Enduring Coleridge: ‘The functions of comparison, judgement, and interpretation’ Alison Helen Cardinale A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University June 2016. © Copyright by Alison Helen Cardinale 2016 All Rights Reserved. 1 This thesis is completely my own original work. – Alison Cardinale 65,500 words. 2 Acknowledgements Thank you to my supervisor, Prof. Will Christie, for friendly conversation and for the kindness of an inquiring spirit. I acknowledge the generosity of your enduring the writing of my thesis with such unswerving geniality. I acknowledge my grandmother, Coraline Milne, who bequeathed me her literary passions. 3 Abstract My thesis, ‘Enduring Coleridge’, is a dialogic inquiry into poetic form in the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge that admits the non-semantic, even irrational, quality of Coleridge’s poetry to identify a dramatic juxtaposition of voices in an authentically Romantic critical methodology. My thesis considers Coleridge’s poetry and philosophical writing as an organic whole, sharing the same preoccupations and the same rhetorical and imaginative techniques, in order to recover and characterise an informing experience of poetic rapture involving intimations of divinity. It is vital to return to Coleridge to articulate a theory of poetry in an age in which ways of knowing about ourselves and the world have been claimed by philosophers in the field of neuroscience, whose extreme physicalism represents a developed version of the reductive empiricism emerging in Coleridge’s time. This thesis will attempt to unite different epistemic models of understanding to recover, through Coleridge’s own writings, a broader cosmology akin to that envisioned by Plato and the German Idealists who exerted such a powerful influence on his work. My focus is on Coleridge’s program for the methodical cultivation of the mental powers through the exercise of the active contemplation of nature as creation. Dissatisfied with the editing of the ‘Treatise on Method’ in the Encyclopedia Metropolitana, published in January 1818, Coleridge reworked his material for what he dubbed a rifacciamento of the 1809-10 serial publication of The Friend. The concept of the friend as reader, collaborator, and gentle auditor is central to Coleridge’s work and life. As readers, we are envisaged as retiring to our study with Coleridge, who aims to converse with us across time in a manner that enlarges our network of friends to include thinkers and theorists from Plato to A. W. Schlegel and poets from Shakespeare and Milton to William Wordsworth. It is my contention that, in this endearing enterprise, Coleridge has succeeded. In the four decades following the publication of 4 Barbara E. Rooke’s edition of The Friend, Coleridge’s posthumous scholarly network has expanded and crossed disciplines that were once discrete fields of academic endeavour. The notion of friendship is central to the study of Coleridge, so it is worth reflecting on formative personal experiences when drawing conclusions about the significance of the title of The Friend. Accordingly, I proceed in this inquiry cognisant of Coleridge’s life experiences, from the trial and banishment of the social reformer William Frend in the early 1790s through to Coleridge’s historic entanglement with the Wordsworths as the decade drew to a close. Strict historicism, however, needs to be complemented by due consideration of the imaginative life of Coleridge as a self- conceived writer of far-reaching educative influence. To gauge Coleridge’s success in reaching his goals for The Friend, we need to shift the focus of inquiry from the politics of subscription to a consideration of his ‘Essays on the Principles of Method’ in the second, 1818 edition. These essays, I argue, represent Coleridge’s attempt to reconfigure education through intellectual sociability and to guide readers of his early poetry. 5 Contents Preface......................................................................................................9 HONOURING THE PRINCIPLES OF COLERIDGEAN METHOD The substantial act of writing and ‘the self-unravelling clue’ Chapter 1................................................................................................32 DESIGNATION Progressive singularity Method as ‘progressive transition’ Chapter 2................................................................................................65 THE TINY SWERVE Coleridge’s ‘lene clinamen’ Chapter 3................................................................................................79 THE CARNIVAL OF THE MOON Analogues of Divine grace PART I: CONTEXTS, STRANGE AND FAMILIAR ......................80 PART II: STRANGE AND FAMILIAR MOONS.............................94 Chapter 