Coleridge! O Most Loving Soul!
Placed on this earth to love and understand
Excerpted from A Whirld of Words: A Reader's Commonplace Dictionary. Find the LINK to the Introduction and WORKS CITED below.
Coleridge
in December 1793 Coleridge enlisted in the Kings Regiment of Light Dragoons under the name of Silas Tomkyn Comberbach. It was probably in September 1795, at Bristol, that he met Wordsworth for the first time
(Wordsworth 1970) p. 274
Coleridge!
O most loving Soul!
Placed on this earth to love and understand,
And from thy presence shed the light of love
(Wordsworth 1970) p. 235
Coleridge!
O capacious Soul!
Placed on this earth to love and understand,
And from thy presence shed the light of love
(Wordsworth 2002) p. 375
I have thought
Of thee [Coleridge], thy learning, gorgeous eloquence,
And all the strength and plumage of thy youth,
Thy subtle speculations, toils abstruse
Among the schoolmen, and Platonic forms
Of wild ideal pageantry, shaped out
From things well-matched or ill, and words for things,
The self-created sustenance of a mind
Debarred from Nature's living images,
Compelled to be a life unto herself,
And unrelentingly possessed by thirst
Of greatness, love, and beauty
(Wordsworth 2002) p. 252
an Arch angel a little damaged
Charles Lamb (Holmes 1999) p. 430
except as a poet, Mr Coleridge is not original. He has stolen from a whole host of his fellow-creatures, most of them poorer than himself; and I pledge myself I am bound over to appear against him. If he stands mute, I will press him to death, under three hundred and fifty pound weight of German metaphysics
Thomas De Quincey (Lindop 1981) p. 316
if Mr. Coleridge had not been the most impressive talker of his age, he would probably have been the finest writer
(Hazlitt 1982) p. 233
Mr Coleridge is a florid poet, and an ingenious metaphysician
(Hazlitt 1991) p. 115
Coleridge – his mind was of similar cast to Plato’s
(Willey 1964) p. 29
adyta
the magic rod of fanaticism is preserved in the very adyta of human nature; and needs only the re-exciting warmth of a master hand to bud forth afresh and produce the old fruits
(Coleridge 1975) p. 109
art
art synthesizes opposites
Coleridge (Paglia 2005) p. 82
atheism
Coleridge attacked Thelwall's idea that a child should be brought up as an agnostic until it reached an age of discretion to choose between religion and atheism. 'I showed him my garden, and told him it was my botanical garden. 'How so?' said he, 'it is covered with weeds.' – 'Oh,' I replied, 'that is only because it has not yet come to its age of discretion and choice. The weeds, you see, have taken the liberty to grow, and I thought it unfair in me to prejudice the soil towards roses and strawberries.' Coleridge teased William Godwin relentlessly on the ‘pedantry of atheism’
(Holmes 1990) p. 158, 258
chaos
the proplastic waves of the microcosmic chaos
(Coleridge 1967) p. 53
contemporaneity
the limit and condition of the laws of mind
(Coleridge 1975) p. 71
dictionary
Dr Johnson – Of his celebrated dictionary I will venture to remark once for all that I should suspect the man of a morose disposition who should speak of it without respect and gratitude as a most instructive and entertaining book, and hitherto, unfortunately, an indispensable book; but I confess, that I should be surprized at hearing from a philosophic and thorough scholar any but very qualified praises of it as a dictionary
(Coleridge 1975) p. 137
dictum
every sentence found in a canonical Book, rightly interpreted, contains the dictum of an infallible Mind, – but what the right interpretation is, – or whether the very words now extant are corrupt or genuine – must be determined by the industry and understanding of fallible, and alas! more or less prejudiced theologians
(Coleridge 1967) p. 61
dreams
in our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel
(Borges 1983) p. 240
Eighteenth Century
in the earlier part of the nineteenth century the eighteenth century seemed dead – killed by Coleridge and Carlisle
(Willey 1964) p. 204
epigram
a dwarfish whole, its body brevity, and wit its soul
Coleridge (Grigson 1977) p. 137
faith
the willing suspension of disbelief
Coleridge (Marshall 1966) p. 507
genius
the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination
Coleridge (Crane 1958) p. 260
sensibility, both quick and deep, is not only a characteristic feature, but may be deemed a component part, of genius
(Coleridge 1975) p. 25
Gibbon
