His Critical Works:
S.T. Coleridge is one of the greatest of poet-critic that England has produced. His main critical works are Biographia Literaria and Lectures on Shakespeare and other Poets. In gact, Biographia Literaria (1817) is a monumental work as literary aesthetics.
His Views on Imagination and Fancy:
Coleridge’s main contribution to literary criticism is his theory of imagination. He is most apt interpreter of romantic poetry in which imagination played the supreme part. In Biographia Literaria he asserts that he felt little sympathy for the writings of Pope and his followers or ‘that school of French Poetry’ which was ‘condensed and invigorated by English understanding’. He was dissatisfied with the artifice of the neo-classical school, and with the quest for ‘mere novelty – the desire of exciting wonderment at his powers in the author. The phrase “union of heart and head” strikes the keynote of Coleridge’s theory of imagination. Imagination according to Coleridge, is a faculty of the soul, which gives what it receives, and receives what it gives.
Coleridge’s final definition of imagination and fancy occurs at the close of chapter XIII of the Biographia Literaria. According to him there are primary and secondary imaginations. The primary imagination hold to be the living power and prime agent of all perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the finite. The secondary imagination is 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 idealise and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects are essentially fixed and dead. Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, nut fixities and definite. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space.
Commenting on the distinction between Fancy and Imagination he writes in the Table talk thus:
“you may conceive the difference in kind between the fancy and the Imagination in this way, that if the check of the senses and the reason were withdrawn, the first would become delirium and the last mania. “
In the following memorable passage from biographia Literaraia he gives a detailed account of aesthetic reconciliation:
“ Imagination 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 representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than unusual 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 to the pioet, to our sympathy with poetry.
In the same chapter of the Biographia lietraria, Coleridge gives a nice example of reconciliation between familiarity and novelty and the inner human spirit and the outer transcendental or supernatural. It is clear that there is no difference of kind between the primary and the secondary imagination. Both work upon the objects of sense and have the same function to perform. The difference, however, lies in degree; the primary imagination is more feeble and works unconsciously while the secondary imagination works consciously, and with all its force and power. According to him Fancy is inferior to imagination.
His Views on art:
Coleridge’ theory of imagination modifies the traditional or the neo-classical view of art. Art is the product of imagination. Hence, in all artistic creation there will be imitation but not copying. In all imitation there is ‘likeness and unlikeness, or sameness and difference’. Art creates a semblance of truth to nature. It is at once more or less than what it imitates. It is more because it infuses the artist’s soul into it, and less because it overlooks what is alien to the soul. It is therefore not an imitation of reality in its outward manifestation. It reveals rather what lies deep within it. The purpose of art is ‘immediate pleasure’. Coleridge contrasts pleasure with truth which is the object of science.
His influence of a Poem:
According to Coleridge a poem contains the same elements as a prose composition. The mode of expression in both is language or words. So the difference between them ‘must consist in a different combination of them (words) in consequence of the object will be the different object being proposed. Coleridge remarks that “a poem of any length neither can be ‘nor ought to be, all poetry” Coleridge also endeavors to define poetry. He observes that ‘poetry of the highest kind may exist without metre, and even without the contra-distinguishing objects of a poem.”
On Poet and Poetic Genius:
The poet, describes in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity. Poetry is the creation not of talent but of genius. Coleridge distinguishes between talent and genius by making the one almost identical with fancy and the other almost identical with genius. Genius like imagination is creative; and talent like fancy, merely combinatory. Genius is inborn and talent acquired.
(i) Perfect sweetness of Versification:
The sense of musical delight and the power of producing it in poetry is a gift of imagination, which can never be learnt of acquired. It consists in “the perfect sweetness of versification’ and ‘its adaptation to the subject and the power of varying the music of the words to the requirement of the thought.
(ii) Objectivity:
(iii) It manifests itself in “the choice of subjects very remote from the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself’. This proof of poetic power amply exists in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. He vividly and intensely depicts in it the passions of his characters, their psychology and action, but he himself remains aloof from the world he creates. His methods is God’s own: though present everywhere in his creation. He is nowhere visible.
(iv) Imagination:
The shaping and modifying power of imagination impart vividness and semblance of life to poetic creations. It is the dominant passion behind imagery which imparts vividity to it.
On dramatic Illusion or the “Willing suspension of Disbelief”:
Coleridge’s famous phrase “Willing suspension of disbelief” has acquired wide and universal popularity. It has had a profound impact on subsequent literary theory. This phrase indicates the nature of dramatic illusion. The last sentence sums up Coleridge’s view of how fiction, poetic or dramatic, pleases even when it is known to be fiction. The reader or the spectator knows fully well that it is a tale or a play, but in order to believe what the poet says, to have faith in his fictitious worlds, he willingly suspends his disbelief in it for the duration of his reading on its performance in the theatre. Only by doing so he can derive any pleasure from a tale or play.
Coleridge on Wordsworth:
Coleridge praises Wordsworth for his advocacy of reform in poetic diction, and for evincing the truth of passion and the dramatic propriety of the figures and metaphors in the original poets. But he highlights certain defects in Wordsworth’s conception of themes of poetry, rustic language and poetic diction.
Coleridge on Shakespeare:
Coleridge rendered singular and memorable service to Shakespearean criticism by liberating it from its old bonds. The classical critics judged dramatists by the classical standards and rules and condemned even the slightest deviation from them as monstrous. Shakespeare, the child of nature, did not follow the rules of classical drama, as laid down by Aristotle. So, in the words of Coleridge, he was derived as ‘a sort of beautiful ‘busus natural’ a delightful monster, wild, indeed, and without taste or judgment, but like the inspired idiots so much venerated in the East, uttering amid the strangest follies, the sublimest truths. His judgment of Shakespeare ‘is commensurate with his genius, nay, that his genius reveals itself in his judgment, as in its most exalted form.
Coleridge achievement as a Critic:
Coleridge is undoubtedly one of the greatest critics of England and in the history of literary criticism he ranks with Aristotle and Longinus. But his range ‘is necessarily wider’. Coleridge differs from almost all the Englilsh critics before him in his interest in theoretical criticism. For eighteenth century critics, a poem is simply there, and it is the variety or uniformity of human reaction to it that is worth discussing. With Coleridge creation is central. The aim of Coleridge as a critic is not so much analysis of a finished product but the finding out of a theoretical certainty. For Coleridge, only a theory of poetic creation matter; he analyses, not so much poems as they exist, but the creative act that makes them what they are. This interest in the “seminal principle’ of poetic creation is a very great contribution of Coleridge to English critical thought. His greatest and most significant contribution to critical theory is his conception of imagination. He is the first critic to differentiate between imagination and fancy, the first literary critic to distinguish between primary and secondary imagination. He was the first to bring about a union of philosophy, psychology and literary criticism. Another contribution of Coleridge to criticism is in the field of semantics. He has been regarded as the forerunner of the science of semantics. Coleridge taught English critics to think for themselves rather than ‘parrot those who parrotted others.’ His most remarkable contribution to literary criticism is his theory of imagination. He established that a poem is an organic whole, and that its form is determined by its content, and is essential to that content. The great American critic and short story writer, Edgar Allan Poe, was highly influenced by Coleridge’s poetry and critical theory. It is in the twentieth century that his influence has been felt to a great extent.
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