4..............................................................................................108 THE ART OF METHOD The assumption of intention, the correlative end to this initiative ‘Unity in multeity’ 6 Contents (continued) Chapter 5..............................................................................................136 MADNESS IN THE METHOD Electric currents and gothic undercurrents: generating the persona of the invalid as a form of Romantic self-exploration Essay VII on ‘electricity and magnetism’ – the law of polarity Chapter 6 .............................................................................................167 ‘HYBLEAN MURMURS OF POETIC THOUGHT’ Essay IV on ‘method in the fragments’ – Coleridge conversing in the role of soulful teacher, mindful friend Chapter 7..............................................................................................203 CONCLUSION: ENDURING COLERIDGE ‘Education worth the name’ (with ‘Literary Amusements Interspersed’) BIBLIOGRAPHY ...............................................................................224 7 The text for all quotations from Coleridge’s poetry is from The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume XVI, Part I, Poems (Reading Text), ed. J. C. C. Mays, Bollingen Series LXXV (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 8 Preface Honouring the principles of Coleridgean method: the substantial act of writing and ‘the self-unravelling clue’ My inquiry into the principles of Coleridgean method is framed to meet the challenges of contemporary scholarship, conducted in an age in which the ways of knowing about ourselves and the world have been claimed by philosophers in the field of neuroscience, whose extreme physicalism and scientific modelling of the brain makes the empiricist reductiveness emerging in the nineteenth century appear positively soulful. My critical methodology takes seriously the emerging transitions of our own age that Gaston Bachelard, working across the disciplines of poetics and the philosophy of science, construes as instances of ‘epistemological rupture’.1 Coleridge’s enduring legacy may yet prove to be a way into a more humane future, made so through reconnecting with the literary and philosophical principles he held dear as crucial for the education of both the soul and the mind. The methodological principle articulated in the subtitle of my Preface, ‘the self- unravelling clue’, points to ways to begin developing a theoretical framework for a discussion of ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’, ‘Frost at Midnight', and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. In relation to a strand of critical methodology developed in response to the two conversation poems in this group, Kelvin Everest comments that: The conversation poems have most often been read in a context supplied by Coleridge’s own later writings, critical and philosophical, that bear on his Christian account of the pervasive unity that he conceived to inform experience. The best commentaries on ‘This Lime-Tree Bower’ and ‘Frost at Midnight’ have employed a critical framework derived from Coleridge’s later thought; usually, in fact, the endeavour has been to illustrate that thought by the reference to the way in which the earlier poetry works.2 1 Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 41, 116. 2 Kelvin Everest, Coleridge’s Secret Ministry: The Context of the Conversation Poems 1795-1798 (Sussex: The Harvester Press, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979), 258. 9 A footnote to this passage identifies leading exponents of this critical tradition as R.A. Durr, Richard Haven, R.H. Fogle, R.C. Wendling, George Gilpin and M. G. Sundell. Durr was writing about ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ in 1959; the work by Fogle cited (The Idea of Coleridge’s Criticism) appeared in 1962; Richard Haven identified ‘patterns of consciousness’ in Coleridge’s work in 1969 and Gilpin and Sundell speculated on the ‘spiral of poetic thought’ in Coleridge’s works in 1972. Everest’s own inquiry into ‘Coleridge’s secret ministry’ appeared in 1979, so criticism in the two decades prior to this quite distinct inquiry receives due attention in his survey of the literature. Since then, however, four decades of fast-moving currents in the science of the mind have swept criticism along to a different vantage point from that available in the period from 1959-1972. Though my inquiry proceeds from that new position, it is continuous with the critical tradition saluted as ‘valuable’ by Everest, retaining, as it does, an indispensable sense of the relation between ‘the way in which the early poetry works’ and ‘Coleridge’s later thought’. The title of my first chapter, ‘Designation’, indicates the need to distinguish between