Coleridge as Poet and Religious ThinkerIn the nineteenth century there was a definite divide between those who read Coleridge as a religious thinker and those who read him as a poet. Even now, readers and critics find it hard not to consider one aspect of his work to the exclusion of the other. Here David Jasper considers Coleridge as a poet, literary critic, theologian and philosopher, seeing him as occupying a representative place in European and English Romantic thought on poetry, religion and the role of the artist. His earliest writings are closely linked to his mature religious and critical thought, and his greatest poems, ‘Kubla Khan’, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and the ‘Dejection’ Ode, are a necessary prelude to the prose writings of the middle period of Coleridge’s life. Self-reflection upon the processes of creating poetry and art, particularly in the Biographia Literaria, is an important development in Coleridge’s sense of the relation of the finite to the infinite through the inspiration of the poet. Attention to the nature of inspiration, imagination and irony in creative writing leads directly to his later discussions of man’s need of a divine redeemer and the nature of divine revelation. In the later poetry, attention is given to the theme of self-reflection in which spiritual growth is part and parcel of poetic development, each balancing the other. The final part of the book considers Coleridge’s later prose, linking his reflections upon poetry with an epistemology, which he learnt principally from Kant and Fichtee in a discussion of revelation and radical evil. In conclusion, Coleridge’s religious position is summed up through the late, and still unpublished notebooks, and the fragmentary remains of the long-projected Opus Maximum. The last chapter links Coleridge with a more recent debate on the nature of inspiration, poetic and divine, which arises out of Austin Farrer’s Bampton Lectures The Glass of Vision. |
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Page 10
... Christ, above all, was a poet since, in the tradition of Plato and the ancients, he divulged the sacred and eternal truths contained in these views to mankind, and Christianity, in its abstract purity, became the exoteric expression of ...
... Christ, above all, was a poet since, in the tradition of Plato and the ancients, he divulged the sacred and eternal truths contained in these views to mankind, and Christianity, in its abstract purity, became the exoteric expression of ...
Page 21
... Christ's Hospital. The letters do not always agree factually with other later childhood reminiscences, notably in Biographia Literaria (1817) and in the notes which Coleridge provided for James Gillman's The Life of Samuel Taylor ...
... Christ's Hospital. The letters do not always agree factually with other later childhood reminiscences, notably in Biographia Literaria (1817) and in the notes which Coleridge provided for James Gillman's The Life of Samuel Taylor ...
Page 23
... Christ's Hospital. It is a prosaic and dry account, reflecting the misery of the lonely child, 'pent 'mid cloisters dim'.” Yet during these years, according to Charles Lamb, onevidence supplied by Coleridge himself, he was becoming ...
... Christ's Hospital. It is a prosaic and dry account, reflecting the misery of the lonely child, 'pent 'mid cloisters dim'.” Yet during these years, according to Charles Lamb, onevidence supplied by Coleridge himself, he was becoming ...
Page 24
... Christ's Hospital, it is difficult to derive from his earliest poems more than immature platitudes such as might be expected from an unhappy yet undeniably talented boy. Yet he who Wisdom's paths shall keep And Virtue firm that scorns ...
... Christ's Hospital, it is difficult to derive from his earliest poems more than immature platitudes such as might be expected from an unhappy yet undeniably talented boy. Yet he who Wisdom's paths shall keep And Virtue firm that scorns ...
Page 26
... Christ as both universal and the particular man in history.” The 1795 Lectures on Revealed Religion are his first sustained attempt to relate the nature of man as an individual and as a social being in the context of his views on ...
... Christ as both universal and the particular man in history.” The 1795 Lectures on Revealed Religion are his first sustained attempt to relate the nature of man as an individual and as a social being in the context of his views on ...
Contents
8 | |
20 | |
KUBLA KHAN THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT | 43 |
S THE CRITICAL PROSE | 73 |
THREE LATER POEMS | 103 |
THE LATER PROSE AND NOTEBOOKS | 116 |
INSPIRATION AND REVELATION | 144 |
Notes | 156 |
Bibliography of Secondary Sources | 178 |
Index | 191 |
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Coleridge as Poet and Religious Thinker: Inspiration and Revelation David Jasper Limited preview - 1985 |
Common terms and phrases
aesthetic Aids to Reflection Ancient Mariner artist Austin Farrer Biographia Literaria Boehme Christ Christian Coleridge's Coleridge's writings Confessio Fidei consciousness context creation creative Dejection described divine doctrine Eolian Eolian Harp Essays eternal experience faith Farrer finite fragment Friedrich Schlegel Friend(CC Glass of Vision God’s Hartley Helen Gardner human Ibid ideas individual infinite infinity inspiration intellectual intuition irony John John Thelwall Kant Kant's Kermode Kubla Khan language Lectures letter Lewesdon Hill Limbo literary criticism literature London M. H. Abrams man’s Mary Midgley McFarland metaphysical mind moral mystery narrative nature object Opus Maximum Owen Barfield Oxford perceived philosophical Piranesi's poem poet poetic poetry Polar Logic principle prose reader reading religion religious revelation Romantic S. T. Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge Schelling secondary Imagination self-reflection sense Spirit suggests symbol theology theory things thought tradition truth unity universal Wordsworth