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historical, it will doubtless be both interesting and instructive to many to whose unprepared minds your speculations on the esemplastic power would be utterly unintelligible. Be assured, if you do publish this Chapter in the present work, you will be reminded of Bishop Berkeley’s Siris, announced as an Essay on Tar-water, which beginning CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

218 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I with Tar ends with the Trinity, the omnescibile forming the interspace. I say in the present work. In that greater work to which you have devoted so many years, and study so intense and various, it will be in its proper place. Your prospectus will have described and announced both its contents and their nature; and if any persons purchase it, who feel no interest in the subjects of which it treats, they will have themselves only to blame. “I could add to these arguments one derived from pecuniary motives, and particularly from the probable effects on the sale of your present publication; but they would weigh little with you compared with the preceding. Besides, I have long observed, that arguments drawn from your own personal interests more often act on you as narcotics than as stimulants, and that in money concerns you have some small portion of pig-nature in your moral idiosyncrasy, and, like these amiable creatures, must occasionally be pulled backward from the boat in order to make you enter it. All success attend you, for if hard thinking and hard reading are merits, you have deserved it. “Your affectionate, etc.”

In consequence of this very judicious letter, which produced complete conviction on my mind, I shall content myself for the present with stating the main result of the chapter, which I have reserved for that future publication, a detailed prospectus of which the reader will find at the close of the second volume. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, Chapters IV, XIII and XIV 219 The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association. 7.3 Chapter XIV Occasion of the Lyrical Ballads, and the objects originally proposed — Preface to the second edition — The ensuing controversy, its causes and acrimony — Philosophic definitions of a Poem and Poetry with scholia. During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself — (to which of us I do not recollect) — that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the

incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

220 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them, when they present themselves. In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand. With this view I wrote THE ANCIENT MARINER, and was preparing among other poems, THE DARK LADIE, and CHRISTABEL, in which I should have more nearly realized my ideal, than I had done in my first attempt. But Mr. Wordsworth’s industry had proved so much more successful, and the number of his poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous matter. Mr. Wordsworth added two or three poems written in his own character, in the impassioned, lofty, and sustained diction, which is characteristic of his genius. In this form the Lyrical Ballads were published; and were presented by him, as an experiment, whether subjects, which from their nature rejected the usual ornaments and extra-colloquial style of poems in general, might not be so managed in the language of ordinary life as to produce the pleasurable interest, which it is the peculiar business of poetry to impart. To the second edition he added a preface of considerable length; in which, notwithstanding some passages of apparently a contrary import, he was understood to contend for the extension of this style to poetry of all kinds, and to reject as vicious and indefensible all

phrases and forms of speech that were not included in what he (unfortunately, I think, adopting an equivocal expression) called the language of real life. From this preface, prefixed to poems in CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, Chapters IV, XIII and XIV 221 which it was impossible to deny the presence of original genius, however mistaken its direction might be deemed, arose the whole long-continued controversy. For from the conjunction of perceived power with supposed heresy I explain the inveteracy and in some instances, I grieve to say, the acrimonious passions, with which the controversy has been conducted by the assailants. Had Mr. Wordsworth’s poems been the silly, the childish things, which they were for a long time described as being had they been really distinguished from the compositions of other poets merely by meanness of language and inanity of thought; had they indeed contained nothing more than what is found in the parodies and pretended imitations of them; they must have sunk at once, a dead weight, into the slough of oblivion, and have dragged the preface along with them. But year after year increased the number of Mr. Wordsworth’s admirers. They were found too not in the lower classes of the reading public, but chiefly among young men of strong sensibility and meditative minds; and their admiration (inflamed perhaps in some degree by opposition) was distinguished by its intensity, I might almost say, by its religious fervour. These facts, and the intellectual energy of the author, which was more or less consciously felt, where it was outwardly and even boisterously denied, meeting with sentiments of aversion to his opinions, and of alarm at their consequences, produced an eddy of criticism, which would of itself have borne up the poems by the violence with which it whirled them round and round. With many parts of this preface in the sense attributed to them and which the words undoubtedly seem to authorize, I never concurred; but on the contrary objected to them as erroneous in principle, and as contradictory (in appearance at least) both to other parts of the same preface, and to the author’s own practice in the greater part of the poems themselves. Mr. Wordsworth in his recent collection has, I find, degraded this prefatory disquisition to the end of his second volume, to be read or not at the reader’s choice. But he has not, as far as I can discover, announced any change in his poetic creed. At all events, considering it as the source of a controversy, in which I have been honoured more than I deserve by the frequent conjunction of my name with his, I think it expedient to declare once for all, in what points I coincide with the opinions supported in that preface, and in what points I altogether differ. But in order to render myself intelligible I must previously, in as few words as possible, explain my views, first, of a Poem; and secondly, of Poetry itself, in kind, and in essence.

