Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (born October 21, 1772, Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, England—died July 25, 1834, Highgate, near London) was an English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher. 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 period.

Coleridge made a name for himself both as a political radical and as an important young poet; along with his friends Robert Southey and William Wordsworth, he became one of the most important writers in England. Collaborating with Wordsworth on the revolutionary Lyrical Ballads of 1798. 

Coleridge helped to inaugurate the Romantic era in England; as Wordsworth explained it in the 1802 preface to the third edition of the work, the idea of poetry underlying Lyrical Ballads turned the established conventions of poetry upside down: Privileging natural speech over poetic ornament, simply stated themes over elaborate symbolism, emotion over abstract thought, and the experience of natural beauty over urban sophistication, the book paved the way for two generations of poets, and stands as one of the milestones of European literature.

Coleridge's theory of imagination modifies the traditional 'particularly the nen-classical view of art as a mere imitation. Since, it is the product of imagination which imposes its own reflections on whatever it perceives, art is as much a self-revelation as an imitation, perhaps more than one than the other. 

Art is the union of the soul with the external world or Dature. It represents nature as thought and thought as nature, it is at once more and less than what it imitates. It is more because it confuses the artist 'soul into it, it is less because it ignores what is alien to the soul. It is therefore an imitation of reality in its outward manifestation. it reveals rather what lies deep within it the nature naturans. which pre-supposes a bond nature in the higher sense and the soul of man. On a purely artistic level, it is not just a copy of the original. 

The imagination that meddles some faculty of the soul would not let it be the same but must add something of its own. What is dark, it illuminates and what is low, it raises or it does the reverse in either case making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. It is the reconciliation of the likeness and difference. 

Art, therefore and the poetic art in particular is the balance or reconciliation of opposite er discordant qualities of sameness with difference, of the general with the concrete, of the idea with the image, of the individual with the representative, of the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects, of a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order, of judgement ever awake and steady possession with enthusiasm and reelings profound and vehement. Poetry in the broadest sense idealises the real and realises the ideal.

Going further in his discussion of the imagination Coleridge devises it into two parts. He discusses and gives the characteristics of both then. "The imagination, then I consider either as a primary or secondary. The primary imagination, I hold to be the living power and prime agent of human perception and as a repetition af in the finite wind in the external art of creation in the infinite mind. 

The secondary imagination, I consider, as an echo of the former co-existing with the conscious will, yet will is identical with the prime kind of its agency and differing only in degree and n the mode of its operation, it dissolves, diffuses,  dissipates in order to recreate or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all evens it struggles idealite and to unity.  

As active creation is the fundamental principle of imagination, it cannot remain contented with more imitation. From the discussion of his metaphysical principles, coleridge comes down to the practice and convincing discussion of the ultimate aim of Criticism. 

The aim of criticism is to establish principles of writing and to furnish rules as to how to pass judgement on what has been written by others. A criticism of a work of art in the same spirit in which the artist produced  ought to have produced it. According to this principles, poetry being a spontaneous and creative thing, ne rules can be given from outside to guide it because a single defiant act of creative genius is enough to break down all rules Coleridge defines poetry in the broadest possible way as the excitement of emotion for the purpose of immediate pleasure through the medium of beauty.