This PPT is based on the chapter on Coleridge from the book Literary Criticism by Prasad

1. Mrs. S. Malathi, M.A., B.Ed., M.Phil.,
Assistant Professor of English,
V.V.Vanniaperumal College for Women,
Virudhunagar.

2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an
English poet, literary critic,
philosopher and theologian who,
with his friend William
Wordsworth, was a founder of
the Romantic Movement in
England and a member of the
Lake Poets. He also shared
volumes and collaborated with
Charles Lamb, Robert Southey,
and Charles Lloyd.
1772-1834

3. • He establishes the principles of writing rather than to furnish
rules how to pass judgment on what has been written by others.
• He sought to discover in
- the faculties of the human soul which gave it birth
Coleridge is the first English critic who based his
literary criticism on philosophical principles.

4. His literary works suffer from a woeful lack of system
 Biographia Literaria is ill-planned and incomplete
 Lectures on Shakespeare are disjointed and ill-reported
 The Friend, The Table Talk, the contributions to Southey's
Ominiana, the Letters, the posthumous Anima Poetae- all
these contain fragments of criticism

5. Rene Wellek cites evidence to show that he borrowed freely from
the German philosophers like Lessing, Kant, Schelling,
Schiller, the Schelegels and others.
But it is undeniable too because his principal critical theses has
own special stamp.

6. His Theory of imagination
According to Coleridge,
• all creative activity is an act of the imagination.
• Fancy and imagination were two distinct.
Before Wordsworth, poets only gave 'what oft was thought'.
They never presented 'what was equally felt'.
It was Wordsworth who bridged the gulf between the two.
His feelings issued forth as thoughts and his thoughts as
feelings.

7. Wordsworth defines poetry as 'emotions recollected in
tranquillity.
When we recollected the past, it undergoes deep
contemplation and the result in 'a union of deep feeling
with profound thought'.
In this state, the forms, incidents and situations originally
observed in nature or life and it take on the colour of the
poet's feelings and thoughts and appear in a new light.
They acquire a new significance. They undergo a sea-
change into something rich and strange. Now the
common eye which sees in them, had failed to see
before. It is the work of imagination

8. From this study of the effect of imagination, Coleridge is led to
examine its very nature and genesis - What it is and how
it is set in motion
He finds two forms of imagination - the primary and the
secondary

9. The Primary imagination is
 simply the power of perceiving the objects of sense - persons,
places, things- both in their parts and as wholes.
 enables the mind to form a clear picture of the object perceived
by the senses.
 an involuntary act of the mind when confronted with a
mingled mass of matters.
 unconsciously, it reduced it to shape and size to make
perception possible.

10. The Secondary imagination is the conscious use of the power of
perception
 is a composite faculty of the soul consisting of all the other
faculties, perception, intellect, will and emotions.
 is a more active agent than the primary imagination.
 dissolves, diffuses, dissipates inorder to recreate.
 reduces all to a solution sweet to generate forms of its own.
 is a shaping and modifying power.
 From its plastic stress, objects emerge fashioned in its own
likeness. it steeps them in its own light or shade.
 They are as the mind conceives them to be not what they are in
the external world of nature. In this process, the mind and
nature act and react on each other.
 The mind colouring nature becomes one with nature and
nature coloured by the mind becomes one with the mind. (i-e)
The internal (subject) is made external (object), the external
(object) internal (subject)

11. so, imagination is a unifying or esemplastic power which identifies the mind
with nature (or matter) and nature ( or matter) with the mind.
 For the truth which the poet discovers lies neither in himself
nor in the things he sees, but in the identity of both.
 It is the product both of what nature presents to the mind and
of what the mind imparts to nature.
 so, there is no difference between the primary and the
secondary imagination: both work upon the objects of sense.
There is no difference between Coleridge's concept of
imagination and Wordsworth's.
Coleridge interested in the theory of the concepts, Wordsworth in
the practice.

12. Wordsworth's views on Coleridge's 'Fancy'
• Regarding fancy, Coleridge says that Fancy only combines the
things which it sees into pleasing shapes instead of blending
them and to give them shapes of its own.
• The original material ever remains the same but it is offered in
a new combination.
Example: Chesterton's Lines
The dews of the evening most carefully shun,
They are the tears of the sky for the loss of the sun.
(The image is that of the sky weeping, a new thing certainly)
The poet combines four things-sky, evening, dews, tears. None of
which receives any colouring or modification from his own
mind. It is like putting four separate pictures together on the
same screen to form a new picture.

13. so, Fancy is 'the arbitrary bringing together of things that lie
remote and forming them into a unity’.
It is ‘the faculty of bringing together images dissimilar in the
main by some one point or more of likeness’.
It is akin to talent which is acquired as imagination is akin
to genius which is inborn.
eg: Imagination is the distinguishing quality of the poetry of
Shakespeare and Milton.
Fancy is that of the poets from Donne and Cowley
Spenser has an imaginative fancy but he has not
imagination

14. His View of Art
Coleridge's theory of the imagination modifies the traditional,
particularly the neo-classical (i-e) view of art as a mere
imitation.
Art is the union of the soul with the external world or nature.
It represents nature as thought and thought as nature.
It reveals what lies deep within it (the very spirit of nature),
which presupposes (requires) a bond between nature in the
higher sense and the soul of man.

