Coleridge as a critic

Topic: Coleridge as a critic

Paper: 3

Paper name: Literary theory and criticism

Name: Bhatt Urvi P.

Roll no.: 35

Class: sem-1

Year: 2013-14

Submitted to: MKBU

Que.: Coleridge as a critic.

Ans.: ●       Introduction:

          Samuel Taylor Coleridge [1772-1834] was a great poet, but he is also a great critic. He is one of the greatest of poet-critics that England has ever produced. He was a genius and when he inspired, and when the mood was upon him, he could create works of the highest order, but he was incapable of sustained and persistent labour.

          Stray’s remarks on literature and literary theory are scattered all over his prose works as, The Friend, Table Talks, Letters, Aids to Reflections, Confessions of an Inquiring spirit, Animal Poteau and Sibylline Leaves. But the bulk of his literary criticism, all that is most worthwhile in it is contained in his

(1)     Biographia Literaria and

(2)     Lectures on Shakespeare and other poets.

          Activity of the ‘poet’s’ mind, and a ‘poem’ is merely one of the forms of us expression, a verbal expression of that activity, and poetic activity is basically an activity of the imagination. As David Daiches points out. ‘Poetry’ for Coleridge is a wider category than that of “poem”, that is poetry is a kind of activity which can be engaged in by painters or philosophers or scientists and is not confined to those who employ metrical language, or even to those who employ language of any kind. Poetry, in this larger sense brings, “the whole soul of man”, into activity, with each faculty playing its proper part according to its ‘relative worth and dignity’. This takes place whenever the “secondary imagination” comes into operation. Whenever the synthesizing the integrating, powers of the secondary imagination is at work, bringing all aspects of a subject into a completion unity, then poetry in this larger sense results.

●       Coleridge’s Criticism:

→      Themes of poetry

→      Rustic Language

→      Poetic Diction

●       Rustic Language:

          As regards the second statement of words worth, Coleridge objects to the view that the best part of language is derived from the objects with which the rustic hourly communicates. First, communication with an object implies reflection on it, and the richness of vocabulary arises from such reflection, now the rural conditions of life do not require any reflection, hence the vocabulary of the rustics is poor. They can express only the barest facts of nature, and not the ideas and thoughts – universal laws – which result from reflection on such facts. Secondly, the best part of man’s language does not result merely from communication with nature, but from education, from the mind’s dwelling on noble thoughts and ideals of the master minds o humanity. Whatever noble and poetic phrases, words and arrangement of words, the rustics use, are derived not from nature, but from repeated listening to The Bible and to the sermons of noble and inspired preachers.

●       Poetic Diction:

          Coming then to detailed consideration of words worth’s theory of poetic diction he takes up his statements, one by one; and demonstrates that his views are not justified. Words worth asserts that the language of poetry is, “a selection of the real language of men or the very language of men, and that there was no essential difference between the language of prose and that of poetry”, Coleridge, retorts that, ‘every man’s language’, “varies according to the extent of his knowledge, the activity of his faculties and the depth or quickness of his feelings. “Every man’s language has, first its individual peculiarities, secondly, the properties common to the class to which he belongs, and thirdly, words and phrases of universal use. “No two men of the same class or of different classes speak alike, although both use words and phrases common to them all, because in the one case their natures are different, and in the one case their nature are different, and in the other their classes are different.” This applies as much to the language of rustics to that of townsmen in both cases. The language varies form person to person, class to class, and place to place.

          Wordsworth and Coleridge in their lyrical Ballads discussed the following points: People and supernatural characters or romantics, imaginations, poetic truth and man’s inner world and human interest. According to Coleridge there are two main points of poetry:

(1)     The power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature.

(2)     The power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of imagination.

          Words worth tried to focus on the charms of novelty to things of everyday directing the human mind to the loveliness and wonders of the world.  According to Coleridge there are two types of poetry:

(1)     Nature Poetry

(2)     Supernatural Poetry

          In which the incidents and people were to be the part of supernatural. Coleridge says that subject of the poem, people and other objects should be chosen from ordinary life. It should be taken from the rustic and the village life. In lyrical: ballads it was written that the persons and characters which are supernatural or at least romantic. Thus our interest should transfer from our inward nature to human interest. According to Coleridge the language of poetry should be the language of real life. A poem contains the same elements as a prose composition. It is distinguished from prose by meter or rhyme. In this sense it is the lowest sense of poem. A particular type of pleasure is derived from the sounds and all compositions that have this charm may be entitled as a poem. A difference of object and content also distinguishes them. The immediate purpose may be the communication of truth either absolute truth as science or facts experienced and recorded as in history. Pleasure and that of the highest and the most permanent kind may result from the allayment of the end. In other words the communication of pleasure may be the immediate purpose and the truth either moral or intellectual ought to be the ultimate and. The communication of pleasure may be the immediate: object of a work not metrically composed. It is quite possible that the highest type of pleasure can be communicated by a novel then can it be called a poem? In this case the final definition is:

          “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. It is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.”

