Coleridge : Samuel Taylor (1772-1834), leading English Romantic poet, author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, & one of the most profound literary theorists of his day.
... the "verbal" and the "ideational" devices play the dominant roles. Here is a second example - again from the pen of Amal Kiran: Page 274 (2) Coleridge discoursing to Charles Lamb: "S.T.C., Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was intoxicated with philosophical ideas and made of philosophical talk a poetic feast which Wordsworth and others enjoyed... But occasionally he was difficult to... Lamb was once on his way to his office when Coleridge caught him and drew him to a quiet corner in the street. He started a brilliant discourse. Lamb was charmed for five minutes, tolerant at ten, impatient at fifteen, thoroughly fidgetty after twenty and absolutely bewildered and desperate at the end of twenty-five. The biggest trouble was that Coleridge had caught him by one of his coat-buttons and... he was behind time. And there was no prospect of interrupting Coleridge and getting away. To attempt it was like trying to get a word in with the Niagara Falls in order to persuade them not to fall so much. So Lamb thought of a novel means of effecting his escape. He whisked out a pen-knife and cut off the button chaining him to Coleridge. Quietly he slipped away, leaving S.T.C. lecturing. An hour and ...
... them-selves suffused with Supernature. We then, says Coleridge, appreciate the position of the philosopher Malebranche, that we see all things in God. This actively imaginative sensing of what the active imagination of God has created is the source, whether recognised or not, of the highest poetry. In the highest poetry, according to Coleridge, the barrier between mind and matter, subject and object... 136 discovered in it. [Coleridge] attributed it to a faculty of the soul, which gives what it receives, and receives what it gives -and this act, a volitional act, of bringing to nature something which it was capable of accepting, or of voluntarily accepting from nature that which the imaginative mind was so constituted as to receive, implied for Coleridge a 'common ground' between nature... modify many others, and by a sort. of fusion to force many into one". The harmony it effects must answer to a nature of harmony within itself: that is why Coleridge hails it not only as "beauty-making" but also as itself "beautiful". Coleridge could not but think of Imagination as what Wordsworth terms it in those three lines, for actually he came to his theory of it as distinct from Fancy by the ...
... the alloy of untransmuted intellect in their work, two other poets of the time, Blake and Coleridge, miss the highest greatness they might otherwise have attained by an opposite defect, by want of the gravity and enduring substance which force of thought gives to the poetical inspiration. They are, Coleridge in his scanty best work, Blake almost always, strong in sight, but are unable to command the... that he lives, though he has also two or three others of a more human charm and grace; but here Coleridge shows within narrow limits a superlative power and brings in a new element and opens a new field in the realms of poetic vision. Blake lives ordinarily far up in this middle world of which Coleridge only catches some glimpses or at most stands occasionally just over its border. Blake's seeing... a thing seen indeed and objectively real, but abnormal; but it is only when supernature becomes normal to the inner experience that it can be turned into material of the very greatest poetry. Coleridge more than any of his great contemporaries missed his poetic crown; he has only found and left to us three or four scattered jewels of a strange and singular beauty. The rest of his work is a failure ...
... symbolism building up a mystical truth in a magical space-time. To quote Kathleen Raine on Coleridge: "He platonized even in his dreams - if Kubla Khan was entirely a dream; for the symbolism of the Neoplatonists is central to the poem. Nor is this surprising, for from his letters we know that Coleridge had been reading their works shortly before it was written. There is Plotinus' sea, or lake... already hinted objectively by "that deep romantic chasm". And within the abyss he catches the rhythm of the Divine Spirit's height which is connected with that recess: the height is called "A bora" by Coleridge through the vague recollection of a Miltonic phrase which also shows Coleridge's "Abora" and his "paradise" reflecting each other: Nor where Abassin Kings their issue guard, Mount Amora... the help of such an instrument than if it were left to a collocation by geography, both the singer and the sung height Amara being understood to belong to Abyssinia. The Abyssinian maid whom Coleridge sets forth as thus joined in music to an unknown altitude is what the ancients named the Muse; she is a Romantic version of the Goddess of Song, a version in which the strange is merged with the beautiful ...
... emotional life and Coleridge had become just a splendid memory, the poet of The Prelude and the simple yet profound lyrics and the beautifully contem- ___________________________ really understood him, "not even Coleridge", because the latter was "not happy enough"? However, we are not here concerned with this or any other reading: we are concerned with the identification which Coleridge, taking the... help drying up, especially as he was also altogether out of touch with the only other human being of his circle who could sustain both his heart and his imagination in the paths of poetry — Coleridge. Coleridge above anyone else nourished Wordsworth's philosophic intellect and made it poetically creative, just as Wordsworth in his turn gave Coleridge's unstable and erratic genius strength and staying... of her agree with what we know of Dorothy's temperament and of his relation with her. At least the poem, A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal, that most Wordsworthians take to belong to the "Lucy" series, Coleridge terms "a most sublime epitaph which, in all likelihood, reflected some gloomy moment when the poet had fancied the time his sister might die".* * Sri Aurobindo has read a purely spiritual ...
... Lamb was once on his way to his office when Coleridge caught him and drew him to a quiet corner in the street. He started a brilliant discourse. Lamb was charmed for five minutes, tolerant at ten, impatient at fifteen, thoroughly fidgetty after twenty and absolutely bewildered and desperate at the end of twenty-five. The biggest trouble was that Coleridge had caught him by one of his coat-buttons and... he was behind time. And there was no prospect of interrupting Coleridge and getting away. To attempt it was like trying to get a word in with the Niagara Falls in order to persuade them not to fall so much. So Lamb thought of a novel means of effecting his escape. He whisked out a pen-knife and cut off the button chaining him to Coleridge. Quietly he slipped away, leaving S.T.C. lecturing. An hour and... going home for lunch. There, at the quiet corner in the street, Coleridge was still standing, his eye rolling at the sky, his hand grasping the button, his lips spouting his poetic philosophy. Lamb went up to him and stood where he had been 90 minutes earlier and gently tapped his friend on the shoulder. Somehow the trick worked. Coleridge came out of his splendid soliloquy, smiled, looked at the button ...