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222 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I The office of philosophical disquisition consists in just distinction; while it is the privilege of the philosopher to preserve himself constantly aware, that distinction is not division. In order to obtain adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of philosophy. But having so done, we must then restore them in our conceptions to the unity, in which they actually co-exist; and this is the result of philosophy. A poem contains the same elements as a prose composition; the difference therefore must consist in a different combination of them, in consequence of a different object being proposed. According to the difference of the object will be the difference of the combination. It is possible, that the object may be merely to facilitate the recollection of any given facts or observations by artificial arrangement; and the composition will be a poem, merely because it is distinguished from prose by metre, or by rhyme, or by both conjointly. In this, the lowest sense, a man might attribute the name of a poem to the well-known enumeration of the days in the several months; “Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November,” etc. And others of the same class and purpose. And as a particular pleasure is found in anticipating the recurrence of sounds and quantities, all compositions that have this charm super-added, whatever be their contents, may be entitled poems. So much for the superficial form. A difference of object and contents supplies an additional ground of distinction. The immediate purpose may be the communication of truths; either of truth absolute and demonstrable, as in works of science; or of facts experienced and recorded, as in history. Pleasure, and that of the highest and most permanent kind, may result from the attainment of the end; but it is not itself the immediate end. In other words the communication of pleasure may be the immediate purpose; and though truth, either moral or intellectual, ought to be the ultimate end, yet this will distinguish the character of the author, not the class to which the work belongs. Blest indeed is that state of society, in which the immediate purpose would be baffled by the perversion of the

proper ultimate end; in which no charm of diction or imagery could exempt the BATHYLLUS even of an Anacreon, or the ALEXIS of Virgil, from disgust and aversion! CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, Chapters IV, XIII and XIV 223 But the communication of pleasure may be the immediate object of a work not metrically composed; and that object may have been in a high degree attained, as in novels and romances. Would then the mere superaddition of metre, with or without rhyme, entitle these to the name of poems? The answer is, that nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise. If metre be superadded, all other parts must be made consonant with it. They must be such, as to justify the perpetual and distinct attention to each part, which an exact correspondent recurrence of accent and sound are calculated to excite. The final definition then, so deduced, may be thus worded. A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species — (having this object in common with it) — it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part. Controversy is not seldom excited in consequence of the disputants attaching each a different meaning to the same word; and in few instances has this been more striking, than in disputes concerning the present subject. If a man chooses to call every composition a poem, which is rhyme, or measure, or both, I must leave his opinion uncontroverted. The distinction is at least competent to characterize the writer’s intention. If it were subjoined, that the whole is likewise entertaining or affecting, as a tale, or as a series of interesting reflections; I of course admit this as another fit ingredient of a poem, and an additional merit. But if the definition sought for be that of a legitimate poem, I answer, it must be one, the parts of which mutually support and explain each other; all in their proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose and known influences of metrical arrangement. The philosophic critics of all ages coincide with the ultimate judgment of all countries, in equally denying the praises of a just poem, on the one hand, to a series of striking lines or distiches, each of which, absorbing the whole attention of the reader to itself, becomes disjoined from its context, and forms a separate whole, instead of a harmonizing part; and on the other hand, to an unsustained composition, from which the reader collects rapidly the general result unattracted by the component parts. The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasureable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey

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224 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I itself. Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power; or like the path of sound through the air;— at every step he pauses and half recedes; and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him onward. Praecipitandus est liber spiritus, says Petronius most happily. The epithet, liber, here balances the preceding verb; and it is not easy to conceive more meaning condensed in fewer words. But if this should be admitted as a satisfactory character of a poem, we have still to seek for a definition of poetry. The writings of Plato, and Jeremy Taylor, and Burnet’s Theory of the Earth, furnish undeniable proofs that poetry of the highest kind may exist without metre, and even without the contradistinguishing objects of a poem. The first chapter of Isaiah — (indeed a very large portion of the whole book) — is poetry in the most emphatic sense; yet it would be not less irrational than strange to assert, that pleasure, and not truth was the immediate object of the prophet. In short, whatever specific import we attach to the word, Poetry, there will be found involved in it, as a necessary consequence, that a poem of any length neither can be, nor ought to be, all poetry. Yet if an harmonious whole is to be produced, the remaining parts must be preserved in keeping with the poetry; and this can be no otherwise effected than by such a studied selection and artificial arrangement, as will partake of one, though not a peculiar property of poetry. And this again can be no other than the property of exciting a more continuous and equal attention than the language of prose aims at, whether colloquial or written. My own conclusions on the nature of poetry, in the strictest use of the word, have been in part anticipated in some of the remarks on the Fancy and Imagination in the early part of this work. What is poetry? — is so nearly the same question with, what is a poet? — that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other. For it is a distinction resulting from the poetic genius itself, which sustains and modifies the images, thoughts, and emotions of the poet’s own mind. The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and

magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination. This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, Chapters IV, XIII and XIV 225 though gentle and unnoticed, control, laxis effertur habenis, reveals “itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant” qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry. Doubtless, as Sir John Davies observes of the soul — (and his words may with slight alteration be applied, and even more appropriately, to the poetic Imagination) — Doubtless this could not be, but that she turns Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange, As fire converts to fire the things it burns, As we our food into our nature change. From their gross matter she abstracts their forms, And draws a kind of quintessence from things; Which to her proper nature she transforms To bear them light on her celestial wings.

Thus does she, when from individual states She doth abstract the universal kinds; Which then re-clothed in divers names and fates Steal access through the senses to our minds. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

226 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I Finally, Good Sense is the Body of poetic genius, Fancy its Drapery, Motion its Life, and Imagination the Soul that is everywhere, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole. 7.4 Introduction Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the book that Coleridge wanted to write for a long time, examining the relationships between literature and philosophy. The book began as a conversation between Coleridge and his neighbour, William Wordsworth, although the book did not appear for another seventeen years. Coleridge provided the ideas for the Preface to the second edition of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads and this then was developed into Biographia Literaria, which he dreamed about writing for a long time. Biographia Literaria is concerned with the form of poetry, the genius of the poet and the relationship to philosophy. Coleridge feels that all of the great writers had their basis in philosophy because philosophy was the sum of all knowledge at this time. All education at that time consisted of a study of philosophy. Coleridge examines issues like the use of language in poetry and how it relates to everyday speech. He looks at the relationship between the subject of poetry and its relationship to everyday life. Coleridge examines the sources of poetic power which relates to the brilliance of the poet. This involves the use of language, meter, rhyme, and the writing style or the poetic diction. The poet, he feels, should write about subjects that are outside his own sensations and experiences. This is where the poetic genius comes from. If the poet confines his poetry to subjects within his own experiences, then the work is mediocre. Coleridge feels that the purpose of poetry is to communicate beauty and pleasure. This is an expression of the brilliance of the poet.

A great deal of Coleridge’s works were the analysis and criticism of other writers. There are many passages from various authors in Biographia Lieteraria and much of the book examines the works of Wordsworth and Shakespeare, both contemporaries of Coleridge, as Coleridge examines the link between literature and philosophy. He also examines the views of Des Cartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, as well as other philosophers. He uses this approach to examine the source of the CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, Chapters IV, XIII and XIV 227 poet’s imagination. The brilliance of the poet must elicit feelings of excitement and emotion in the reader and Coleridge examines how this process functions and why some writers are more popular than others. Coleridge also addresses the issue of literary critics, some of whom he had problems with regarding his own works. He feels that the critics must find something wrong with a literary work in order to sell reviews. Therefore, many reviews are unfair and the result of personal animosity. Coleridge accomplishes his goal of examining the relationship between philosophy and literature in this book. 7.5 Summary Biographica Literaria is an autobiographical novel by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published in 1817. Framed as a nonlinear, meditative discourse, it originated as an intended preface to a volume of poetry, obliquely defining Coleridge’s self-conception as a poetic subject. The book addresses thematic elements of poetry such as suspense, as well as elements of the poet himself, including a decomposition of the meaning of creativity informed by his knowledge about both past and early 19th century philosophical thought. Because of the insight it provides into the mind of a great poet in the early years of what scholars define as the modern literary era, Biographica Literaria is now a seminal work in critical theory. Coleridge begins the work with a meditation on his formative years of schooling, particularly his secondary schooling under James Boyer at a grammar school called Christ’s Hospital. This time formed the basis for his poem “Frost at Midnight,” which reflects on his time in a formal educational environment that he believes squelched his creative spirit. Coleridge poses a philosophical argument against structured learning environments, noting that real creativity and freedom always rests on the bars of the school windows, meaning on the margins of the existing epistemological structures that

define one’s immediate context and the contemporary world. He also restates the predominant themes of the early English Romantic movement, positioning the entity of Nature as the child’s teacher who functions in a symmetric relationship with the human spirit, recursively defining the questions a subject may ask as they correspond. He also vindicates CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

