emphasizes Coleridge's struggle with language as a means of both expressing and creating Being. While many of Coleridge's late poems are generally viewed as fragments that constitute an aesthetic failure, Professor Kessler contends that what at first may appear to reflect Coleridge's inability to finish a poem can otherwise be seen as a deliberate rejection of what the poet came to see as a confining form. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.




Coleridge and the Inspired Word


Book Description

This movement radically revised the interpretation of the Bible as an "inspired" book and also helped to redefine the inspiration attributed to poets, since many poets of the period, including Coleridge himself, wished to emulate the prophetic voice of biblical tradition. Coleridge's mastery of this new study and his search for a new understanding of the Bible on which to ground his faith are the focus of this book. Beginning with an exposition of Coleridge's double role as theologian and poet, Anthony Harding analyses the development and transmission of Coleridge's views of inspiration - both biblical and poetic - and provides a history of his theological and poetic ideas in their second generation, in England especially in the work of F.D. Maurice and John Sterling, and in America in that of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Harding argues that Coleridge's emphasis on the human integrity of the scriptural authors provided his contemporaries with a poetics of inspiration that seemed likely to restore to literature a "biblical" sense of the divine as a presence in the world. Coleridge's treatment of biblical inspiration is thus an important contribution to Romantic poetics as well as to biblical scholarship. His concept of inspiration is also linked directly to his literary theory and thus to the current debate over the reader's relation to text and author.




Coleridge's Writings: On the Sublime


Book Description

This new volume demonstrates the extent and diversity of Coleridge's writings on the sublime. It highlights the development of his aesthetic of transcendence from an initial emphasis on the infinite progressiveness of humanity, through a fascination with landscape as half-revealing the infinite forces underlying it, and with literature as producing a similar feeling of the inexpressible, to an increasing emphasis on contemplating the ineffable nature of God, as well as the transcendent power of Reason or spiritual insight.




Coleridge the Moralist


Book Description

This rigorously argued yet deftly written book defines and analyzes Coleridge's moral vision as it reveals itself in his life, thought, and poetry. Based on the entire corpus of his writings, it includes much unpublished or previously unanalyzed primary source material, such as the late notebooks and the Opus Maximum manuscript. Mr. Lockridge considers Coleridge to be one of the great British moralists, and he argues that much of his work is characterized by an uncommon density of thought and an imaginative assimilation of theory to practice. Tracing Coleridge's evolution as a moralist, he treats with close attention Coleridge's writings on such subjects as freedom, will, duty, self-realization, pleasure, suffering, dread, and evil. By bringing together related fragments, he has given coherent structure to the moral thought of a major Romantic writer.




Coleridge, Keats, and the Imagination


Book Description

In November 1817, John Keats wrote to Benjamin Bailey, The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream - he awoke and found it truth. The Romantic poet's concept of the imagination was central to their poetry, becoming a persistent and powerful theme central to many works. In nine new essays by scholars commissioned in honour of Walter Jackson Bate, this collection examines the uses of the imagination in the poetry of Keats and Coleridge, and by extension in all Romantic literature.




Coleridge's Later Poetry


Book Description

The poems that Coleridge wrote after his "golden" period are seldom studied or anthologized. Yet many of these later poems are of quality and interest, addressing such universal themes as the nature of self and the experience of unrequited love. Paley examines the later verse in the context of Coleridge's oeuvre. He discusses its distinguishing characteristics, and looks at why the poet felt he had to develop distinctively different modes of writing for these works.




Coleridge's Blessed Machine of Language


Book Description

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's prose has long confounded its critics. In Coleridge's Blessed Machine of Language, Jerome Christensen offers a reading of the prose which captures its pious, perverse vitality and characterizes its rhetorical form. Coleridge sought "to expose the folly and legerdemain of those who have... abused the blessed machine of language." Christensen develops a framework for reading Coleridge's language by first exploring Coleridge's critique of David Hartley's philosophy of associationism. Although Coleridge discredited Hartley's system, he failed to devise a coherent alternative. Lacking a firm grounding for his philosophical method, Coleridge wrought a mobile, fragmentary discourse which, Christensen asserts, is important to the Romantic tradition not because it is central, but because it is brilliantly eccentric. Christensen navigates the complexities of Coleridge's language in prefaces, guides, marginalia, notebooks, letters, essays, and manuals, but chiefly in the Biographia Literaria and The Friend, his major works in prose. The Biographia, he argues, is best conceived of as marginal discourse—a category that subsumes not only Coleridge's criticism of association but also the mix of deference and dominance in his engagement with Wordsworth's genius. In The Friend, Coleridge appears as the figure of the Friend, mediator between the extremes of principle and prudence. These extremes do meet in Coleridge's prose, but the moral force of the encounter is vitiated by Coleridge's purely rhetorical resolution in the figure of chiasmus. The chiasmus, Christensen concludes, is the trope that both shapes The Friend and propels the blessed machine of Coleridge's language.




Coleridge, Form and Symbol, Or The Ascertaining Vision


Book Description

Reid, to demonstrate the centrality of concrete form for Coleridge, giving an integrated account of Coleridge's theory (including terms like 'symbol' and 'organic form') and also situating these central Coleridgean concerns within a contemporary realist and non-theistic aesthetic. In addition, he offers a clear account of Schelling's place in the development of Coleridge's thinking. Reid's interdisciplinary approach will make this book invaluable not only to Coleridge specialists but also to students and scholars concerned generally with the history of philosophy, psychology, religion, and literature."--BOOK JACKET.




Coleridge’s Sublime Later Prose and Recent Theory


Book Description

This book explores the sublime in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s later major prose in relation to more recent theories of the sublime. Building on the author’s previous monograph Sublime Coleridge: The Opus Maximum, this study focuses on sublime theory and discourse in Coleridge’s other major prose texts of the 1820s: Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (wr. 1824), Aids to Reflection (1825), and On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829). This book thus ponders the constellations of aesthetics, literature, religion, and politics in the sublime theory and practice of this central Romantic author and three of his important successors: Julia Kristeva, Theodor Adorno, and Jacques Rancière.




Creating Romanticism


Book Description

This book argues that the term 'Romanticism' should be more culturally-inclusive, recognizing the importance of scientific and medical ideas that helped shape some of the key concepts of the period, such as natural rights, the creative imagination and the sublime.