... things the Wordsworthian mood searches for a deep chord of living. And this chord, a music of time coming from a silence of eternity, makes for a persistent happiness. Didn't Wordsworth say, "Even Coleridge didn't understand me, Page 170 for he was not happy enough"? As you are steeped in Wordsworth's poetry it is no mis-step to move from him to you. But there seems to be a difference... waters of Babylon I sat down and wept.' I like your young friend's piece on Kubla Khan, and it Page 175 may well be that she has indeed settled the date of the poem. I can't see Coleridge as likely to be accurate about dates. He may well have read Wordsworth's letter. The thing about poetic images and metaphors and symbols is not that it is either from this source or from that... all is not so dark and hopeless as you see and feel at present. Competent and enlightening reviews still meet us from its columns. 1 remember two long ones treating of Dorothy Wordsworth and Sarah Coleridge. Certainly such things don't excuse cleverly nasty sneers at a noble venture like yours. In the old days they would have been impossible. All the same they have served a purpose they could have never ...
... alive in him this feeling: his friend Coleridge and his own sister Dorothy. The mind of Coleridge, at once soaring and systematic, quicksilvery and mountainous, sensitive and poised, was a great help and so too was Dorothy's intense happy Nature-insight and highly imagina-tive human sympathy. An unfortunate series of incidents sepa-rated Wordsworth from Coleridge. Wordsworth was not physically separated... most. Over the Immortality Ode Jeffrey shook his head and passed the damning sentence: "This will never do." But neither Coleridge nor Wordsworth was chicken-hearted. They went on in their Romanticism, and Wordsworth by sheer persistence created the new taste by which he and Coleridge subsequently came to be enjoyed. Many, however, were the battles the enemies waged, and one of the fiercest was against... Ballads which came out in 1798, much before Hugo's splash into poetry, though not earlier than Rousseau's famous Romanticist books in prose. Lyrical Ballads was the joint work of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Cole-ridge had The Ancient Mariner in this publication and it was as organic to the new Romanticist Movement as that other of Wordsworth's. But Wordsworth was the more powerful, more comprehensive ...
... the trace of others, improving on Abercrombie, "rivalling" Coleridge,—and if to improve on Abercrombie is easy (though why anyone should try it, I don't know), to rival Coleridge is not such an easy job, I can assure you. In any case, no good work is likely to come out of such a second-hand motive. Let me add that this poem of Coleridge is a masterpiece, not because it is the quintessence of romantic... poetry as Coleridge's Kubla Khan was not possible. The day before yesterday I got some kind of inspiration and wrote the first draft of these lines that form a fragment on the same theme as that of Coleridge. But can it come anywhere near that gem? Kubla Khan "For thy unforgettable sake See my royal passion wake Marmoreal sleep to towering dreamery, In wide felicitous splendour ...
... Romantics from the poets of the eighteenth century," writes Bowra, 1 "it is to be found in the importance which they attached to the imagination and in the special view which they held of it... Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, despite many differences, agreed on one vital point: that the creative imagination is closely connected with a peculiar insight into an unseen order behind visible... intellect. It is the "feeling intellect" to which, according to him, the master faculty of poetic creation becomes possible: Imagination, the visionary insight whose activity he believed with Coleridge to resemble the workings of the "Infinite Mind". To forget that the Romantic Movement was an imaginative soar from the basis of the feeling intellect is to misconstrue its entire genius. To forget... to certain moods of a poem like The Ancient Mariner or Christabel: what relation has it to the larger sweep of the supernatural that the Celtic intensity brings? And even in The Ancient Mariner Coleridge goes far beyond mediaeval superstition and fantasy, the haunting horrors in Gothic settings that in his time were being revived by several writers who wanted to be "Romantic": his poem broke into ...
... The sarcasm about "one essence" and "only one colour - say, bright pink" - is utterly jejune. The Unity for which Coleridge ached and which Imagination as distinct from Fancy was supposed to discern or achieve did not abrogate multi-plicity and difference: in fact, Coleridge emphatically declared that without dissolving or submerging them the Unity reigned. And, after all, the intuition of such... aesthetic taste and fascinating scholarship but limited psychological insight, whom we have often mentioned and who has little sympathy with the mystically orientated imagination of a Romantic like Coleridge and with this Romantic's metaphysical distinction between Imagination and Fancy. Apropos of Coleridge's letter to Thelwall in 1797 - "The universe itself, what but an immense heap of little things... of Classicism or Romanticism enabling us to put various apparently dissimilar poems under one head or the other. Whether we hold atheistic and materialistic views or the philosophy of minds like Coleridge, we always proceed as if a Unity existed and acted within diversities without annulling them. It is only extreme mystics of the One who metaphysicise about and seek for a featureless cosmos-annihilating ...
... 22 April 1947 Coleridge May I say a word about the four lines of Coleridge which you bash in your essay?— He prayeth best who loveth best, All things both great and small: For the dear God, who loveth us, He made and loveth all. The sentimentalism of the "dear God" is obviously extra childlike and sounds childish even. If it had been written by Coleridge as his own contribution... contribution to thought or his personal feeling described in its native language it would have ranked him very low. But Coleridge was a great metaphysician or at any rate an acute and wide-winged thinker, not a sentimental prattling poet of the third order. Mark that the idea in the lines is not essentially poor; otherwise expressed it could rank among great thoughts and stand as the basis of a philosophy and... ethics founded on bhakti. There are one or two lines of the Gita which are based on a similar thought, though from the Vedantic, not the dualist point of view. But throughout the Ancient Mariner Coleridge is looking at things from the point of view and the state of mind of the most simple and childlike personality possible, the Ancient Mariner who feels and thinks only with the barest ideas and the ...
