21/9/07 - English Literature - Coleridge and Wandering

The concept of English literature in the early nineteenth century depended on writing having a purpose in itself, needing no outside explanation or meaning.

There came two competing conceptions of the sublime, by Burke and Kant, both of which influenced Coleridge's writing. He explored the effects of wandering on the imagination. Organic form and content was key to Romantic writing at this time, of which Coleridge was a factor in its popularisation.

The thing that makes wandering of such interest to poetry is that it has no route or predetermined form. But could it have an inner form?

Burke's conception of the sublime is defined by fear and indeterminacy. Fear, he thought, was the most overriding human emotion.

"Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure."
[Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1759]

The mind feels overpowered by massive objects, causing a form of paralysis, like a rabbit in the headlights. Indeterminacy stems from human lack of comprehension, from the human search for the truth and the inability to reach it. This engenders a feeling of inadequacy.

"This matter might be pursued much further; but it is not the extent of the subject which must prescribe our bounds, for what subject does not branch out to infinity?"
[Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1759]

So the infinite is a sublime trope. The mind's inability to assert order on the world creates pain. Coleridge found this concept of the sublime odd. Burke's rhetoric was used by French speakers, evoking the sublime.

For Kant, the sublime is less important for humanity than beauty. Experiencing beauty is very human. Conversely to Burke, Kant's version of the sublime is when humans apply order to the world. For Kant, beauty involves communication; it speaks to us. There is therefore a harmony between the mind and nature. The sublime is when disharmony occurs, when things go wrong. Sublimity is not an interesting factor of nature for Kant. He disagrees with Burke that the sublime occurs because of the mind's inability to conceive of something. Kant believes that the mind reflects, while aware of failure, that failure is in a way a success. The sublime for Kant is therefore paradoxical: both pleasurable and about failure.

"Hence the feeling of the sublime is a feeling of displeasure that arises from the imagination’s inadequacy, in an aesthetic estimation of magnitude, for an estimation by reason, but is at the same time also a pleasure, aroused by the fact that this very judgement, namely, that even the greatest power of sensibility is inadequate, is [itself] in harmony with rational ideas, insofar as striving toward them is still a law for us."
[Kant, Critique of Judgement, 1790]

There is a triumph in failure.

For Coleridge wandering is connected with the sublime. It involves solitude like the sublime. There are two ways of wandering: without a purpose, and appearing to wander without a purpose. Burke's theory belongs to the first, while Kant, who realises that wandering without a purpose is the point, belongs to the second.

"And now this spell was snapt: once more
I viewed the ocean green,
And looked far forth, yet little saw
Of what had else been seen -
Like one, that on a lonesome road

Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread."
[‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ 1798, 442-51]

This passage influenced Mary Shelley and Lord Byron, among others. It signified the Gothic. Coleridge's imagery is strange: we know they are at sea, but the mariner is a solitary wanderer on a lonely road. This ideal of the image of the lonely wanderer was significant to Coleridge. He was a wanderer himself - he turned from his father's religion and became an Anglican. He felt guilty much of his life and thought of himself as isolated from God. Coleridge's attitude to France is also important. The French Revolution left everyone on edge and Coleridge was affected by paranoia under France's threat; he saw the country as a kind of Cain.

"Methinks I see his grand and noble countenance […] that look of humourous despondency fixed on his almost blank sheet of paper, and then its silent mock-piteous admission of failure struggling with the sense of the exceeding ridiculousness of the whole scheme - which broke up in a laugh: and the Ancient Mariner was written instead."
[Preface (1828), ‘The Wanderings of Cain’ (1798)]

Coleridge was beset by financial difficulties, had marital problems and became addicted to opium. But he shared his love of walking with Wordsworth. In the eighteenth century people began walking in nature as a pastime and people became more aware of their responses to nature. But Coleridge was different: his wandering was less gentile, more rugged, and he liked to compose poetry as he was walking. Wordsworth did this also. It greatly affected their styles of poetry.

"Coleridge’s manner is more full, animated, and varied; Wordsworth’s more equable, sustained, and internal. The one might be termed more dramatic, the other more lyrical. Coleridge has told me that he himself liked to compose in walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood; whereas Wordsworth always wrote (if he could) walking up and down a straight gravel-walk, or in some spot where the continuity of his verse met with no collateral interruption."
[William Hazlitt, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets,’ 1823, Norton II p.523]

Hazlitt is saying a lot about Coleridge and Wordsworth's personalities too. The physical world and the imagination were two branches influencing the effects of walking. Cook's travels were happening concurrently with the writing of Coleridge and Wordsworth, which demonstrates how popular exploration was in life and literature at the time.

"In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas’s Pilgrimage: ‘Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed with a wall."
[Preface, ‘Kubla Khan: A Vision,’ 1798, Norton II p. 439]

The Purchas' Pilgrimage passage created inspiration for Coleridge, with emphasis on symbolism rather than the literal. In Coleridge's visionary poems there is a leaning towards colonialism which exemplified Said's belief that the human wish to understand is always linked to the human wish to dominate.

For Kant, form determines content. He thought that beauty came not from aesthetic pleasure, but from recognition of its aesthetic form. We must treat something as beautiful in itself. Applied to poetry, it is not then the purpose of poetry to please and instruct but to express its own form for self-sufficiency. It is impossible to reduce poetry to its exterior purpose. Coleridge said that we must stop using poetry as a vehicle; one must read for reading's sake, and wander for wandering's sake. The activity is a pleasure in itself. Coleridge said that the relationship between a poem and reality is the same as the poem's influence on reality, but it is not reality's influence on the poem. This means a poem is an organic form, rather than a mechanical form in which reality would be affected by the poetry but not vice versa.

"[…] a Symbol is characterized by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part of that Unity, of which it is the representative."
[The Statesman’s Manual, 1816, Norton II, p.490]

A symbol transforms the thing that it represents, like a leaf on a tree (organic form). An allegory stands for something in an arbitrary way (mechanical). Poetry is like the leaf on the tree.

Coleridge thought that one should treat everything as a means in itself, not as a means to an end. He offers Kant's conceptions of the sublime; we offer the mean of the conception of the world, rather than the world providing the means for us. We shape our own reality. We blend the supernatural mind with nature; so the sublime is more significant than nature itself.