Coleridge dismissed Gibbon's prose style as meretricious: 'when I read a Chapter in Gibbon I seem to be looking at a luminous haze, or fog'
(Porter 1988) p. 3
idea
Coleridge says in The Statesman's Manual, 'Every idea is living, productive, partaketh of infinity, and (as Bacon has sublimely observed) containeth an endless power of semination'
Elizabeth Sewell (Tagliacozzo and White 1969) p. 125
the word ἰδÎα, in its original sense as used by Pindar, Aristophanes and in the Gospel of Matthew, represented the visual abstraction of a distant object when we see the whole without distinguishing its parts. Plato adopted it as a technical term, and as the antithesis of εἴδωλα, or sensuous images; the transient and perishable emblems, or mental words, of ideas. The ideas themselves he considered as mysterious powers, living, seminal, formative and exempt from time. In this sense the word became the property of the Platonic school; and it seldom occurs in Aristotle, without some such phrase annexed to it as according to Plato, or as Plato says
(Coleridge 1975) p. 57
ideas
death exists only because Ideas exist
Coleridge (Holmes 1990) p. 343
imagination
that synthetic and magical power which 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 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
(Coleridge 1975) p. 174
infinity
for a very long time indeed I could not reconcile personality with infinity; and my head was with Spinoza, though my whole heart remained with Paul and John
(Coleridge 1975) p. 112
Johnson, Samuel
a great writer; an original stylist; an important philosopher of travel; a founding father of the modern art of biography; a Christian moralist well-equipped to understand an increasingly secular world; a poet playwright; novelist; preacher; essayist translator; journalist; political commentator; reviewer; critic; bibliographer; historian; philologist. Born in Lichfield on 18 September 1709; his father a local bookseller. In 1706 his father bought the library of the late William Stanley, ninth Earl of Derby, which comprised almost 3000 volumes. Johnson's childhood reading was formidable – wide, and deep. Johnson's early years were uncomfortable. He was a sickly child: blind in one eye, partially deaf, and scarred by the glandular disease known as scrofula, all as a result of being put out to a wet nurse whose milk was infected with tuberculosis. The younger Johnson was what Coleridge liked to call a 'library cormorant', a rapacious creature nesting among books. Thomas Osborne paid £13,000 for the huge library of Robert and Edward Harley, the first and second Earls of Oxford. The library comprised almost 50,000 books, at least a quarter of a million pamphlets, and more than 7000 volumes of manuscripts. Osborne engaged Johnson and William Oldys, formerly Edward Harley's personal librarian, to catalogue the collection. Early in 1746 he was approached by Robert Dodsley who proposed that Johnson compile a modern, authoritative English dictionary. Boswell did not know Johnson until eight years after the Dictionary's completion
(Hitchings 2005) p. 7, 9, 12, 15, 16, 18, 48, 49, 74
knowledge
truth is correlative to being; knowledge without a correspondent reality is not knowledge
(Coleridge 1975) p. 149
library
a living world, and every book a man, absolute flesh and blood
Coleridge (Jackson 1981) p. 35
logic
to a youth led from his first boyhood to investigate the meaning of every word and the reason of its choice and position, logic presents itself as an old acquaintance under new names
(Coleridge 1975) p. 264
metaphysician
Wordsworth is a great, a true Poet – I [Coleridge] am only a kind of Metaphysician; Coleridge argues that the poet is a metaphysician who actively engages with nature, who goes out of himself, who hunts down the otherness of being. A great Poet must be, implicitè if not explicitè, a profound Metaphysician. He must have it by Tact: for all sounds, & forms of human nature he must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent Desert
(Holmes 1990) p. 286, 325
metaphysics
poor unlucky metaphysics! and what are they? A single sentence expresses the object and thereby the contents of this science. Γνῶθι σεαυτόν: et Deum quantum licet, et in Deo omnia scibis. Know thyself: and so shalt thou know God, as far as is permitted to a creature, and in God all things. – Surely, there is a strange – nay, rather a too natural – aversion in many to know themselves
(Coleridge 1975) p. 284
meter