... ibid., pp. 140-1. 53. ibid., p. 145. 54. ibid. „p.l50. 55. ibid. , p. 152. 56. ibid., pp. 152-3. 57. ibid. , p. 157. 58. Cf. Coleridge: Beyond the shadow of the ship, I watched the water-snakes... O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare: A spring... the consolidation of matter from which science, later, dates its study of world evolution... Mythology is the original source of human history." (The Meaning of History, pp. 80-1). 25. Coleridge on Imagination, pp. 171-2. 26. See Allen Tate, The Man of Letters in the Modern World, pp. 62-3. 27. Bernard Blackstone, The Consecrated Urn, p. 134; see also Charles Williams... that total quality he gives the name of composition....Longinus location of rhythm in the total composition, as binding and bound up with it, is perhaps the best critical insight of its kind before Coleridge." (The Man of Letters in the Modern World, pp. 169-70). 70. See Lytton Strachey, Literary Essays 1948), p. 16. 71. Okakura Kakuzo, The Book of Tea (Charles E. Tuttle Company ...
... the sight. It is an effectively repellent visual touch, the direct description of a preternatural horror. In The Ancient Mariner Coleridge has used this method very successfully — you may remember the glittering eye and the skinny hand of the old salt himself. Coleridge felt that Christabel was a more eerie poem and everything in it should be suggested rather than depicted. So he redid the lines... which the technical device called Aposiopesis has play, though the actual determinant of the poetic quality is not this device. Aposiopesis means a sudden breaking off in speech. In Christabel Coleridge has written of a half-human half-demon creature, the outwardly fair Lady Geraldine. When describing the undressing of this woman before Christabel, he originally had the lines: Behold! her bosom ...
... composed by Coleridge and adapted in some places as well as enlarged at the close by Amal — not exactly rendered, as I would believe if I were of D'Annunzio's temper, belle or magni-fique by being made Amalienne. At the same time it tells us the characteristic of each important metrical foot and illustrates in the greater part of the line the very foot which is being spoken of. Coleridge is employing... employing the old terminology of long and short for what we now call stress and slack. Thus far Coleridge adapted. Now the enlargement. Trochees and Iambics (or Iambs) are opposites, so are Dactyls and Anapaests, Amphibrachs and Amphimacers (or Cretics). But Spondees are left unopposed. So I have to round off: After the "giant racer", "a tail-end" is quite in place, you will ...
... objective facts but he does not stay locked up in them. On the other hand, he uses them as symbols to drive home to our souls his sense of that reality. Many great critics including Johnson, Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis at times committed ridiculous blunders in their estimates of poets and poems just because they failed to realise that there can be an endless variety... Sethna's contribution to Blake criticism is too well-known to demand reiteration. But, unfortunately, it has overshadowed his writings on other romantic poets. Though his observations on Coleridge, Shelley, Byron and Keats are profoundly illuminating, it is Wordsworth who receives the warmest praise and whose poetry is quoted repeatedly with love and admiration. There is no full-length... Movement as the poems of Wordsworth. As poet, * Sethna's book on the subject concerned is awaiting publication. - Editors Page 278 he is decidedly superior to Coleridge for more than one reason: "But Wordsworth was the more powerful, more comprehensive, was more hannonised poet and he is the more central figure and it was his Preface to the second edition ...
... recovered his habit of tranquil meditation and recollection as well as "that deep power of joy" that enabled him to see into the life of things. It was here that Wordsworth met the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Their acquaintance soon ripened into the friendship that has linked their names, together with Dorothy's, in a spiritual partnership unique in literary biography. That partnership produced the Lyrical... selected for the present collection are from The Prelude, begun in 1798 and completed in 1805. Wordsworth described The Prelude as "a long poem upon the formation of my own mind" and dedicated it to Coleridge. His comments on this piece reveal its autobiographical intentions. Several years ago, when the author retired, to his native mountains with the hope of being enabled to construct a literary... saw the birth of a group of poets whose body of work was so astounding as to perpetuate the notion that "Romantic" refers directly, even solely, to their poetry. These were Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. William Wordsworth's "Preface" to his Lyrical Ballads is considered the manifesto of the Romantic movement from a poet's viewpoint. The following extracts are taken from this ...
... protested. Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley — these were witnesses to a greater truth than that of Science. But in the eyes of common sense what were the results of the activity of poetic mysticism? Nothing comparable to the steam-engine, the telegraph, the mill-machinery or the system of mathematical laws by which everything could be predicted with amazing accuracy. Coleridge puffed a good deal, in... and materialistic Science, but they were rather unavailing in the opinion of intellectuals; and especially in France where the intellect was more at play than in the England of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley, nobody with brains thought of doubting the pronouncements of Physics and Physiology. What those brains forgot was that man was the only creature who thought of asking whether he had ...
... much. Coleridge did famous things, but his destination remained vague because Wordsworth's soul-composing mind-assuring simplicity was removed from his neighbourhood and he was left drowning in the oceans of his own labyrinthine restlessness. Wordsworth himself lapsed after a brief decade of keen beauty into benevolent dullness because not only did his philosophy have its initial root in Coleridge but... sensibility had been lit by Coleridge's inflammable temperament and could not long keep a living glow on its own. It was Wordsworth who had sustained Coleridge's already awakened genius, but it was Coleridge who by his contact gave Wordsworth's music a noble accent. Tennyson had a half-morbid half-visionary strain in him which with his curious eye for scenic detail would have brought us colourful and ...
... ultra-violet and infra-red not to be traced anywhere. Among English influences the most outstanding are, to my mind, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats and Stephen Phillips, along with something of Shelley and Coleridge. I cannot tell you much about it from that point of view; I did not draw consciously from any of the poets you mention except from Phillips. I read Marpessa and Christ in Hades before they... be traced in my poetry—I can myself see that of Milton, sometimes of Wordsworth and Arnold; but it was of the automatic kind—they came in unnoticed. I am not aware of much influence of Shelley and Coleridge, but since I read Shelley a great deal and took an intense pleasure in some of Coleridge's poetry, they may have been there without my knowledge. The one work of Keats that influenced me was Hyperion ...
