Customer Reviews

Biographia Literaria: The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life & Opinions (v. 7)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am almost as much in awe of the erudition of the editors (James Engell and W Jackson Bates of the Bolingen edition) as that of Coleridge himself. I think it is often easier to parade one's own wide reading than to recognize someone elses's references. These editors track down the most obscure of Greek, German and Latin quotations and it's an education to read their notes.
There are really three themes in the book. One part is philosophy, one is literary criticism, and one is straight autobiography. These are dispersed throughout.
As regards the philosophy I am probably what he would have called "ignorant of his understanding." Coleridge shows a remarkable knowledge of German philosophy, read in the original language. As far as I know his philosophical ideas have not been highly regarded by pure philosophers.
The literary criticism is the most powerful and original part although the texts he uses will be unfamiliar and even anaccessible to most modern readers.
The fragments of autobiography such as chapter 10 and the first of the Satyrayane's Letters are the most readable.
While this is an unboubted work of genius I have denied it the fifth star because of a certain lack of redability. It is not, for the modern reader, a page-turning work of entertainment. It contains many gems, and much wit, but is one of those we take up today for instruction rather than diversion.

Bede Griffiths, in his book The Golden String, referred to STC as "one of the most universal minds in English literature."

I don't know of anything comparable to Biographia Literaria. At times it's the narrative of a great poet's life. He may veer off into literary criticism or even parody (see the, to me, hilarious section in which he gives "The House that Jack Built" in the rhetorical manner of a recent poet). He powerfully attacks the positivism of his age (and ours). He evokes the wonder of being human.

This scholarly edition is the one to get, if you're going to put in the time to read this rich classic at all.

Anyone interested in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's work could not receive better advice than to buy the Princeton University Press paperback edition of Biographia Literaria (1817), the closest thing that this most brilliant but also most erratic of all the English romantic poets produced by way of a summa of his life and critical theories. If you've tried it in a cheap edition (e.g., the Modern Library) and set it aside scratching your head over the constant flow of obscure allusions, untranslated quotations in Latin, Greek, and, especially, German, and hundreds of references to other writers, now is the time to give it another shot. The editors, James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, have meticulously glossed every one of these obscurities in footnotes (not endnotes)that are a model of clarity and concision. The volume has everything you need to appreciate this great work: a thorough and highly readable editors' introduction, a chronology of Coleridge's life, appendices on related correspondence and on passages Coleridge appropriated from the German philosophers, and a complete index. This edition is not, by ordinary standards, new: as volume 7 of Princeton's Collected Works of STC, it's been around as a two-volume hardcover since 1983 and a single volume paperback since 1984. But considering how long it took to produce a usable version for the ordinary reader, it might as well have come out yesterday.

STC's original purpose for BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA was to account for the major influences in his development of both his philosophy and literary technique. But as he progressed, his real goal was to discuss at mind-numbing length intellectual problems and issues and to provide the world a pulpit for his literary criticism with comments on specific works. His book is truly a long conversation ranging over poetry, drama, philosophy, and psychology. He opens the book by praising the Reverend James Bowyer, who had taught him logic and rhetoric years earlier. He notes that in his youth he developed a taste for the `pre-romantic' vogue of lyrics rather than the traditional styles of Pope and other Augustan poets. Throughout, he mentions the harsh attacks of critics who saw in him (and Wordsworth) as poetic vulgarizers. It is no surprise then that he often went on to a spirited counterattack. Early in the book, he considers a favorite series of topics: perception, sensation, and the human thought processes. He does not make it easy for the modern reader to catch his drift since he assumes that his readers have an intimate knowledge of the popular theories of psychology and philosophy of his day. He ponders, among others, Hobbes, Aristotle, Descarte and Kant. He describes his business failure with a literary journal "The Watchman" that he founded. Had his friends not bailed him out with timely loans, he might have wound up in debtor's prison. He notes that his 1798 trip to Germany provided him with invaluable first-hand knowledge of literature and politics. A return to England exposed him to the joys of journalism. Later in the text, he returns to philosophy. He was quite concerned with distinguishing between the perceiver and the perceived. He also distinguished imagination (You can always spot his unique prose style since he invariably spells "imagination" and "fancy" in upper case) into the Primary Imagination and the Secondary Imagination. The former perceives and recognizes objects while the latter enables its host to produce new thoughts: `It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate.' Coleridge invents a new word that he calls `esemplastic' to refer to this Imagination that can balance or reconcile the apparent opposites in experience. Next he writes that with reference to poetry, its immediate object is `pleasure, not truth.' Next, he discusses the function of the poet, who, via his imagination, brings unity out of diversity by reconciling `sameness, with differences; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objets; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement.' Coleridge was not bashful about criticizing his good friend Wordsworth, who valued the speech of low and rustic life as the natural language of emotion. Coleridge praised Wordsworth for the purity of his language and the freshness of his thoughts. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA emerges as a penetrating glimpse into a man who saw a universe in a manner that not many others did, not even his literary soulmates.