Coleridge Quotes - Yenra

1. In a work of art the universal dwells in the particular; the particular does not simply stand for the universal. 

2. The symbol joins things held apart in discursive thought. It is the vehicle of the beautiful, in that the beautiful joins multeity and unity.

3. The artist joins subject and object in an act analogous to God's creative act. Thus man reconciles himself with nature.

The work of art must grow organically from within itself. Its principles of order are finally internal and not imposed from without.

"We have imprisoned our own conceptions by the lines which we have drawn in order to exclude the conceptions of others." Biographia Literaria ,ed. 1817, i, 249.

"the compatibility of a document with the conclusions of self-evident reason, and with the laws of conscience, is a condition a priori of any evidence adequate to the proof of its having been revealed by God" a principle "clearly laid down both by Moses and St. Paul" (Literary Remains, i, 388; iii, 263, 293).

"Whenever by self-subjection to this universal light, the will of the individual, the particular will, has become a will or reason, the man is regenerate: and reason is then the spirit of the regenerated man, whereby the person is capable of a quickening intercommunion with the Divine Spirit" (Coleridge, Aids, 211).

From "Table-Talk":

"How strange and awful is the synthesis of life and death in the gusty winds and falling leaves of an autumnal day!"

"When a man mistakes his thoughts for persons and things, he is mad."

"A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket: let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection; and trust more to your imagination than to your memory."

"Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense, at all events, just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least."

"It is an art (or whatever better term our language may afford) of representing, in words, external nature and human thoughts and affections, both relatively to human affections, by the production of as much immediate pleasure in parts, as is compatible with the largest sum of pleasure in the whole."

"It is the art of communicating whatever we wish to communicate, so as both to express and produce excitement, but for the purpose of immediate pleasure; and each part is fitted to afford as much pleasure, as is compatible with the largest sum in the whole."

"Pleasurable excitement is its origin and object; pleasure is the magic circle out of which the poet must not dare to tread."

"I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose == words in their best order;--poetry == the best words in the best order."

"Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain."

"A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket: let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection; and trust more to your imagination than to your memory."

"All harmony is founded on a relation to rest--on relative rest."

"The clerisy of a nation, that is, its learned men, whether poets, or philosophers, or scholars, are these points of relative rest. There could be no order, no harmony of the whole, without them."

"In Shakespeare one sentence begets the next naturally; the meaning is all inwoven. He goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere; yet, when the creation in its outline is once perfect, then he seems to rest from his labour, and to smile upon his work, and tell himself that it is very good. You see many scenes and parts of scenes which are simply Shakespeare's disporting himself in joyous triumph and vigorous fun after a great achievement of his highest genius."

"The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault."

"How strange and awful is the synthesis of life and death in the gusty winds and falling leaves of an autumnal day!"

"How charming, how wholesome, Fielding always is! To take him up after Richardson is like emerging from a sick-room heated by stoves into an open lawn on a breezy day in May."

"This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" (1797, 1800)

"Ah! slowly sink

Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun!

Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb,

Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds!

Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves! So my friend

Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood,

Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round

On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem

Less gross than bodily; and of such hues

As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes

Spirits perceive his presence."

"Henceforth I shall know

That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure;

No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,

No waste so vacant, but may well employ

Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart

Awake to Love and Beauty!"

"My gentle-hearted Charles, to whom

No sound is dissonant which tells of Life."

"All is still,

A balmy night! and though the stars be dim,

Yet let us think upon the vernal showers

That gladden the green earth, and we shall find

A pleasure in the dimness of the stars."

"In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering through the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking for, a symbolical language for something within me that already and for ever exists, than observing anything new. Even when that latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling as if that new phenomena were the dim awaking of a forgotten or hidden truth of my inner nature. It is still interesting as a word--a symbol. It is logos the Creator, and the Evolver!" (Saturday Night, April 14, 1805). [checks as a Sunday].Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. H. J. Jackson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985.

Table Talk

[12 September 1831]: "My system, if I may venture to give it so fine a name, is the only attempt I know ever made to reduce all knowledges into harmony. It opposes no other system, but shows what was true in each; and how that which was true in the particular, in each of them became error, because it was only half the truth. I have endeavored to unite the insulated fragments of truth, and therewith to frame a perfect mirror. I show to each system that I fully understand and rightly appreciate what that system means; but then I lift up that system to a higher point of view, from which I enable it to see its former position, where it was, indeed, but under another light and with different relations--so that the fragment of truth is not only acknowledged, but explained" (597-98).

(KM: Consider in relation to Hegel's Dialectic Approach to Knowledge, Unitarianism, American Transcendentalism)

[21 July 1832]: "I cannot help regretting that Wordsworth did not first publish his thirteen books on the growth of an individual mind--superiour, as I used to think, upon the whole, to the Excursion. You may judge how I felt about them by my own poem upon the occasion. Wordworth should assume the station of a man in mental repose, one whose principles were made up, and so prepared to deliver upon authority a system of philosophy. He was to treat man as man--a subject of eye, ear, touch, and taste, in contact with external nature, and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out of the senses; then he was to describe the pastoral and other states of society, assuming something of the Juvenalian spirit as he approached the high civilization of cities and towns, and opening a melancholy picture of the present state of degeneracy and vice; thence he was to infer and reveal the proof of, and necessity for, the whole state of man and society being subject to, and illustrative of, a redemptive process in operation, showing how this idea reconciled all the anomalies, and promised future glory and restoration. Something of this sort was, I think, agreed on. It is, in substance, what I have been all my life doing in my system of philosophy" (599-600).