          As a result the reader should be carried forward by the pleasurable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself. 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.

          Now Coleridge talks about the pleasure that you derived from the poetry and says that the poet described in ideal perfection brings the whole soul of man into activity.

          Coleridge differs with words worth’s theory based on assumption that his words had been rightly interpreted that the proper diction for poetry in general consists all together in a language taken with due acceptations. According to words worth’s, language should be taken from the mouth of man.

          Coleridge agrees with words worth that in rustic life human soul can prosper fully but he believes that every man is not likely to include by a country life. Coleridge accepts the principle of Aristotle that the poetry is essentially ideal and that it avoids all accidents and feels completely individualistic in rank and characters who represent a class. Coleridge says that a rustic language purified from all provincialism and written as per rules of grammar than there is no difference from rustic and the language of any other learned or refined man. Coleridge says that the literal knowledge of an educated rustic person will provide a very scanty / limited vocabulary. The few things and modes of action requisite for his bodily convenience that alone would be individualized whereas all the rest of nature would be expressed by a small number of confused general terms. The nature of a man’s world, where he is strongly affected by joy, grief of anger, must necessarily depend on the quality of the general truth, conceptions, and images and of the words expressing them which are already stored in the mind of a man. Words worth truly says that poetry always implies passion means all excited state of the feelings and faculty so there is an essential difference between the language of prose and of metrical composition. Thus, Coleridge in the end gives the above statement that there should be difference between the language of prose and poetry.

          At the end of his notes on Shakespeare, he has a passage, full of power and meaning, incidentally, referring to the same, thought: ‘There are three powers.’

(1)     Wit which discovers partial likeness hidden in general diversity.

(2)     Subtlety which discovers the diversity, concealed in general apparent sameness.

(3)     Profundity which discovers an essential unity under all the semblance of difference. Give a subtle man fancy and he is a wit, to a deep man imagination and he is a philosopher.

          Add again pleasurable sensibility in the interesting in morals, the impressive in form, and the harmonious in sound and you have the poet. But combine all, wit subtlety, and fancy, with profundity imagination, and moral and physical susceptibility of all pleasurable and let the object of action be man universal; and we shall have – Orash prophecy! Say, rather we have – a Shakespeare! Let’s come back to our topic that is poet and prose. Pleasure may be the immediate object of a work not metrically composed as it is in novels and romances. Worse then the more super addition of meter, with or without rhyme entitle these to the name of poems? The answer is that we cannot call them poems because in the first place metrical form would not be suitable to its language and content and, secondly, due to its length all parts would not require equal attention and therefore would not equally contribute, to the total pleasure. ‘A poem, defines Coleridge,’

          “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, it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.”

          A ‘legitimate’ poem is one which the parts mutually support and explain each other and harmonize with the known influences of metrical arrangement. We cannot give the praise of a just poem, firstly, to a series of striking lines or distiches which, absorbing enough in themselves, make a separate whole and do not harmonize with the rest of the composition and secondly, to an un-sustained composition from which the reader collects rapidly the general result, un-attracted by the component parts. Like the motion of a serpent, which the eruption 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 re-progressive movement collects the force which again carries him onward. In the long poem all the parts cannot be equally gratifying. Therefore Coleridge says,

          “A poem of any length neither can be nor ought to be, all poetry size does not decide the quality. It doesn't determine prose or poem too.”

●       Conclusion:

          To conclude, we may say in his own words, he endeavored ‘to establish the principles of writing rather than to furnish rules about how to pass judgment on, what had been written by others.’

          Thus, Coleridge is the first English critic who based his literary criticism on philosophical principles. While a critic before him has been content to turn a poem inside out and to discourse on its merits and deaneries; Coleridge busied himself with the basic question of, ‘how it came to be there at all.’ He was more interested in the creative process that made it, what it was, then in the finished product.