Poems of Coleridge | Page 7

of all other
knowledges," "the blossom and fragrance of all human knowledge,
human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language." "Verse is in
itself a music, and the natural symbol of that union of passion with
thought and pleasure, which constitutes the essence of all poetry "; "a
more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order," as he
has elsewhere defined it. And, in one of his spoken counsels, he says: "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."
Unlike most creative critics, or most critics who were creative artists in
another medium, Coleridge, when he was writing criticism, wrote it
wholly for its own sake, almost as if it were a science. His prose is
rarely of the finest quality as prose writing. Here and there he can strike
out a phrase at red-heat, as when he christens Shakespeare "the one
Proteus of the fire and flood"; or he can elaborate subtly, as when he
notes the judgment of Shakespeare, observable in every scene of the
"Tempest," "still preparing, still inviting, and still gratifying, like a
finished piece of music"; or he can strike us with the wit of the pure
intellect, as when he condemns certain work for being "as trivial in
thought and yet enigmatic in expression, as if Echo and the Sphinx had
laid their heads together to construct it." But for the most part it is a
kind of thinking aloud, and the form is wholly lost in the pursuit of
ideas. With his love for the absolute, why is it that he does not seek
after an absolute in words considered as style, as well as in words

considered as the expression of thought? In his finest verse Coleridge
has the finest style perhaps in English; but his prose is never quite
reduced to order from its tumultuous amplitude or its snake-like
involution. Is it that he values it only as a medium, not as an art? His art
is verse, and this he dreads, because of its too mortal closeness to his
heart; the prose is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
The poetry of Coleridge, though it is closely interwoven with the
circumstances of his life, is rarely made directly out of those
circumstances. To some extent this is no doubt explained by a fact to
which he often refers in his letters, and which, in his own opinion,
hindered him not only from writing about himself in verse, but from
writing verse at all. "As to myself," he writes in 1802, "all my poetic
genius ... is gone," and he attributes it "to my long and exceedingly
severe metaphysical investigations, and these partly to ill-health, and
partly to private afflictions which rendered any subjects, immediately
connected with feeling, a source of pain and disquiet to me." In 1818 he
writes: "Poetry is out of the question. The attempt would only hurry me
into that sphere of acute feelings from which abstruse research, the
mother of self-oblivion, presents an asylum." But theory worked with a
natural tendency in keeping him for the most part away from any
attempt to put his personal emotions into verse. "A sound promise of
genius," he considered, "is the choice of subjects very remote from the
private interests and circumstances of the writer himself." With only a
few exceptions, the wholly personal poems, those actually written
under a shock of emotion, are vague, generalized, turned into a kind of
literature. The success of such a poem as the almost distressingly
personal "Ode on Dejection" comes from the fact that Coleridge has
been able to project his personal feeling into an outward image, which
becomes to him the type of dejection; he can look at it as at one of his
dreams which become things; he can sympathize with it as he could
never sympathize with his own undeserving self. And thus one stanza,
perhaps the finest as poetry, becomes the biography of his soul:
"There was a time when, though my path was rough,
This joy within
me dallied with distress,
And all misfortunes were but as the stuff

Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness:
For hope grew round

me, like the twining vine,
And fruits, and foliage, not my own,
seemed mine
But now afflictions bow me down to earth:
Nor care I
that they rob me of my mirth;
But oh! each visitation
Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,

My shaping spirit of Imagination.
For not to think of what I needs
must feel,
But to be still and patient all I can,
And haply by abstruse
research to steal
From my own nature all the natural man--
This
was my sole resource, my only plan:
Till that which suits a part