... His was the privilege of the earliest initiation. This new poetry has six great voices who fall naturally in spite of their pronounced differences into pairs, Wordsworth and Byron, Blake and Coleridge, Shelley and Keats. Byron sets out with a strangely transformed echo of the past intellectualism, is carried beyond it by the elemental force of his personality, has even one foot across the borders... deliberate purpose from the past, forces his way into this new realm, but finally sinks under the weight of the narrower intellectual tendencies which he carries with him into its amplitudes. Blake and Coleridge open magical gates, pass by flowering sidelanes with hedges laden with supernatural blooms into a middle world whence their voices come to us ringing with an unearthly melody. In Shelley the idealism ...
... Crashaw's lyrical many-hued reli- Page 87 giosity and Vaughan's intellectual vision's luminous attempt at transcendence of itself, there glimmers out a presage of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats. A forerunner more immediate in time as well as in several moods is the effort made by poets like Gray, Collins, Thomson, Chatterton and Cowper in the third quarter of the eighteenth... promise is being slowly fulfilled of the time when the ebb of positive faith was to some extent compensated for by a light and force of inspiration that came into the work of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats and carried again and again the influences then abroad beyond themselves. The influences thus uplifted were those which had found expression in the vehement idealism of the ...
... more remarkable. Milton's slumber must have been the most extraordinary phenomenon in any poet's life. Coleridge's Kubla Khan was composed during a dream. But it is a wonder of brief spell and Coleridge never met with a repetition of the experience, though we may be right in viewing The Ancient Mariner and Christabel as resulting from a sort of prolongation or projection of the dream-state... deeper level. Have we not the same sign in good portions of Paradise Lost - at least in the first two Books which are the best? Milton is a more tightly knit though less metaphysical mind than Coleridge, a mind more classically steady and less romantically tremulous in its general movement than his. So whatever quality it may have of dream-vision would not be quite the same. Only the essence of ...
... mutandis true of great poets throughout the world and more so in case of great Indian poets like Kālidāsa. It is worth mentioning here that according to Coleridge, one cannot be a great poet without being a great philosopher. "No man," says Coleridge, "was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time a profound philosopher". 10 Kālidāsa, in my humble opinion, was a great poet whose philosophical ...
... realities. To what extent a poet may feel himself to be a mere passive, almost inanimate, instrument – nothing more than a mirror or a sensitive photographic plate-is illustrated in the famous case of Coleridge. His Kubla Khan, as is well known, he heard in sleep and it was a long poem very distinctly recited to him, but when he woke up and wanted to write it down he could remember only the opening lines... to hear in sleep verses or musical tunes and what seem then to be very beautiful things, but which leave no trace on the brain and are not recalled in memory. Still, it must be noted that Coleridge is a rare example, for the recording apparatus is not usually so faithful but puts up its own formations that disturb and alter the perfection of the original. The passivity or neutrality of the ...
... the Lake District." "The Land of Lakes?" "Yes. Wordsworth's birthplace. Haven't you read about it in his works? You must have heard about his sister Dorothy and his friend Coleridge." "Of course we have. Coleridge who wrote the 'Ancient Mariner' - isn't that so? 'The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free, We were the first who ever burst Into that silent sea ...
... these there are two writers who cannot Page 134 be classed, Smart & Beattie. Last come the first nineteenth century poets, who published their earliest work in 1798-1800, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Landor & Campbell. School of Natural Description The first to break away from Pope were Thomson & Dyer. The original departures made by their school were as follows. (1) In ... mainly in (1) the first attempt to handle Nature in a new poetic fashion afterwards perfected by Wordsworth, (2) the reintroduction of the supernatural influencing all subsequent writers but mainly Coleridge, Shelley & Keats, (3) the introduction of Hellenism into poetry, carried out by Keats & Shelley & (4) the restoration of the lyric & especially the Ode form, which became a favourite one in the early ...
... co-organization of an integrative kind. There the harmony of the whole is not merely built out of its parts but is impressed on the parts by the whole. An individuality whose whole, as luminously said by Coleridge, is presupposed by all its parts." Here we have the heart of the matter. And all serious biologists point towards it. It means in the first place that what distinguishes living things is not... what Sherrington terms "additive by co-organization of an integrative kind", its harmony is not "impressed on the parts by the whole", it is not "an individuality whose whole, as luminously said by Coleridge, is presupposed by all its parts." Let us get such a whole into proper focus by further distinguishing "co-organization of an integrative kind" from a system of interrelated parts interrelated ...
... soon or late Page 52 without a cry of pain at its ring of false metal, one cannot refrain from laughter at the goody-goody sentimentalism tagged on to the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge: He prayeth best who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all. It cannot be arraigned on the score of simplicity... ardours. In addition, his sparks of "high seriousness" bear a cryptic tinge, so that the supernatural is never far away, although its nearness is unlike the atmosphere created in Coleridge's poem. In Coleridge the inspiration is more weirdly cryptic — the ancient mariner is a creature haunted by supernatural life-forms whose touch is almost directly felt by us; Chesterton's verse is haunted by supernatural ...
... The thing has come, as all of you can easily see, from the very core of his heart, and prayer does come from the heart. Isn't it in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" that Samuel Taylor Coleridge says: 78 Farewell, farewell! But this I tell To thee, thou Wedding-Guest! He prayeth well, who loveth well, Both man and bird and beast. He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both... le style (Discourse on Style) by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, spoken before the French Academy on 25 August 1753. 77Letter to Robert Lloyd (October 1798), Th e Poetry and Prose of Coleridge, Lamb and Leigh Hunt (The Christ's Hospital Anthology, 1920), 150. 78 Lyrical Ballads (1798). Page 41 For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all. ...
