What allows the poet to communicate general and essential truths is the unifying power of imagination, which sees the connections between particular and general, concrete and abstract, individual and representative. But he also gave us a … Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Hence all nature is an expression of the selfconscious will or intelligence of God: “We begin with the I KNOW MYSELF, in order to end with the absolute I AM. Reason is the supreme faculty or power which embraces the senses, the understanding, and the imagination. An important element in this elevation of imagination’s role was the distinction between this higher faculty and mere fancy. The understanding, according to Coleridge, “concerns itself exclusively with the quantities, qualities, and relations of particulars in time and space” (LS, 59). Coleridge also appears to have been the first person to use the word ‘bipolar’, in 1810 – which is appropriate, since some recent critics and commentators believe the poet may have suffered from bipolar disorder. We might simply regard Coleridge’s passage as an index of a reaction against the primacy of Enlightenment reason, and its displacement by imagination as the higher and more creative power. Nonetheless, Coleridge appears to view reason as the supreme faculty, one which contains all the others: “The REASON, (not the abstract reason, not the reason as the mere organ of science . After his father died in 1781, Coleridge attended Christ's Hospital School in London, where he met lifelong friend Charles Lamb. The understanding, then, gives us a piecemeal knowledge of what Kant called the “phenomenal” world, the world of our sense-experience in space and time. This article from the Coleridge Bulletin goes into more detail about Coleridge’s attitudes to the slave trade: I don’t think he ever came to oppose its abolition, but he certainly lost enthusiasm for the cause later in life: http://www.friendsofcoleridge.com/MembersOnly/CB27/CB27%20Sonoi.pdf. Coleridge was born in Ottery St Mary, Devon. So, why shouldn't there be a quiz on it? Look forward to reading more of your posts. But this use of the term “imagination” seems to be generic: Coleridge uses it synonymously with what he calls “philosophic consciousness” or the use of the higher and intuitive power of reason which alone can view the concepts of the understanding as an essentially symbolic expression of a higher unity (BL, I, 241–242). In the passage above, Coleridge reproduces with his own modifications a distinction between fancy and imagination made by several German thinkers such as Tetens, Kant, Ernst Platner, and Schelling. Here, Coleridge neatly recounts the history of his own attitudes toward the Revolution. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wasborn on October 21, 1772, in Devonshire, England. As well as being an influential poet, Coleridge was also a gifted critic. Find the insight about a famous story by Washington Irving on.. Factsofworld.com is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.Com, 10 Facts about Shakespeare’s Play Romeo and Juliet. I love The Rime of the Ancient Mariner! What is perhaps most interesting about Coleridge’s perspective is the way he presents “eternal” and vital scripture as opposed to modern “mechanical” or “dead” philosophies in terms of the faculties of the human mind. This is not the same conception of reason as was espoused by the classical philosophers, or by Christian theologians, who viewed it as a faculty through which we could acquire a universalizing knowledge that might contextualize in both moral and intellectual terms the information we received through our senses. In 1798 the two men collaborated on a joint volume of poetry entitled Lyrical Ballads. . His father, a vicar of a parish and master of a grammar school, married twice and had fourteen children. What Coleridge designates as the primary imagination is roughly equivalent to what Kant views as the reproductive imagination: it operates in our normal perception, combining the various data received through the senses into a unifying image, which can then be conceptualized by the understanding. Coleridge and his wife Sara lived close to Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy from 1796; in 1800 they all moved to the Lake District, which proved to be a rich source of poetic inspiration. Coleridge does talk in the Biographia of a “philosophic imagination,” which he also calls “the sacred power of self-intuition” (BL, I, 241). I have wanted to read Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist for years. He hears freedom’s “loud lament,” and addresses France now in less flattering terms: “O France, that mockest Heaven, adulterous, blind, / And patriot only in pernicious toils! And this, he says, is no more to be found in the language of rustics than in that of any other class. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. Coleridge saw most of these philosophies as reducing nature to a dead and lifeless entity, subject merely to mechanical laws (BL, I, 129 n. 1). (BL, II, 16–17). And Eloquence shall fearless glow. I really enjoyed the facts about Coleridge. (Right: statue of the Ancient Mariner at Watchet, Somerset. Thanks for the comment, too – as ever, much appreciated. No fetter vile the mind shall know, In the same year he devised a plan with the poet Robert Southey to establish a society of equals ruled by all, a “pantisocracy,” in Pennsylvania, a plan that rapidly dissolved. ~ Ayanna Nahmias, Thanks Ayanna, much appreciated! The original title of the work is The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere. As seen earlier, reason for Coleridge is a comprehensive faculty, whose unifying disposition far exceeds the fragmentary and cumulative operations of the mere understanding. The Biographia is a highly eclectic mixture of literary autobiography, literary theory, philosophical speculation, and polemic. Born in 1795, John Keats was an English Romantic poet and author of three poems considered to be... Born in 1819 into a once-prominent New York family, Herman Melville was He became dependent on laudanum, a form of opium. The imperative and oracular form of the inspired Scripture is the form of reason itself in all things purely rational and moral” (LS, 18). He was also a literary critic, philosopher and theologian. His studies of German philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Jakob Boehme, and G. E. Lessing influenced his writings after 1800. As Coleridge sees it, “philosophy is neither a science of the reason or understanding only, nor merely a science of morals, but the science of BEING altogether”: it must combine the realms of the speculative and the practical (or moral). His Lyrical Ballads, written with William Wordsworth, heralded the English Romantic movement, and his Biographia Literaria (1817) is the most significant work of general literary criticism produced in the English Romantic Much of his thinking on philosophical issues is contained in his Logic.