Teacher’s Notes About Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria

Coleridge affirms that during the years when he and Wordsworth were neighbours they often discussed about poetry. They agreed that the two cardinal points of poetry were:

1. its power of exciting the sympathy of the reader
2. its power of giving the interest of novelty

The first power could be obtained by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, the second by the modifying colours of imagination.

There also came into their minds the idea of composing two kinds of poems:

a)     poems where the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural

b)     poems where subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life

The first kind of poems should describe events which were supernatural as if they were real, the second kind should describe ordinary things and, by the modifying colours of the Imagination (“inward I”) present them in an unusual aspect.

These ideas were basic for the production of Lyrical Ballads where Coleridge’s task was oriented towards people and characters supernatural, while Wordsworth’s was to give the charm of novelty to things of everyday.

To do this Coleridge was to a elicit a semblance of truth by “a willing suspension of disbelief” and Wordsworth had to awake the mind’s attention to “the lethargy of custom” and direct it to the wonders of the world. These efforts gave the poets the possibility to convince the reader, to make him share the poet’s feelings because supernatural events really become real and ordinary things become new. All that may only happen to people who can see and feel.

The poet is then described as he who brings the whole soul of man in whole activity and he diffuses a tone, a spirit of unity, that blends and fuses each into each by the synthetic power of Imagination.

Imagination is put into action by the will and understanding and reveals itself in the balance or “reconcilement of opposite or discordant quality”.

Coleridge’s Idea of the Work of Art

A work of art was not to be thought of an object consciously contrived, like a mechanical device, with the end in view of gratifying the settled taste of the public, but as an autonomous living entity, coming into being and growing and developing as a tree does, by the laws of its own nature. If it gives pleasure, as a tree may indeed give pleasure and of the highest kind, this is not its defining purpose, which is, rather simply to come into being, to fulfil, as it were  the demands of its own nature. Its author does, to be sure, in some sense bring it into being, but in doing so, his conscious intention and intellect play but a secondary part.

This conception of the process of literary creation as being “organic rather than mechanical” was preeminently exemplified for the romantic by Shakespeare.

Coleridge maintains that the goal of poetry is not education. The ultimate goal is pleasure which can come from beauty.

The poet must produce beauty to create pleasure. This beauty is not expernal beauty, it is pertinent to the wholeness of poetry. Biographia Literaria’s best chapters are those in which Coleridge discusses the Wordsworthian theory of poetry and the seminal principle of the creative process, mainly through his celebrated distinction between Fancy and Imagination.

Imagination is, in Coleridge’s view, the truly creative principle. In Coleridge Imagination becomes the name of the faculty capable of creating images and ordering them into a new unity. Fancy, on the other hand, refers to a sort of mechanical production of dead images, or to the quality of dreams. Imagination was for the poet, Fancy for the common man. While Imagination s God-like, Fancy is human, Imagination refers to the reason’s ability to master the chaotic world of Fancy.