for any poetic purposes, metre resembles (if the aptness of the simile may excuse its meanness) yeast, worthless or disagreeable by itself, but giving vivacity and spirit to the liquor with which it is proportionally combined
(Coleridge 1975) p. 208
minds
the first defense of weak minds is to recriminate
(Coleridge 1975) p. 16
moon
the moon for Coleridge is always the symbol of the imagination
(Holmes 1999) p. 250
negative capability
at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason
Coleridge (Bate 1963) p. 249
neologism
in both countries [U.S. and England], neologisms were pouring out, perhaps at a faster rate than ever before. But in most cases they were rapidly adopted on both sides of the Atlantic, so for the first time a joint language was coming into being, adding to its vocabulary at twice the speed either could have done separately. It was, indeed, a great age for new words. The Germans produced Zeitgeist and Weltanschauung, and the French romantique and libérale, the latter quickly adopted in England and given, by Byron, as the title to the newspaper he financed in 1820. But it was the Anglo-Saxons who were adding to their terms the fastest. Edmund Burke has produced colonial, financial, expenditure, representation [as in political] and diplomacy. Jeremy Bentham contributed international. Sir Walter Scott, characteristically, invented stalwart, gruesome, free lance, and red-handed; Byron, equally characteristically, bored and blasé; and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, phenomenal, pessimism and period terms, such as Elizabethan; from Thomas Macaulay, in the 1820s, came constituency
(Johnson 1991) p. 56
Pantisocracy
an experimental society, living in pastoral seclusion, sharing property, labor, and self-government equally among all its adult members, both men and women. Coleridge created the word from the Greek roots pant-isocratia, an all-equal-society; a heady cocktail of all the progressive idealism of the Romantic Age; 'The leading Idea of Pantisocracy is to make men necessarily virtuous by removing all Motives to Evil – all possible Temptations'
Coleridge (Holmes 1990) p. 62, 78
philosophy
Coleridge's thesis: the Aristotelian and the Platonic approaches represented a permanent polarity in the human intellect. 'The difference between Aristotle and Plato is that which will remain as long as we are men and there is any difference between man and man in point of opinion. Plato, with Pythagoras before him, had conceived that the phenomenon or outward appearance, all that we call thing or matter, is but as it were a language by which the invisible (that which is not the object of our senses) communicates its existence to our finite being. Aristotle, on the contrary, affirmed that all our knowledge had begun in experience, had begun through the senses, and that from the senses only we could take our notions of reality. It was the first way in which, plainly and distinctly, two opposite systems were placed before the mind of the world'
(Holmes 1999) p. 492
the great majority of men live like bats, but in twilight, and know and feel the philosophy of their age only by its reflections and refractions
Coleridge, Essays on His Own Times (Kirk 1954) frontis.
the term philosophy defines itself as an affectionate seeking after the truth; but Truth is the correlative of Being
(Coleridge 1975) p. 80
the great aim of philosophy was the largeness and generosity of mind that came from self-knowledge (for Coleridge)
(Holmes 1999) p. 493
Plato
the luminous gloom of Plato
Coleridge (Holmes 1990) p. 247
poem
not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power and claims the name of essential poetry
(Coleridge 1975) p. 12
poetic faith
willing suspension of disbelief for the moment constitutes poetic faith
(Coleridge 1975) p. 169
poetic imagination
a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am
Coleridge (Rees 1971) p. 185
the poet's Imagination – 'whose essence is passionate order'
Coleridge (Holmes 1999) p. 106
poetry
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. 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 we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination
(Coleridge 1975) p. 173
poetry gives most pleasure when only generally, and not perfectly understood
Coleridge (Holmes 1990) p. 217
during the first year that Mr Wordsworth and I were neighbors 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 colors of imagination
(Coleridge 1975) p. 168
poets
no one can leap over his Shadow; Poets leap over Death
Coleridge (Holmes 1990) p. 318