228 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I the innate freedom of the spirit, arguing that children should be allowed to roam rather than cloistered in buildings. Coleridge moves on from his introduction to his critical theory of language to a reflection on the evolution of his philosophical doctrine. He states that he initially adhered to the associational psychology of David Hartley, which holds that new ideas emerge from associations inherent in combinations of older ideas. Coleridge criticizes and then rejects this belief, asserting that the mind is not a mechanical receptacle for ideas that are already out in the world. Rather, the mind is an active agent in the perception of reality. Because reality emerges out of a discourse with Nature, Coleridge comes close to a Cartesian conclusion that reality is, in some sense, constructed. Coleridge then delivers remarks on how he defines imagination, which he restates as “emplastic power.” Emplastic power is the means through which the human soul is able to perceive the universe in its raw form, a spiritual unity. He distinguishes the universe’s spiritual unity as the only ultimate “object” to be perceived, asserting that any other objects can be categorized as “fancy,” or the products of the other associative functions of the human mind. Coleridge transitions to a meditation on William Wordsworth’s poetry. He argues against the contemporary perception that the “right” way to read Wordsworth is to distance oneself from his language, parsing his syntax objectively without overcommitting to any one interpretation. Rather, he asserts, Wordsworth’s insistence that his poetry constituted a “common language” for everyday people to understand is not true. Wordsworth’s poetry is equally as artificial as any other poet’s words because they necessarily originate in conscious thought; not the stream of consciousness, unreflective speech he purported to use while writing. Despite the errors Coleridge identifies in contemporary interpretations of Wordsworth, he vindicates the poet as the finest of their time. He credits his excellence to his ability to transmute seemingly ordinary natural imagery into the extraordinary and supernatural. Coleridge goes on to define his own poetic pursuit as a kind of inversion of Wordsworth’s: to render the supernatural credible and real using natural language.

Coleridge concludes his reflection of the ideal state and role of poetry by thoroughly rejecting Wordsworth’s principle that the language with which poetry is constructed should be CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, Chapters IV, XIII and XIV 229 taken from the utterances of men in real life. He holds instead that there is never any essential distinction between the natural and unconscious utterances of prose and the highly concentrated metrical composition of poetry. All language contains in itself an inherent meter and potential rhyme schemes. He critiques a few excerpts of Wordsworth’s poems, pointing out where certain uses of language are too ordinary and could be substituted with more compelling, metrical expressions. Biographia Literaria is Coleridge’s effort to break away from the past in certain key rationalizations driven by insights about language and creativity. Focusing first on his own education, and abstracting it to a philosophical theory of education as something that should be reconceived without its damaging opposition to creativity, he utilizes empirical evidence from his own history to dislodge his audience from the past. His concluding definition of his own creative spirit as natural and unpredictable, and therefore something that positions itself in opposition to predominant poetic methodologies that fixate on the extant vocabularies of the public, similarly urges readers to rethink what damaging unconscious relationships they might be maintaining with tradition. On the Imagination or Esemplastic Power The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. Samuel Taylor Coleridge divides imagination into two parts: the primary and secondary imagination. As the “living Power and prime Agent,” the primary imagination is attributed a divine quality, namely the creation of the self, the “I Am.” However, because it is not subject to human will,

the poet has no control over the primary imagination. It is the intrinsic quality of the poet that makes him or her a Creator; harking back to Wordsworth, the primary imagination can CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

230 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I be likened to poetic genius. The secondary imagination is an echo of the primary. It is like the former in every way except that it is restricted in some capacity. It co-exists with the conscious will, but because of this, the secondary imagination does not have the unlimited power to create. It struggles to attain the ideal but can never reach it. Still the primary governs the secondary, and imagination gives rise to our ideas of perfection. In this way, Coleridge and Shelley share the belief that inimitable forms of creation can only exist in the mind. As soon as the poet decides to write down his or her poem, for example, the work is inevitably diminished. Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association. Coleridge also adds Fancy in his description of the Imagination. According to his philosophy, Fancy is even lower than the secondary imagination, which is already of the earthly realm. Fancy is the source of our baser desires. It is not a creative faculty but a repository for lust. 3. From Chapter 14 [Lyrical Ballads and Poetic Controversy]: ...the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sun-set diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. Truth seems to be one of the preoccupations of the Romantic poets. In this sense, the truth of nature will always remain superior to poetry, which is an artifice. However, imagination is that aspect of poetry that provides another way of looking at nature so that what is ordinary and familiar can be seen anew.