To William Wordworth

Composed on the Night after his Recitation of a Poem on the Growth of

an Individual Mind

And when I rose, I found myself in prayer (112).

[25 July 1832]: "The pith of my system is to make the senses out of the mind--not the mind out of the senses, as Locke did" (600).

[23 June 1834]: "You may conceive the difference in kind between the fancy and the imagination in this way--that if the check of the senses and the reason were withdrawn, the first would become delirium, and the last mania. The fancy brings together images which have no connection natural or moral, but are yoked together by the poet by means of some accidental coincidence.... The imagination modifies images, and gives unity to variety; it sees all things in one.... There is the epic imagination, the perfection of which is in Milton; and the dramatic, of which Shakespeare is the absolute master. The first gives unity by throwing back into the distance.... The dramatic imagination does not throw back, but brings close; it stamps all nature with one, and that its own, meaning, as in Lear throughout" (602-03).

[10 July 1834]: "I am dying.... I own I wish life and strength and been spared to me to complete my Philosophy. For, as God hears me, the originating, continuing, and sustaining wish and design in my hart was to exalt the glory of his name; and, which is the same thing in other words, to promote the improvement of mankind" (603).

From "Anima Poetae":

"Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood."

"A child scolding a flower in the words in which he had been himself scolded and whipped, is poetry,--passion past with pleasure."

"Nothing affects me much at the moment it happens. It either stupefies me, and I, perhaps, look at a merry-make and dance-the-hay of flies, or listen entirely to the loud click of the great clock, or I am simply indifferent, not without some sense of philosophical self-complacency. For a thing at the moment is but a thing of the moment; it must be taken up into the mind, diffuse itself through the whole multitude of shapes and thoughts, not one of which it leaves untinged, between not one of which and it some new thought is engendered. Now this is a work of time, but the body feels it quicker with me."

"Idly talk they who speak of poets as mere indulgers of fancy, imagination, superstition, etc. They are the bridlers by delight, the purifiers; they that combine all these with reason and order--the true protoplasts--Gods of Love who tame the chaos."

"The favorite object of all Oriental tales, and that which, whilst it inspired their authors in the East, still inspires their readers everywhere, is the impossibility of baffling Destiny."

"What a swarm of thoughts and feelings, endlessly minute fragments, an, as it were, representations of all preceding and embryos of all future thought, lie compact in any one moment! So, in a single drop of water, the microscope discovers what motions, what tumult, what wars, what pursuits, what stratagems, what a circle-dance of death and life, death-hunting life, and life renewed and invigorated by death! The whole world seems here in a many-meaning cypher. What if our existence was but that moment? What an unintelligible, affrightful riddle, what a chaos of limbs and trunk, tailless, headless, nothing begun and nothing ended, would it not be? And yet scarcely more than that other moment of fifty or sixty years, were that our all. Each part throughout infinite diminution adapted to some other, and yet the whole a means to nothing--ends everywhere, and yet an end nowhere."

"If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke--Ay! and what then?"

"Kubla Kahn"

"All the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast."

In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round:

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced:

Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:

And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:

And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure

Floated midway on the waves;

Where was heard the mingled measure

From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of Mount Abora.

Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,

To such a deep delight 'twould win me,

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

"Frost at Midnight"

The frost performs its secret ministry,

Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry

Came loud--and hark, again! loud as before.

The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,

Have left me to that solitude, which suits

Abstruser musings: save that at my side

My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.

'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs

And vexes meditation with its strange

And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,

This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,

With all the numberless goings on of life,

Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame

Lies on my low burnt fire, and quivers not;

Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,

Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.

Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature

Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,

Making it a companionable form,

Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit

By its own moods interprets, every where

Echo or mirror seeking of itself,

And makes a toy of Thought.

But O! how oft,

How oft, at school, with most believing mind,

Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,

To watch that fluttering stranger! and as oft

With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt

Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,

Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang

From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,

So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me

With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear

Most like articulate sounds of things to come!

So gazed I, till the soothing things I dreamt

Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!

And so I brooded all the following morn,

Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye

Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:

Save if the door half opened, and I snatched

A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,

For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,

Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,

My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,

Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,

Fill up the interspersed vacancies

And momentary pauses of the thought!

My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart

With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,

And think that thou shalt learn far other lore

And in far other scenes! For I was reared

In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,

And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.

But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze

By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags

Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,

Which image in their bulk both lake and shores

And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear

The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible

Of that eternal language, which thy God

Utters, who from eternity doth teach

Himself in all, and all things in himself.

Great universal Teacher! he shall mould

Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,

Whether the summer clothe the general earth

With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing

Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch

Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch

Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall

Heard only in the trances of the blast,

Or if the secret ministry of frost

Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison

[Addressed to Charles Lamb, of the India House, London]

Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,

This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost

Beauties and feelings, such as would have been

Most sweet to my remembrance even when age

Had dimmed mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile,

Friends, whom I never more may meet again,

On springy heath, along the hill-top edge,

Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance,

To that still roaring dell, of which I told;

The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep,

And only speckled by the mid-day sun;

Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock

Flings arching like a bridge;--that branchless ash,

Unsunned and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves

Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,

Fanned by the water-fall! and there my friends

Behold the dark green file of along lank weeds,

That all at once (a most fantastic sight!)

Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge

Of the blue clay-stone.