principles
as Coleridge expressed it, good works may exist without saving principles, but saving principles never exist without good works
(Willey 1964) p. 22
psychoanalytical
Coleridge coined the word to describe the richness of character he found in Shakespeare's works
(Lynch 2007) p. 255
readers
I am, & ever have been, a great reader – have read almost everything – a library-cormorant – I am deep in all out of the way books
Coleridge (Gill 2020) p. 445
[I] have read almost everything – a library-cormorant – I am deep in all out of the way books
Coleridge (Holmes 1990) p. 130
reason
the mind's eye
Coleridge (Wordsworth 1970) p. 262
rules
rules are but means to an end
(Coleridge 1975) p. 18
Shakespeare
the greatest genius that perhaps human nature has yet produced, our myriad-minded Shakespeare
(Coleridge 1975) p. 175
soul
in Greek Psyche is the common name for the soul and the butterfly
(Coleridge 1975) p. 46
truth
I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist: I care not from whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the words are audible and intelligible
(Coleridge 1975) p. 89
unconscious
the genius in the man of genius
Coleridge (Brooks and Warren 1960) p. 530
usufruct
'Greta Hall, Keswick, Cumberland, at the present time in the occupancy and usufruct-possession of S.T. Coleridge, Esq., Gentleman-poet and Philosopher in a mist'
(Holmes 1990) p. 277
Xanadu
both the fabled domain of the Tartar Emperor Kubla, and the ideal world of poetry, Coleridge was creating in his wanderings with the Wordsworths
(Holmes 1990) p. 166
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LINK to the Introduction to A Whirld of Words: A Reader's Commonplace Dictionary.
WORKS CITED
Bate, Walter Jackson (1963), John Keats (Cambridge: Harvard University Press) xvii, 732.
Borges, Jorge Luis (1983), Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: Modern Library) xxiii, 251.
Brooks, Cleanth and Warren, Robert Penn (1960), Understanding Poetry (New York: Holt) xxiv, 584.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1967), Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (Stanford University Press) 120.
--- (1975), Biographia Literaria: Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions (New York: Dutton) xxvi, 303.
Crane, Hart (1958), The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (Garden City, NY: Doubleday) xvi, 183.
Gill, Stephen (2020), William Wordsworth: A Life (2d edn.; Oxford: Oxford University Press) xviii, 657, 8 p. of pl.
Grigson, Geoffrey (1977), The Faber Book of Epigrams and Epitaphs (London: Faber) x, 291.
Hazlitt, William (1982), Selected Writings (Penguin Classics; New York: Penguin Books) 509.
--- (1991), Selected Writings (The World's Classics; New York: Oxford University Press) xlvi, 423.
Hitchings, Henry (2005), Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux) viii, 292.
Holmes, Richard (1990), Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Penguin) xvi, 409 p., [16] p. of plates.
--- (1999), Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834 (New York: Pantheon Books) 622.
Jackson, Holbrook (1981), The Anatomy of Bibliomania (New York: Avenel Books) 668.
Johnson, Paul (1991), The Birth of the Modern: World Society, 1815-1830 (New York: HarperCollins) xx, 1095.
Kirk, Russell (1954), The Conservative Mind (London: Faber and Faber) 480.
Lindop, Grevel (1981), The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (New York: Taplinger) xiv, 433.
Lynch, Jack (2007), Becoming Shakespeare: The Unlikely Afterlife that turned a Provincial Playwright into the Bard (New York: Walker) viii, 306.
Marshall, William Harvey (1966), The Major Victorian Poets: An Anthology (New York: Washington Square Press) xxix, 786.
Paglia, Camille (2005), Break, Blow, Burn (New York: Pantheon Books) xvii, 247.
Porter, Roy (1988), Gibbon: Making History (New York: St. Martin's Press) x, 187.
Rees, Joan (1971), Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, 1554-1628 A Critical Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press) xiv, 238.
Tagliacozzo, Giorgio and White, Hayden V. (1969), Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press) xxvi, 636.
Willey, Basil (1964), The English Moralists (London: Chatto and Windus) 318.
Wordsworth, William (1970), The Prelude, or, Growth of a Poet's Mind (Oxford University Press: London) xxxix, 330.
--- (2002), Selected Poetry of William Wordsworth (New York: Modern Library) xx, 760.
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