15. Imitation is such a version of the original - part thought and part
thing.
It is the mesothesis (reconciliation – reunion), of Likeness and
Difference.
The difference is essential like likeness because without the
difference, it woud be copy or fac-simile.

16. Art, particularly poetic art is the balance or reconciliation of
opposite or discordant (contrary)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 of freshness, with 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 (great)or vehement (showing
strong feeling)
In all this work of recociliation, imagination plays the vital role.

17. His Definition of a Poem
Poetry is an activity of the imagination, idealising the real and
realising the ideal.
Eg: As Wordsworth and Coleridge did in the ‘Lyrical Ballads’
Coleridge – a poem uses the same medium as a prose
composition - Words.
But the difference between the two must lie in their different use
of words in consequence of their different objects.
If the object of a poem is to facilitate memory, it should put
words in the metrical form with or without rhyme.

18. Eg: Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November etc.
Here, we can find pleasure in anticipating the recurrence of
sounds and quantities.
We have different ways of writing – the scientific and the
poetical. Each has an immediate object and an ultimate one.
The immediate object of a work of science is truth and the
immediate object of a poem is pleasure.
Their ultimate object for the work of science may afford a
profound pleasure to its reader and the poem may be found to
contain a profound truth.

19. As pleasure is the immediate object of poetry, it prefers metre
to the language of prose.
Metre should suit the language and content of the poem and not
to be a mere super addition for ornament’s sake or to facilitate
memory.
Coleridge had no objection for long poems.
He admired Milton’s Paradise Lost and Shakespeare’s plays.
But Edgar Allan Poe thought even great epics like Paradise Lost
are insipid and boring

20. On Poetic Diction
Regarding the language, Coleridge considers that ‘a selection of
the real language of men’ or ‘the language of men constituted the
language of poetry. (Wordsworth)
Language of men may differ from person to person, class to class,
place to place.
Coleridge presents that the omissions and changes to be made in
the language of rustics before it could be transferred to any
species of poem. Such a language alone has a universal appeal
and is therefore the language of poetry.
To differ from prose, the poetry should be written in metre using
real language of men.

21. Coleridge distinguishes Genius as the one almost identical with
imagination and talent as the one identical with fancy.
Genius like imagination is creative and inborn. Talent like fancy
is combinatory and acquired.
So, a poet is a genius, born not made.
In chapter XV of the Biographia Literaria, observing
Shakespeare’s early works Venus and Adonis and The Rape of
Lucrece, Coleridge says that genius manifests itself in the
following four ways.
On poetic genius

22. It consists in the perfect sweetness of the versification, its
adaptation to the subject and the power of varying the music of
the words to the requirement of the thought.
It is the outward manifestation of the music in the poet’s soul.
Sense of Musical Delight

23. Objectivity
It shows itself in the choice of subjects very remote from the
private interests and circumstances of the writer himself
and in the utter aloofness of the poet’s own feelings, from those
of which he is at once the painter and the analyst.
He knows no self.
He knows what is reflected from our fellow creature, the flowers,
the trees, the beasts, from the surface of the waters and the sands
of the desert.
His method is God’s own: though He present everywhere in his
creation, he is nowhere visible.

24. The Shaping and modifying power of imagination
A poet's pictures of life are not faithful copies, accurately
rendered in words.
They become poetic when they are modified by a predominant
passion
 or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion.
 or when they have the effect of reducin multitude to unity, or
succession to an instant
 or when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them for
the poet's own spirit

25. In the poem or in a play, the sequence of occurence in life or
nature meet together at a common point of time.
Their succession is reduced to an instant.
eg: Shakespeare's King Lear and Othello
A unity of interest is achieved which is more effective than the
mechanical unities of time, place or action

26. Depth and Energy of Thought
Coleridge - No man was ever a great poet without being a
profound philosopher.
Such a man feels in a moment of inspiration and it is naturally
modified and directed by his deep and long thoughts.
So, the poetry is the union of deep feeling with profound thought.

27. On Dramatic Illusion
Coleridge & Wordsworth composed a series of poems of two
sorts
1. The incidents and agents were to be supernatural
2. Subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life
Wordsworth chose the second class to give the charm of novelty
to things of everyday
Coleridge chose the supernatural persons and characters to make
them credible

28. Coleridge's view of fiction, poetic or dramatic pleases the
audience when it is known to be fiction (imaginary)
The reader or spectator knows well that it is a tale or play. He
knows that the stage is only a stage, and the players are only
players (Dr.Johnson's)
The true stage illusion consists not in the mind's judging it to be a
forest, but in its remission of the judgement that it is not a
forest.
It is enjoyed neither unconsciously nor consciously but when
consciousness is voluntarily suspended.

29. The Value of his criticism
Coleridge differs from all the previous English critics by his
psycholoical approach to literary problem.
The study of poetry led him to probe the imaginative processes
that gave it birth
The study of art led him to the transcendental principle that it is a
self-revelation inspite of the artist
The study of drama led him to the state of mind in which it is
enjoyed

30. His theory of imagination is heavily weighted in favour of the
romantic
It justifies the ways of the romantics to the world, of those who
made the internal external and the external internal, ignoring
poetry that has stood the test of time
eg: Gray's Elegy or Spenser's Faerie Queen
It taught English critics to think for themselves rather than 'parrot
those who have parroted others'.

31. Thank You