Biographia Literaria

"The book is thrown together a bit. I suppose Leslie Stephen means like an old-fashioned hay-stack is put together with a pitchfork—you just pile up whatever hay you find hanging around. And it is a bit of a hodge-podge. It’s a great example of Coleridge not being able to finish something. If you read volume one, which is the most rebarbative of the two volumes, you find yourself, after a few hundred pages or so, in the midst of some really turgid philosophical deductions. Coleridge is trying to argue that the passive philosophies of the mind that eighteenth-century Associationist psychology typically describe are wrong. He wants the mind to be intrinsically active and creative. Passivity, inherited from an eighteenth-century philosophical tradition, is what he’s rejecting. He wants to put forward an innate, divine creativity informing not just works of art but all our perceptions. When you put it like that, it sounds straightforward, but my goodness, it becomes extremely tangled. It’s incredibly difficult for most readers, including most Coleridgeans, to fully master it. Then, when he’s in the thick of all this, he suddenly stops, and there’s a letter—notionally, a letter from one of his friends—saying, ‘I think this is going to lose your readership; I don’t think you want to do all this. People have bought this thinking it’s going to be your literary life and opinions! They don’t want to read this philosophy stuff. Anyway, I wish you well, dear Coleridge, yours forever’, and so on. And Coleridge then writes, ‘having received this letter I realised of course he was right, and I’d better drop all this’—it’s the most extraordinary moment in a book. If you look at the letters Coleridge wrote around this time, of course there was no friend: it was Coleridge. He includes it. Coleridge writing a letter to Coleridge. It’s an extraordinary moment—a stroke of the self-deprecating, self-ruining wit that characterises him. After all these shenanigans, he gives very famous definitions of imagination and fancy. Then you turn a page and begin volume two, which I think is the place to start for the modern reader—he talks about his friendship with Wordsworth, the origin of Lyrical Ballads , and he talks about Shakespeare and Milton as being kinds of poetic genius. Then there’s a long account of what’s great and not so great about Wordsworth’s poetry. By this stage, they’ve fallen out. Some of that personal scratchiness gets into the literary criticism. But they remain some of the best pages of literary criticism about Wordsworth ever. They’re wonderfully generous and perceptive about the things in Wordsworth that are great, and they’re not actually wrong about the things in Wordsworth that aren’t so great. It’s just the contrast between the beauties and the shortcomings is so stark that the defects perhaps come out sounding rougher than Coleridge intended. Yes. The very first chapters are about his education and schooling are very approachable, and you can pick up again at chapter fourteen where he talks about getting to know Mr. Wordsworth for the first time and about the imagination. He talks very beautifully and memorably about the imagination as the thing that works to balance and reconcile opposite and discordant qualities. It’s a wonderful formulation that once you have in your head, you don’t need to apply to just Coleridge and Wordsworth—it’s a wonderful idea of how the imagination works generally. The book is full of extraordinarily diverse and miscellaneous things which are, admittedly in a kind of precarious and ramshackle way, being brought together into a single thing. In that respect, perhaps it does at least gesture to the acts that it’s interested in describing."