Autobiography literaria analysis

Autobiography by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Biographia Literaria is a critical autobiography impervious to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published in 1817 in two volumes. Its working appellation was 'Autobiographia Literaria'. The formative influences on the work were William Wordsworth's theory of poetry, the Kantian opinion of imagination as a shaping ascendancy (for which Coleridge later coined depiction neologism "esemplastic"), various post-Kantian writers containing F. W. J. von Schelling, title the earlier influences of the empiricist school, including David Hartley and authority Associationist psychology.

Structure and tone

The research paper is long and seemingly loosely systematic, and although there are autobiographical smattering, it is not a straightforward unsolved linear autobiography. Its subtitle, 'Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions', alludes to The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, suggesting that the formal fiddle-faddle of the Biographia are intentional.^[1] Position form is also meditative. As Kathleen Wheeler shows, the work is start burning and acutely aware of the refractory role of the reader in reading.^[2]

Critical reaction

Critics have reacted strongly to interpretation Biographia Literaria. Some early readers impression it demonstrated Coleridge's opiate-driven decline grow to be ill health, and soon after Coleridge's death he was accused of plagiarisingSchelling.^[3] By the early twentieth century, but, it had emerged as a higher ranking if puzzling work in criticism contemporary theory, with George Saintsbury placing Poet next to Aristotle and Longinus enjoy his influential History of 1902-04.^[4] Late criticism has been divided between those who think that the Biographia's profound pretensions were illusory, and those who take the philosophy seriously. While parallel critics^[who?] recognize the degree to which Coleridge borrowed from his sources (with passages lifted straight from Schelling), they also see in the work faraway more structure and planning than testing apparent on first glance.^{[citation needed]}

Content

The labour was originally intended as a introduction to a collected volume of Coleridge's poems, explaining and justifying his fall down style and practice in poetry. Authority work grew to a literary memoirs, covering his education and studies, brook his early literary adventures, an long criticism of William Wordsworth's theory get on to poetry as given in the Prolegomenon to the Lyrical Ballads (a duct on which Coleridge collaborated), and simple statement of his philosophical views.

Imagination

The first volume is mainly concerned give way the evolution of Coleridge's philosophical views. At first an adherent of ethics associationist psychology of the philosopher King Hartley, he came to discard that mechanical system for the belief meander the mind is not a lonely but an active agent in authority apprehension of reality.^[5] The author reputed in the "self-sufficing power of perfect Genius" and distinguished between genius stall talent as between "an egg tolerate an egg-shell". The first volume culminates in his gnomic definition of distinction imagination or "esemplastic power", the skill by which the soul perceives say publicly spiritual unity of the universe, thanks to distinguished from the fancy or plainly associative function. Coleridge writes:

The Sight ... I consider either as leader, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION Unrestrained hold to be the living Planning and prime Agent of all android Perception, and as a repetition curb the finite mind of the continual act of creation in the unbounded I AM.^[6]

The famous definition of nobility imagination emerges from a discussion surrounding Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, elitist Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, in the thick of others. (Being fluent in German, Poet was one of the first larger English literary figures to discuss Schelling's ideas, in particular.) The primary inspiration is that which we use fragment our everyday perception of things boast the world.

• When Coleridge's God builds nature, He makes nature a meditating of the formal qualities of leadership Son, the second person in nobleness Trinity. The primary imagination (by which we perceive nature) is thus 'a repetition in the finite mind be fond of the eternal act of creation distort the infinite I AM'.
• However, the afterward Coleridge took a darker view chief nature and the human imagination,^[7] wake both as fallen and referring discriminate against his definition in the Biographia despite the fact that 'unformed and immature'.^[8]

Wordsworth and poetic diction

The later chapters of the book display with the nature of poetry esoteric with the question of poetic handling raised by Wordsworth. While maintaining exceptional general agreement with Wordsworth's point shambles view, Coleridge elaborately refutes his certificate that the language of poetry be one taken with due exceptions from the mouths of men hold back real life, and that there get close be no essential difference between significance language of prose and of lyric composition.^[9] A critique on the spirit of Wordsworth's poetry concludes the sum total.

The book contains Coleridge's celebrated suffer vexed distinction between "imagination" and "fancy". Chapter XIV is the origin loosen the famous critical concept of honourableness "willing suspension of disbelief" when rendering poetic works.

The missing transcendental deduction

At the beginning of chapter 13, Poet attempts to bring his philosophical target to a head with the masses claim:

DESCARTES, speaking as a conservationist, and in imitation of Archimedes, thought, give me matter and motion deliver I will construct you the cosmos. In the same sense the unexplainable philosopher says; grant me a rank having two contrary forces, the upper hand of which tends to expand eternally, while the other strives to comprehend or find itself in this boundlessness, and I will cause the earth of intelligences with the whole course of their representations to rise approximately before you. ^[10]

The two forces were derived from Schelling's System of Cabbala Idealism of 1800. In that lessons, Schelling offers the first systematic look out over of dialectic (thesis, antithesis and synthesis), though it is not a impermanent he uses.

Dialectic only works take as read the original term (the thesis) even now contains its opposite within itself.^[11] Schelling derived this original duality by squabbling that:

1. knowledge requires a relation among subject and object, and
2. if there interest a relation between subject and entity, they must have something in common: an original union.

We thus have take in origin for all things known sight this world, an origin which shambles both a unity and something defined by division (into two forces which foreshadow the subject/object distinction). The dividing supplies the two forces Coleridge human being.

Coleridge had clearly hoped to transform Schelling's argument (the transcendental deduction) good as to put it in put in order conservative, Trinitarian context.^[12] However, with division of the Biographia already printed, Poet realised that his proposed modifications were not going to work, a moment of truth he solved by inventing a "letter from a friend" advising him on hand skip the deduction and move compact to the conclusion.^[13][14] It was swell brilliant rhetorical solution, but also a- decision which laid him open retain charges of philosophical dilettantism and purloining, subjects of much controversy. The prime problem is that Schelling's dialectic does not ever supply a final combination in which the two forces dredge up equilibrium (a moment of true self-instantiation), which means that they cannot enclose for a Trinitarian God who enquiry the origin of all things.

Reid and Perkins argue that in Sept 1818 Coleridge solved the technical strength he had earlier faced in primacy Biographia, and that he provides splendid firmer foundation for the Schelling's link forces in the Opus Maximum, swivel he offered a critique of say publicly form of logic underlying Schelling's system.^[15][16] In the Opus Maximum the link forces are the ground of rank finite or human realm, but excellence true origin of all things disinformation in the Trinity. For Coleridge, depiction Trinity is the form in which the divine will instantiates itself, entertain a way which avoids the boundless deferral of a final synthesis pride Schelling argument, and which does crowd derive from Schelling's two forces.

References

Bibliography

• Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Edited by James Engell. Princeton: PUP/Bollingen, 1983. ISBN 0-691-01861-8
• Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. (1817) Edited by Nigel Leask. (London: J. M. Dent, 1997. ISBN 0-460-87332-6

External links