What is poetry? is so nearly the same question with what is a poet? that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other. For it is a distinction resulting from the poetic genius itself, which sustains and modifies the images, thoughts and emotions of the poet’s own mind. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, Chapters IV, XIII and XIV 231 The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends and (as it were) fuses by that synthetic and magical power…the imagination. This power, first put in action by the will and understanding...reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order; judgement ever awake and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry. The soul is the imagination. Coleridge’s assertion that the imagination is both synthetic and magical only reaffirms what is already known about him. His works, especially in the Lyrical Ballads, deal with the supernatural insofar as they express real emotions regardless of whether one believes in the phenomena. Similar to William Blake’s philosophy, this power of the imagination is revealed in oppositions. “Doubtless,” as Sir John Davies observes of the soul (and his words may with slight alteration be applied, and even more appropriately to the poetic IMAGINATION). Doubtless this could not be, but that she turns Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange, As fire converts to fire the things it burns, As we our food into our nature change.

From their gross matter she abstracts their forms, And draws a kind of quintessence from things; Which to her proper nature she transforms To bear them light on her celestial wings. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

232 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I Thus does she, when from individual states She doth abstract the universal kinds; Which then re-clothed in diverse names and fates Steal access through our senses to our minds. The soul is equated to the poetic imagination in this poem. Ascribing the poem to the latter, the first stanza deals with how imagination gives life to the body. It transforms a mere body to a spirit. Percy Shelley in his A Defence of Poetry later echoes the idea that the spirit is superior to the body. What the imagination consumes it makes a part of itself, “as fire converts to fire the things it burns,” and as the food we eat become part of us. The second stanza discusses how the imagination takes material from the earthly realm and idealizes them so that they can transform into “proper nature,” which goes back to Coleridge’s idea of “the truth of nature” and the purpose of poetry. Finally, the third stanza is also a return to another of the cardinal points of poetry, which is to let imagination offer us new and interesting ways of looking at something we are already familiar with. Sensual pleasures are transformed into cerebral ones. 7.6 Keywords/Abbreviations  Fancy and Imagination: “The difference between the two is the same as the difference between a mechanical mixture and a chemical compound.”  Willing Suspension of disbelief: It is an intentional avoidance of critical thinking or logic in examining something surreal, such as a work of speculative fiction, in order to believe it for the sake of enjoyment.

7.7 Unit End Questions (MCQ and Descriptive) A. Descriptive Type Questions 15. What is a summary of Chapter 14 of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria? 16. How does Coleridge define the nature and function of poetry? CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, Chapters IV, XIII and XIV 233 Examine Coleridge’s idea on the organic unity of poetry as discussed in Chapter 14 of the Biographia Literaria. What are the themes in Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge? Who are the characters in Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge? In Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, about fancy and imagination he writes “the difference between the two is the same as the difference between a mechanical mixture and a chemical compound.” Elaborate. “The Biographia Literaria touches a new high watermark in literary criticism”Discuss. Comment on Coleridge as a critic based on his Biographia Literaria. Discuss the relative merits and weaknesses of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. What are the differences between Wordsworth and Coleridge according to Biographia Literaria, and what are their clashes? In Biographia Literaria, to what extent can Coleridge’s view about what distinguishes a poem from poetry be supported? Examine how Coleridge sees poetry is a source of knowledge. What is the significance of the letter in Chapter 13? What is the concept of meter and diction according to S.T. Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria? What is Coleridge’s idea of a good poet expressed in Biographia Literaria? Who among his contemporaries fits the description best? Discuss Coleridge’s major contentions with Wordsworth in Biographia Literaria? Comment on faculty of imagination as explained by Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria. What does ‘Biographia literaria’ mean?

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234 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I B. Multiple Choice/Objective Type Questions 1. Coleridge feels that the purpose of poetry is to communicate __________. (a) Instructions (b) Beauty and pleasure (c) Thoughts (d) Moral preaching Coleridge accomplishes his goal of examining the relationship between literature and __________ in Biographia Litereria. (a) Science (b) Philosophy (c) Fine Arts (d) Nature 10. Coleridge feels that __________. There is no difference between the language of prose and poetry There is a difference between the language of prose and poetry The language of prose and poetry should be the language of the rustics The poetry should be in elevated language 11. __________ is the body of the poetic genius. (a) Fancy (b) Imagination (c) Good Sense (d) Motion 5. __________ will always remain superior to poetry. (a) Truth (b) Philosophy