... realities. To what extent a poet may feel himself to be a mere passive, almost inanimate, instrument—nothing more than a mirror or a sensitive photographic plate—is illustrated in the famous case of Coleridge. His Kubia Khan, as is well known, he heard in sleep and it was a long poem very distinctly recited to him, but when he woke up and wanted to write it down he could remember only the opening lines... experience to hear in sleep verses or musical tunes and what seem then to be very beautiful things, but which leave no trace on the brain and are not recalled in memory. Still, it must be noted that Coleridge is a rare example, for the recording apparatus is not usually so faithful but puts up its own formations that disturb and alter the perfection of the original. The passivity or neutrality of the ...
... a delight. I am a great Francophil, you know (or perhaps you did not) and have long been in contact with the school of the Imaginal' in France. For the Imagination, born in England with Blake and Coleridge and Shelley, and restored in the Irish renaissance of this century, has taken a new life in France, long deemed the 'rational' nation. On the contrary, white in positivist England the darkness deepens ...
... of his mother's or his nurse's breast. Behind that initial — or, shall we say, initiatory — gulp of life-nourishment is the primordial Mystery for whose service and revelation he is born. Has not Coleridge spoken of the essential poet as one who inspires "holy dread" by "his flashing eyes, his floating hair", For he on honey-dew hath fed And drunk the milk of paradise. It is this "milk ...
... intellect must similarly develop from its essence a characteristic voice, cry, mould of speech, natural way of development, habits of structure." 1 Shelley and Keats, like Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake, "were embarrassed by the same difficulty of a time which was not ready for work of this kind, not prepared for it by any past development, not fitted for it by anything in the common atmosphere ...
... on the other are both disqualified. And he stresses for "pure poetry" not any particular purity of language but the unimpeded play of the faculty we know as Imagination. Like Blake, Words-worth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, he considers Imagination as constituting poetry and as the queen of all the faculties. Imagina- Page 338 tion to him is no wild instinctive force: it is a conscious ...
... sphere, suppose an average matric student reads a poem and says, "It's beautiful." What would be the meaning of this statement? Will it put the stamp of merit on the poem? Now suppose a man like Coleridge or Matthew Arnold makes the same remark, "It's beautiful." The words will have come from an entirely different source: they will have sprung from a mind quick to the revelatory impact of poetic i ...
... other modern countries in poetry. Neither in modern Page 51 Europe nor anywhere else do we find such a poetic galaxy as Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Swinburne, Francis Thompson and Yeats. In consequence of the intensely inspired impact of poets like these, the versatile English language has acquired a unique capacity for strangely suggestive ...
... of Arnold, the pure ethereal lyricism of Shelley by Swinburne's turgid lyrical surge and all too self-conscient fury of foam-tossing sound, and in place of the supernatural visions of Blake and Coleridge we have the mediaeval glamour and languourous fields of dream of Rossetti and Morris." The Victorians, however, are much closer to the soul of the Page 161 new Romanticism ...
... with its three-dimensional shape to be fitted into something that is "spaceless" or unextended ? Can the non-extension accommodate it merely by being designated supreme ether"? Poetry may have—as Coleridge phrases it—"a happy valiancy", but is not this whole poetic expression of Sri Aurobindo's an impossible violence? we have a language that is not only profound but also life-packed, as language ...
... Cat", 42 Christ, 33, 40, 43, 5 1 , 61, 64, 66, 68, 92- 1 10, 1 5 1 -53, 247. 261 "Christ the tiger", 4 1 , 42, 256 Christian Doctrine , 102 Christology , 40, 69 "climb", 150, 157 Coleridge, 5, 127 Colossians , 102, 231 fn. 309 "Collective Unconscious" , 4, 142 Collected Poems of Sri Aurobindo , 4 fn. 7 Complete Writings of William Blake, The, 2 fn. l Confessions ...
... directed not at one's "rational" mind but at one's temperament and taste and instinct—factors which if one is not specifically trained to be catholic are likely to trip up even critics like Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold and Eliot. May I hope that C.R.M., whose writings are often acute as well as charming will give my book a closer reading and, instead of being in a hurry to pass judgment, open himself more ...
... critics who are over-fastidious, who insist on a continual novelty and think it a deplorable defection of genius for a poet to bring in any word again which has already been used close-by. Thus, Coleridge looks at those phrases in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra - Her gentle women, like the Nereides, So many mermaids, tended her i' the eyes, And made their bends adornings: at the ...
... Browning, Elizabeth 60,161 C Celtic fire and ether 197 ChadwickJohnA. 266 Chandidas 126 Chapman 189 Chattopadhyaya, Harindranath 36,42 Chit-Tapas 247 Coleridge 42,197,234 consciousness depths of 99 developing through Savitri 286 Divine 167,174 Divine Presence and 303 higher 67,176 human's 95 in-drawn 28 Mantra ...
... worlds apart from the stanza by Gray. Even if we took the expression of a more "intellectual being" than Gray's we should feel Milton's distinctive quality. Here are some verses from a poem of Coleridge in an intellectual vein: If dead, we cease to be; if total gloom Swallow up life's brief flash for aye, we fare As summer-gusts, of sudden birth and doom, Whose sound and motion ...
... article on the previous pages.] Page 41 novelty and think it a deplorable defection of genius for a poet to bring in any word again which has already been used close-by. Thus, Coleridge looks at those phrases in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra– Her gentle women, like the Nereides, So many mermaids, tended her i' the eyes, And made their bends adornings: at the ...
... 43, 44, 45 Brahman 12 Brihat 4 British 98 Brummagem 98 Buddhist Period 82 C Caryatides 35 Chandidasa 82, 84 Chinese Puzzle 71 Coleridge 103 Cyclopian 48 D Dane 23 Dante 17, 27, 79 Denmark 25 Dionysus 34, 35 Dirghatama 8, 10, 11, 13, 14 Discabolo 18 Douve 77 Dr. Zhivago 38, 40 ...
