Poems of Coleridge | Page 6

of his
judgments in regard to his own work, and to the work of his friends; the
curious bias which a feeling or an idea, affection or a philosophical
theory, could give to his mind. His admiration for Southey, his
consideration for Sotheby, perhaps in a less degree his unconquerable
esteem for Bowles, together with something very like adulation of
Wordsworth, are all instances of a certain loss of the sense of
proportion. He has left us no penetrating criticisms of Byron, of Shelley,
or of Keats; and in a very interesting letter about Blake, written in 1818,
he is unable to take the poems merely as poems, and chooses among
them with a scrupulous care "not for the want of innocence in the poem,
but from the too probable want of it in many readers."
Lamb, concerned only with individual things, looks straight at them,
not through them, seeing them implacably. His notes to the selections
from the Elizabethan dramatists are the surest criticisms that we have in
English; they go to the roots. Coleridge's critical power was wholly
exercised upon elements and first principles; Lamb showed an
infinitely keener sense of detail, of the parts of the whole. Lamb was
unerring on definite points, and could lay his finger on flaws in
Coleridge's work that were invisible to Coleridge; who, however, was
unerring in his broad distinctions, in the philosophy of his art.
"The ultimate end of criticism," said Coleridge, "is much more to

establish the principles of writing than to furnish rules how to pass
judgment on what has been written by others." And for this task he had
an incomparable foundation: imagination, insight, logic, learning,
almost every critical quality united in one; and he was a poet who
allowed himself to be a critic. Those pages of the "Biographia
Literaria," in which he defines and distinguishes between imagination
and fancy, the researches into the abstract entities of poetry in the
course of an examination of Wordsworth's theories and of the popular
objections to them, all that we have of the lectures on Shakespeare, into
which he put an illuminating idolatry, together with notes and jottings
preserved in the "Table-Talk," "Anima Poetæ," the "Literary Remains,"
and on the margins of countless books, contain the most fundamental
criticism of literature that has ever been attempted, fragmentary as the
attempt remains. "There is not a man in England," said Coleridge, with
truth, "whose thoughts, images, words, and erudition have been
published in larger quantities than mine; though I must admit, not by_,
nor _for, myself." He claimed, and rightly, as his invention, a "science
of reasoning and judging concerning the productions of literature, the
characters and measures of public men, and the events of nations, by a
systematic subsumption of them, under principles deduced from the
nature of man," which, as he says, was unknown before the year 1795.
He is the one philosophical critic who is also a poet, and thus he is the
one critic who instinctively knows his way through all the intricacies of
the creative mind.
Most of his best criticism circles around Shakespeare; and he took
Shakespeare almost frankly in the place of Nature, or of poetry. He
affirms, "Shakespeare knew the human mind, and its most minute and
intimate workings, and he never introduces a word, or a thought, in
vain or out of place." This granted (and to Coleridge it is essential that
it should be granted, for in less than the infinite he cannot find space in
which to use his wings freely) he has only to choose and define, to
discover and to illuminate. In the "myriad-minded man," in his
"oceanic mind," he finds all the material that he needs for the making
of a complete aesthetics. Nothing with Coleridge ever came to
completion; but we have only to turn over the pages about Shakespeare,
to come upon fragments worth more than anyone else's finished work. I

find the whole secret of Shakespeare's way of writing in these
sentences: "Shakespeare's intellectual action is wholly unlike that of
Ben Jonson or Beaumont and Fletcher. The latter see the totality of a
sentence or passage, and then project it entire. Shakespeare goes on
creating, and evolving B out of A, and C out of B, and so on, just as a
serpent moves, which makes a fulcrum of its own body, and seems
forever twisting and untwisting its own strength. "And here are a few
axioms: 'The grandest efforts of poetry are where the imagination is
called forth, not to produce a distinct form, but a strong working of the
mind'; or, in other words, "The power of poetry is, by a single word
perhaps, to instill that energy into the mind which compels the
imagination to produce the picture." "Poetry is the identity