(c) Fancy (d) Imagination Answers: 1. (b), 2. (b), 3. (a), 4. (c), 5. (a). 7.8 References R https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6081/6081-h/6081-h.htm#link2HCH0013 S Barfield, Owen (1971), What Coleridge Thought? (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press) (Extensive Study of Coleridge as Philosopher). CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, Chapters IV, XIII and XIV 235 I Barth, J. Robert (2001). The Symbolic Imagination (New York: Fordham) (Examines Coleridge’s Concept of “Symbol”). J Bate, Walter Jackson (1968), Coleridge, The Macmillan Company. ISBN 0-8262-0713-8. K Beckson, Karl E. (1963), Great Theories in Literary Criticism, Farrar, Straus. L Beer, John B. (1970), Coleridge the Visionary (London: Chatto and Windus) (Places Coleridge’s poems in the context of his thought.) M Berkeley, Richard (2007), Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan). N Cheyne, Peter (2020), Coleridge’s Contemplative Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press). O Class, Monika (2012), Coleridge and the Kantian Ideas in England, 1796-1817 (London: Bloomsbury). P Cutsinger, James S. (1987), The Form of Transformed Vision (Macon GA: Mercer) (Argues that Coleridge wants to transform his reader’s consciousness, to see nature as a living presence). Q Eliot, T.S. (1956), “The Perfect Critic”, Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, Harcourt, ISBN 0-15-180702-7. R Engell, James (1981), The Creative Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard) (Surveys the various German theories of imagination in the eighteenth century). S Leadbetter, Gregory (2011), Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan).

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UNIT 8 INTRODUCTION TO MODERN CRITICISM Structure: 8.0 Learning Objectives 8.1 It’s Nature 8.2 It’s Ancestry 8.3 In the Woods Near Cabin John 8.4 Keywords/Abbreviations 8.5 Unit End Questions (MCQ and Descriptive) 8.6 References 8.0 Learning Objectives

In this unit, the students will understand:  The various tenets of modern literary criticism.   The leading critics of the time and their works.   Literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of literature’s goals and methods. 8.1 It’s Nature THE LITERARY CRITICISM written in English over the past quarter of a century is. qualitatively different from any previous criticism. Whether you call it the “new” criticism, as many have, or “scientific criticism,” or “working criticism,” or “modern criticism,” its only relation to the great criticism of the past seems to be one of descent. Its practitioners are not more CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Introduction to Modern Criticism 237 brilliant or alert to literature than their predecessors, in fact they are clearly less so, than giants like Aristotle and Coleridge, but they are doing something radically different with literature, and they are getting something radically different from literature, in return. What modern criticism is could be defined crudely and somewhat inaccurately as: the organized, use of non-literary techniques and bodies of knowledge to obtain insights into literature. The tools are these methods or “techniques” the nuggets are “insights,” the occupation is mining, digging, or just plain grubbing. The non-literary bodies of knowledge range from the ritual patterns of savages to the nature of capitalist society. And all of these result in a kind of close reading and detailed attention to the text that can only be understood on the analogy of microscopic analysis. The key word of this definition is “organized.” Traditional criticism used most of these techniques and disciplines, but in a spasmodic and haphazard fashion. The relevant sciences were not developed enough to be used methodically, and not informed enough to have much to contribute. The bodies of knowledge of most usefulness to criticism are the social sciences, which study man functioning in the group (since literature is, after all, one of man!s social functions) rather than the physical or biological sciences (since literature is not a function of the human structure in the sense that walking or eating is, ― but a part of the cultural or societal accretion). Although Aristotle clearly aimed to turn what we now call the social sciences on drama and poetry, to study them in terms of what he knew of the human mind, the nature of society, and primitive survivals, he had few data to apply beyond his own empiric observations, brilliant as they are, and unverified traditions. The miracle Aristotle performed, the essential rightness of his criticism based almost entirely on private observation and keen sensibility, is a triumph of critical insight hitting largely by intuition on a good deal later discovered and developed. Even by Coleridge’s time, two thousand years later, not much more was known accurately about the nature of the human mind and society than Aristotle knew. A good deal of criticism, of course, is contemporary without being modem in the sense defined above, that is, it makes no organized critical use of any of this material (it is surprising, however, how much unconscious use it makes). Although such criticism has a place, and frequently an important

one, it is by definition another kind of thing, and not our concern here. At the same time, besides its special functions or the special degree to which it does things done only CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