... most masculine of poets. Echoing his words we may say that Wordsworth is the most masculine of English poets. This classification of poets into "masculine" and "feminine" was made by the poet Coleridge. "Masculine" means in the first place, shorn of ornament, whereas the "feminine" loves ornament. Secondly, the masculine has intellectuality and the feminine emotionalism. Then again, femininity ...
... Page 443 writers. Echoing his words we may say that Wordsworth is the most masculine of English poets. This classification of poets into "masculine" and "feminine" was made by the poet Coleridge. "Masculine" means, in the first place, devoid of ornament, whereas the "feminine" loves ornament. Secondly, the masculine has intellectuality and the feminine emotionalism. Then again, femininity ...
... under the effect of narcotics. Sri Aurobindo : One day Mother asked a workman why he was drinking. He said that after drinking he got thoughts which he could never get when he was sober. Coleridge wrote most of his poems when he was under the influence of opium. Somebody once praised a line of Tennyson. He said : "Ah ! that line ! It cost me 25 cigars !" So there is no reason to suppose ...
... the most masculine of poets. Echoing his words we may say that Wordsworth is the most masculine of English poets. This classification of poets into "masculine" and "feminine" was made by the poet Coleridge. "Masculine" means in the first place, shorn of ornament, whereas the "feminine" loves ornament. Secondly, the masculine has intellectuality and the feminine emotionalism. Then again, femininity is ...
... truth that we state and it is precisely this that we have missed in the present age. Chaucer created a new poetic world, Shakespeare created another, Milton yet a third, the Romantics – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byron – each of them has a whole world to his credit. But this they achieved, not because of any theory they held or did not hold, but because each of them delved deep and struck ...
... limitless in its energising power. Hence prayer, in a soul which is completely patient of the supernatural, is literally without ceasing, because the whole of its action is supernaturalised. 1 When Coleridge writes Like a youthful hermitress, Beauteous in a wilderness, Who, praying always, prays in sleep - he but describes this condition of constant relationship with God through prayer ...
... mastery and the true poetical excellence is a bad school for the appreciation of such severe & perfect work as Vyasa's. Page 303 For Vyasa is the most masculine of writers. 5 When Coleridge spoke of the femineity of genius he had in mind certain features of temperament which whether justly or not are usually thought to count for more in the feminine mould than in the masculine, the love ...
... ditch on one side with cress & forget-me-nots & nothing pronounced or poignant except perhaps a stray whiff of meadowsweet from a distance. This admirable unobtrusive charm and just observed music (Coleridge) makes it run easily Page 262 into verse in English. In translating one has at first some vague idea of reproducing the form as well as the spirit of the Sanscrit, rendering verse stanza ...
... thought, even as Arnold "came a cropper" with the sky-arches of Shelley's iridescent imagination. Francis Jeffrey, before them, had uttered his notorious verdict on the lyricism of Wordsworth and Coleridge: "This will never do!" Johnson, still earlier, had found Milton's Lycidas commonplace if not crude. When such minds could show blindspots, it is hardly surprising that an Indian reviewer of moderate ...
... pronounced "imaging is, in itself, the very height and life of poetry." All these comments seem to suggest that a conscious and deliberate indulgence in image making is at the core of poetic creation. Coleridge, however, slightly modifies these statements by saying that images "become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion, or by associated thoughts or images ...
... and has in the last two centuries received a distinctly Vedantic influence — even if unlabelled as such — through Wordsworth and Shelley and AE and carried touches of the occult through Blake and Coleridge and Yeats and, in a broad sense, grown plastic through Keats and Page 243 Beddoes and others of their kind to ideas which normally would seem to defy articulation: ...
... without affecting in the least my day-to-day mood which - while lacking the famous "flashing eyes" and very much the equally celebrated "floating hair" -is touched by something of the light and delight Coleridge ascribed to his visionary poet in Kubla Khan: For he on honey-dew hath fed And drunk the milk of paradise. Perhaps the discrepancy between the lower body and the rest of me ...
... carpet, as it were, over which a World-Mother's presence sweeps royally towards me to raise me into my highest possibility of inner and outer godhead. My visionary up-soar feels harmonious with what Coleridge in a familiar strain calls the birds' "sweet jargoning" and Meredith in an insightful accent hails as A voice seraphically free Of taint of personality. Going backward, how shall ...
... has in the last two centuries received a distinctly Vedantic influence - even if unlabelled as -such - through Wordsworth and Shelley and A.E. and carried touches of the occult through Blake and Coleridge and Yeats and, in a broad sense, grown plastic through Keats and Beddoes and others of their kind to ideas which normally would seem to defy articulation: ...solitary thinkings such as dodge ...
... seemed his head The likeness of a kingly crown had on. 25 Page 126 Later we come to know that this Shape is Death. The picture is very impressive and deserves the praise of Coleridge for its abstract vagueness whose appeal to the imagination has a subtle force which concrete, clearly defined imagery would lack altogether. But the depths in us are not directly shaken: the outer ...
... be worlds apart from the stanza by Gray. Even if we took the expression of a more "intellectual being" than Gray's we should feel Milton's distinctive quality. Here are some verses from a poem of Coleridge in an intellectual vein: If dead, we cease to be; if total gloom Swallow up life's brief flash for aye, we fare As summer-gusts, of sudden birth and doom, Whose sound and motion ...
... apart. When contemplating what an anomaly of nothing Man would be if his teeming purposes were declared a product of Nature's purposelessness, his life a brief flash ending in total gloom, Coleridge could not better bring to a head the enormous oddity of denying immortality than by exclaiming: If even a soul like Milton's could know death... When Sri Aurobindo wants to characterise ...
... of Arnold, the pure ethereal lyricism of Shelley by Swinburne's turgid lyrical surge and all too self-conscient fury of foam-tossing sound, and in place of the supernatural visions of Blake and Coleridge we have the mediaeval glamour and languorous fields of dream of Rossetti and Morris. There is a considerable gain, but a deep loss; for this poetry has a more evolved richness, but in that greater ...
... in Wordsworth's revelations of the spiritual presence in Nature and its scenes and peoples, in Byron's rare forceful sincerities, in the luminous simplicities of Blake, in the faery melodies of Coleridge, most of all perhaps in the lyrical cry and ethereal light of Shelley. But these are comparatively rare moments, the mass of their work is less certain and unequal in expression and significance. ...
... proven. You have made good to a certain extent—but are these strikingnesses all that there is in Chesterton? Something more is needed to make a poet of rank. I do not think the comparison with Coleridge can hold if it is intended to indicate anything like equality. Coleridge's poetry tells by its union of delicate and magical beauty with exquisite simplicity and straightness. Chesterton never loses ...
... sufficiently rare,—but a poet habitually writing from some other level may stumble into it from time to time or it may come to him strongly and lift him up out of his ordinary sight or intelligence. Coleridge had it with great vividness at certain moments. Blake's poems are full of it, but it Page 18 is not confined to the poetry of the occult or of the supernormal; this vision can take up ...
... narrative; but this is not the true original ballad movement and ballad motive. Scott's movement is narrative, not epic—there is also a lyrical narrative movement and that is the quality reached by Coleridge, perhaps the finest use yet made of the ballad movement. It is doubtful whether the ballad form can bear the epic lift for more than a line or two, a stanza or two—under the epic stress the original ...
... may be only the eyes of daydream, they may exist only in his brown-study and in no recognisable room; yet his art is such as to create a feeling of their reality. Our minds are charmed into what Coleridge called a suspension of disbelief. The imagery and the music go home with an inevitable sense of truth. Somewhere, we seem to tell ourselves, these wonderful apertures are to be found; the rhythmic ...
... seems considerably to overpass the dubious, fluctuant mass of what we commonly term "psychical phenomena." According to Sri Aurobindo, 11 "Blake lives ordinarily far up in this middle world of which Coleridge only catches some glimpses or at most stands occasionally just over its borders. His seeing teems with its images, he hears around him the echoes of its sounds and voices. He is not only a seer ...
... poetry, whose particular species of seerhood was absolutely authentic. Yeats's Celtic verse was both true and new. The Marvellous Might-have-been Blake had walked with spirits, Coleridge had known an eerie darkness, Shelley had been touched by "nurselings of immortality", but none had opened the door of which Yeats discovered the key; they had won no access to the heart whose pulse ...
... than from the hither side as done so far. That is to say, he explicates it not by tackling it from the viewpoint of the mind that looks at it from below but by dealing with it from above and, as Coleridge would put it, "defecating it to a transparency" through the use of "That which thinks not with the mind but by which the mind is thought". (Kena Upanishad) The oldest Indian seers also used ...
... art. But I think AE has not yet received proper appreciation as a poet. When English poetry comes to fulfil more consciously, more directly the particular mystic strain in it which gleams out in Coleridge and Shelley and most in Wordsworth and which is best designated as a secret Indianness of inner and outer perception, then AE will surely come into his own in the world's judgment as a profound ...
... and shoulders above other modern countries in poetry. Neither in modern Europe nor anywhere else do we find such a poetic galaxy as Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Francis Thompson and Yeats. If we may add from those to whom English was native outside England, there is the free-verse giant, Whitman. In consequence of the intensely ...
... something directed not at one's "rational" mind but at one's temperament and taste and instinct-factors which if not specifically trained to be catholic are likely to trip up even critics like Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold and Eliot. May I hope that C.R.M. whose writings are often acute as well as charming will give my book a closer reading and, instead of being in a hurry to pass judgment, open himself more ...
... 238-40, 242 Christ, 6, 50, 14511., 151, 154, 164, 195, 208,213-14,259,273-4,381,384 Christianity, 23, 58, 151, 168, 213, 280,282,359 Churchill, Winston, 91, Ill, 128 Coleridge, 194 Commonwealth, 91, 106, 236 Communism, 25, 27-8, 125-6 Confucius, 222 Copernicus, 308 Cordelia, 185n Corneille, 197 Crete, 214 Cyrus ...
... characterised Anal-da’s inner state as “a glorious sun, that would not yield to night”. Has not K.D.S. himself revealed: “My day-to-day mood…is touched by something of the light and delight Coleridge ascribed to his visionary poet in Kubla Khan: For he on honey-dew hath fed And drunk the milk of paradise.”? Amal-da has indeed “drunk the milk of paradise” got amply substantiated in ...
... But the dreams their children dreamed, Fleeting, unsubstantial, vain, Shadowy as the shadows seemed, Airy nothing, as they deemed, These remain. So sings Mary Coleridge. The past brings us many gifts; indeed, all that we have to-day of culture, page-386 civilization, science, or knowledge of some aspects of the truth, is a gift of the distant or recent ...
... Strange Journey, 69n -"Blue Profound", 69n Chicago, 196n China, 133, 281 Christ, Jesus, 68, 107, 114, 116-18, 120, 122-4, 129, 240, 267 Christianity, 120, 125, 240, 244, 276 Coleridge, 84, 235 -Kubla Khan, 84 Commonwealth, 284, 290 Communism (Sovietic), 253 Confucius, 281 Cousins, James H., 52n -New Ways in English Literature, 52n DANDAKARANYA,276 ...
... Life and Times of C. R. Das (Oxford University Press, Bombay, 1927). Read, Sri Herbert. Collected Essays in Literary Criticism (Faber & Faber, London, 1938). Richards, LA. Coleridge on Imagination (Roudedge, London, 2 nd Edition, 1950). Science and Poetry (Kegan Paul, London, 1926). Page 489 Rilke, Rainer Maria. Poemt 1906 ...