238 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I haphazardly and informally before, modern criticism does a number of things that criticism has always done: interpreting the work, relating it to a literary tradition, evaluating it, etc. These are relatively permanent features of any criticism (evaluation, we might note, has largely atrophied in the serious criticism of our time), but even where a modern critic tends to specialize in one of these more traditional functions, he does so along with other less traditional things, or in a fashion profoundly modified by these characteristic developments of the modem mind… John Crowe Ransom, who has been chiefly influential in popularizing the term “the new criticism” with his book of that name, insisting on its qualitative difference from earlier criticism (on the basis of the modern detailed reading in “the structural properties of poetry”) has claimed that ours is an age of more than usual critical distinction, and that in depth and precision contemporary critical writing is “beyond all earlier criticism in our language.” There is, I think, little doubt of this, but we cannot flatter ourselves that the superiority lies in the calibre of our critics as opposed,.to their predecessors. Clearly, it lies in their methods. Modern criticism has vast organized bodies of knowledge about human behaviour at its disposal, and new and fruitful techniques in its bag of tricks. To, the extent that some of this can be consolidated, and the erratic, sometimes unbalanced and incomplete, if brilliant, work of a number of isolated critics coordinated and integrated, vistas for the immediate future of criticism should be even greater, and a body of serious literary analysis turned out in English of a quality to distinguish our age. Among the methods and disciplines that have been established as useful for literary criticism, the social sciences come to mind first, a reservoir so vast that it has hardly yet been tapped. From psychoanalysis critics have borrowed the basic assumptions of the operations of the subconscious mind, demonstrating its deeper “wishes” through associations and “clusters” of images; the basic mechanisms of dream-distortion, such as condensation, displacement, and splitting, which are also the basic mechanisms of poetic-formation; the Jungian concept of Archetypes, and much else. They have taken the concept of “configurations” from the Gestaltists; basic experimental data about animal and child behavior from the laboratory psychologists; information about the pathological expressions of the human mind from the clinical psychologists; discoveries about ‘the behaviour of man in groups

and, social patterns from the social psychologists’; and a great deal more, from Jaensch’s “eidetic images” and similar purely subjective material to the most CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Introduction to Modern Criticism 239 objective physical and chemical data reported by neurological and endocrinological psychologies. From competing sociologies criticism has borrowed theories and data regarding the nature of society, social change, and social conflicts, and their relation to literature and other cultural phenomena; and from anthropological schools, theories and data regarding primitive and savage societies and social behaviour, from the sweeping evolutionary generalizations of theorists like Tylor to the meticulously observed detail of the Boas school. An offshoot of anthropology, the field of folklore has also been of particular fruitfulness to criticism as a source of information about the traditional popular rituals, tales, and beliefs that underlie the patterns and themes of both folk art and sophisticated art. In addition to the social sciences, a number of other modem disciplines have been very fruitful or are potentially so. Literary scholarship, although hardly a new field, has by our century accumulated so great a body of accurate information and so exact a body of procedures, that with the addition of critical imagination it has been made to produce a type of scholarly criticism completely “modern” in the sense used above. The traditional scholarly areas of linguistics and philology, with the addition of the modern field of semantics, have opened up to criticism enormous vistas, only slightly explored. The physical and biological sciences have provided criticism with such basic ingredients as the experimental method itself, as well as theories of great” metaphoric usefulness, like “evolution” and modern physical “relativity,” “field,” and “indeterminacy” concepts. Philosophy, although traditionally concerned with literature only in the guise of aesthetics, has proved of use to criticism, particularly in ethical and metaphysical formulations with which it can confront questions of ultimate value and belief; and a number of critics have even turned the doctrines and insights of religion and mysticism on literature. Besides these bodies of theory and knowledge, modem criticism has developed a number of specialized procedures of its own and methodized them, sometimes on the analogy of scientific procedure. Such are the pursuit of biographical information, the exploration of ambiguities, the study of symbolic action and communication in literary works, and close reading, hard work, and detailed exploration of texts in general.

For the most part these new critical techniques and lines of investigation depend on-a small number of assumptions that are ‘basic’ to the modem mind and characteristic of it, assumptions CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

240 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I that are principally the contributions of four great nineteenth and early twentieth century thinkers 11. Darwin, Marx, Frazer, and Freud.” A few of those key assumptions, relatively new to literary criticism in our century, can be noted here at random, with the reservation that probably no single modern critic would accept them all. From Darwin, the view of literature as an evolutionary development, within the work of a single author and in larger patterns outside him, changing and developing (although not necessarily “improving”) in orderly sequence. From Marx, the concept of literature as reflecting, in however complex and indirect a fashion, the social patterns and customs of its time. From Freud, the concept of literature as the disguised expression and fulfillment of repressed wishes, or the analogy of dreams, with these disguises operating in accord with known principles; and underlying that, the even more basic assumptions of mental levels beneath consciousness and some conflict between an expressive and a censorship principle. From Frazer, the view of primitive magic, myth, and ritual underlying the most transcendent literary patterns and themes. Other basic assumptions would include Dewey’s doctrine of “continuity,” the view that the reading and writing of literature is a form of human activity comparable to any other, answerable to the same laws and capable of being studied by the same objective ‘procedures;’ the behaviourist addition that literature is in fact a man writing and a man reading, or it is nothing; and the rationalist view that literature is ultimately analyzable. Negatively, modern criticism is equally, distinguished. by the absence of the two principal assumptions about literature in the past, that it is essentially a type of moral instruction and that it is essentially a type of entertainment or amusement. Operating on these assumptions, modern criticism asks a number of questions.that have, for the most part, not been asked of literature before. What is the significance of the work in relation to the artist’s life, his childhood, his family, his deepest needs and desires? What is its relation to his .social group, his class, his economic livelihood, the larger pattern of his society? What precisely does it do for him and how? What does it do for the reader, and how? What is the connection between those two functions? What is the relation of the work to the’ archetypal primitive patterns of ritual, to the inherited corpus of literature, to the philosophic world views of its time and of all time? What is the organization of its images, its diction, its lager formal pattern? What are the ambiguous possibilities of its key words, and how much of its content consists of

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Introduction to Modern Criticism 241 meaningful and provable statements? Finally, then, modern criticism can get to the older questions: what are the work’s intentions, how valid are they, and how completely are they fulfilled; what are its meanings (plural rather than singular); and how good or bad is it and why? All of these, obviously, are questions asked about literature, either in general or of a specific work. Nevertheless, modern criticism for the most part no longer accepts its traditional status as an adjunct to “creative” or “imaginative” literature. If we define art as the creation of meaningful patterns of experience, or the manipulation of human experience into meaningful patterns, a definition that would probably get some degree of general acceptance, it is obvious that both imaginative and critical writing are art as defined. Imaginative literature organizes its experiences out of life at first hand (in most cases); criticism organizes its experiences out of imaginative literature“ life at second hand or once- removed. Both are, if you wish, kinds of poetry, and one is precisely as independent as the other, or as dependent. “No exponent of criticism ... has, I presume, ever made the preposterous assumption that criticism is an autotelic art,” T. S. Eliot wrote in 1923, in “The Function of Criticism.” Whether or not anyone had made that “preposterous assumption” of 1923, modern criticism, which began more or less formally the following year with the publication of I. A. Richards Principles of Literary Criticism, has been acting on it since. As R. P. Blackmur has pointed out, however, criticism “is a self-sufficient but by no means an isolated art,” and in actual practice modern criticism has been at once completely.autotelic and inextricably tied to poetry. That is, like any criticism, it guides, nourishes, and lives off art, and is thus, from another point of view, a handmaiden to art, parasitic at worst and symbiotic at best. The critic requires works of art for his raw material, subject, and theme, and in return for them performs such invaluable secondary functions on occasion as helping the reader understand and appreciate works of art; helping the artiste understand and evaluate his own work; and helping the general progress and development of art by popularizing, “placing,” and providing standards. The critic also, in special cases, calls up a generation of poets, as Emerson or the early Van Wyck Brooks did; assigns subjects for writers as Gorky or Bernard DeVoto do; changes the course of art or attempts to, with

Tolstoy and the moralists in the latter category, and Boileau and perhaps the Romantic critics in England in the former; or even furnishes the artist (sometimes himself) with CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

242 Literary Criticism and Critical Approaches - I specific themes, techniques, and usable formulations, as do a number of contemporary critics of poetry. In one direction, literary criticism is bounded by reviewing, in the other, by aesthetics. The reviewer, more or less, is interested in books as commodities; the critics in books as literature, or, in modern terms, as literary action or behaviour; the aesthetician in literature in the abstract, not in specific books at all. These are thus functional rather than formal categories, and they are constantly shifting, so that the reviewer who ignores the commodity aspects of the book under discussion to treat of its significance as a work of literature becomes, for that review at least, a critic; the critic who generalizes about the abstract nature of Art or the Beautiful becomes, temporarily, an aesthetician; and the aesthetician who criticizes specific works of literature in terms of their unique properties is at that time a critic. One of the most remarkable features of our time is the number of ostensible critics, like Henry Seidel Canby or the brothers Van Doren, who on examination turn out to be disguised reviewers. Another feature of contemporary criticism worth remarking is that each critic tends to have a master metaphor or series of metaphors, in terms of which he sees the critical function, and that this metaphor then ‘shapes, informs, and sometimes limits his work. Thus for R. P. Blackmur the critic is a mechanic with a flashlight, turning light on the internal workings of a beautiful piece of machinery; for George Saintsbury he is a wine-bibber; for Constance Rourke he is a manure-spreader, fertilizing the ground for a good crop; for Waldo Frank he is an obstetrician, bringing new life to birth; for Kenneth Burke, after a number of other images, he has emerged as a wealthy impresario, staging dramatic performances of any work that catches his fancy; for Ezra Pound he is a patient man showing a friend through his library, and so forth. The methods and techniques of modern criticism noted the above filters through these master metaphors, and also filter through something even more intangible, the critic’s personal apparatus, of intelligence, knowledge, skill, sensibility, and ability to write. No method, however ingenious, is foolproof, and almost every technique of modern criticism is used brilliantly by brilliant critics, and poorly by stupid, ignorant, incompetent or dull ones. On the other hand, a good man possessed of the