... Chandrasekharam, V. 226, 231, 235, 255 Chandulal Shah 255, 265-6, 280, 328-9 Cheddi Lal 821 Chidanandam, V. 231, 765 Chinmayi (Mehdi Begum) 321, 325, 674 Churchill, Winston 410, 416, 423, 425 Coleridge, S.T. 61 Counouma, P. 691, 816 Cripps, Sir Stafford 425ff, 447, 571 Page 900 Dahyabhai Patel 683 Daladier, Edouard 395ff, 403 Daniel, Samuel 38 Dante 111,315,471,633 ...
... Classical and Romantic Foreword We were doing Coleridge's Kubla Khan in the first year Poetry Class at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education in Pondicherry. When we had recovered enough from the intoxication of reading it and could ask critical questions, the very first and the most general and fundamental that arose were apropos ...
... Wordsworth, as he realised most vividly during his journey through the Simplon Pass when he "entered a narrow chasm" which carries to its deepest suggestion the Romanticism conjured up for us by Coleridge's "savage" and "holy" and "enchanted" gorge: The immeasurable height Of woods decaying, never to be decayed, The stationary blasts of waterfalls. And in the narrow rent at every... Wordsworth's own, may call "unknown modes of being" and what in addition we may call after Plato the prenatal bliss of the soul. Both the shades join with suggestions floating or flashing out from Coleridge's Kubla Khan. The woman wailing for her demon lover and haunting the romantic chasm is matched by the episode, recounted in The Prelude, of the boy Wordsworth pushing off the shore in a boat found... heard Low breathings coming after me, and sounds Of undistinguishable motion, steps Almost as silent as the turf they trod, we have the occult, as genuine as in any spectral perceptions of Coleridge's - or of Blake's, either, when he speaks of The invisible worm That flies in the night, In the howling storm, or when, dazzled by the dreadful beauty he symbolises as "Tyger" ...
... of the true gold of critical perception. The traditional example of poetry neat and pure is Coleridge's Kubla Khan. Housman plunges still nearer the heart of things by selecting work which goes even beyond the non-moral, non-intellectual, sheer visionary delight of Xanadu. There is in Coleridge's perfect picture a meaning seizable by the normal intelligence - not surely a logical formula but ...
... inscribed on it in your own handwriting ?" Prolific reader that he was, Sri Aurobindo knew Shakespeare and Milton to the full. "I read Shelley a great deal and took an intense pleasure in some of Coleridge's poetry." Keats too, specially his Hyperion. Among the Victorian poets, Stephen Phillips made a considerable impression on him. "I read Marpessa and Christ in Hades, before they were published ...
... touch. But the poetic psychology too is here. The picture of poetry as being produced by the lips because the poet has taken strange unearthly food is a recurrent one in literature: we may cite Coleridge's line in Kubla Khan about the bespelled singer: For he on honey-dew hath fed And drunk the milk of paradise. And in this picture we have two implications: the poet has taken ...
... imaginatively interchangeable not because our Dairy-chief Surendra is in any way responsible for the milk-white pages with the quotations at their heads, but because about Sri Aurobindo we can say in Coleridge's language: For he on honey-dew hath fed And drunk the milk of paradise. The paradisal milk runs in all of Sri Aurobindo's utterances — they may be said to stream from a Divine Dairy where ...
... amateurish jealousy that taunts the poet while he looks upon the swans moving about, "unwearied, lover-by lover..." Here the poet has transcended the corporeal and grazed the overmental levels. In Coleridge's "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner", when the mariner beholds the sea creatures playing about in the sea and in a total thoughtless state blesses them from deep within his heart, the albatross that ...
... were, of the theme and an "aura" of suggestion beyond the apparent line and hue and thrill. There is, of course, no one single way of realising the Meredithian ideal. One may be exquisite as in Coleridge's Her gentle limbs did she undress And lay down in her loveliness, or grand as in the same poet' The alien shine of unconcerning stars Page 205 or one may pr ...
... spiritual turn, by Wordsworth's force of ethical thought and communion with Nature, by Shelley's imaginative transcendentalism, Keats' worship of Beauty, Byron's Titanism and force of personality, Coleridge's supernaturalism or, as it should more Page 208 properly be called, his eye for other nature, Blake's command of the inner psychic realms. Only in drama was there, owing to the prestige ...
... the effect on the Mother of the onesided exchange and her decision at last to withdraw her own personal participation in the ceremony - it was a marvellous lyric suspended half-way through, like Coleridge's Kubla Khan. That too was the period when the Mother instituted other means also of engaging the sadhaks' attention and awakening and stimulating their dormant consciousness in desired directions ...
... the phanopoeists, Shakespeare, would have put it if he had had something to do not only with Othello, the Moor of Venice, but also with George, the Moore of London. Typical instances would be Coleridge's lines on the "one red leaf" that could most easily be wind-stirred and that still hung motionless: There is not wind enough to twirl The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That ...
... market-driven economies: breed an unrestrained materialism. Page 320 (i) Finally the conservative is likely to promote a coalition between classes. S/he is likely to accept Coleridge's views on a clerisy which will provide leadership in society and s/he is likely to see the middle-class insular mind as an obstacle to the necessary link the clerisy must have with the people who ...
... 243. Ibid. 244. Ibid., 11 .900-904. Page 126 variety of books by others lessens the supreme and unique inspiration of these works of Coleridge's in their finally realized form. However, there is one difference. Coleridge's "story" is not clarified by echoes from his varied reading: they do not really anticipate that story, for it is entirely new and arises from the way these echoes ...
... her days' with Tagore's 'morning sparrow'. I am totally un- Page 76 moved and unimpressed by Aurobindo's super-bird. Tagore's sparrow performs perfectly the symbolic function (see Coleridge's definition of the symbol which reveals the eternal 'in and through the temporal'). The small, dusty humblest of birds is for the poet a daily epiphany of the mystery and miracle of Being, here and ...
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