Write a note on: Coleridge’s view on poem and prose & Coleridge’s definition of a ‘Poem’.

Assignment

Paper III: Literary Theory & Criticism

Topic:

◙ Write a note on: Coleridge’s view on poem and prose & Coleridge’s definition of a ‘Poem’.

    

Name: Kaushal H. Desai 

Semester: I

Department: M.A. English department

Roll No: 17

Submitted To: Dr. Prof. Dilip Barad

(Head of English Dept.

M. K. S. Bhavnagar University)

◘ Write a note on: Coleridge’s view on poem and prose & Coleridge’s definition of a ‘Poem’.

→ Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

“I should much wish, like the Indian Vishna,

 To float along an infinite ocean creates in

 the flower of the Lotus, and wake once in

                                                                         a million years for a few minutes – just to know

 that I was going to sleep a million years more.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a poet, philosopher, and literary critic whose writings have been enormously influential in the development of modern thought. In his own lifetime, Coleridge was renowned throughout Britain and Europe as one of the Lake Poets, a close-knit group of writers including William Wordsworth and Robert Southey, who resided in the English Lake District. He is greater than great and a genius of his poetic work as we can look in his poems and by that feeling of nature, romance preciousness we feel. Coleridge was the son of a Vicar. He was educated at Christ’s Hospital, London, where he failed to get a degree. In the summer of 1794 Coleridge became friends with the future poet Laureate Southey, with whom he wrote a verse drama. Together they formed a plan to establish a pantisocracy, a utopian community, in New English. They married sisters, but the scheme fell apart and they argued over money and politics. 

Coleridge was also known to many English readers as a talented prose writer, especially as the author of the Biographia Literaria (1817), a literary autobiography; The Friend (1809- 1810), a collection of essays; and Aids to Reflection (1825), a series of aphorisms on religious faith. Coleridge's extraordinary talents were soon noticed by his teachers, who encouraged his reading of classical texts and promoted him to the elite class of "Grecians" destined for the university. Residents of Bristol might have remembered him as a young radical firebrand who delivered some controversial lectures on politics and religion in 1795, while residents of London would more likely have recalled his lectures on literature delivered from 1808 to 1819, which first established his public image as a distinguished man of letters endowed with immense cultural authority in matters of aesthetic theory and practical criticism. However, very few of his contemporaries were aware of the wide range of his prose works, which included a large quantity of newspaper articles, occasional pamphlets on politics and religion, and a vast number of letters, notebooks, marginalia, and manuscript treatises on philosophy and theology. Coleridge's prose gradually became better known during the Victorian period, mainly due to the republication of his major works in England and America, which contributed to his growing reputation as a philosopher, theologian, and literary critic.

♪ First, let’s look on Coleridge’s definition of a ‘Poem’:-

           

            By discussing this we have to know, The difference between Poem and Poetry,

Coleridge considers distinguishing poem from poetry. Coleridge points out that “poetry of the highest kind may exist without metre and even without the contradistinguishing objects of a poem”. He gives example of the writings of Plato, Jeremy Taylor and Bible. The quality of the prose in this writings is equal to that of high poetry. He also asserts that the poem of any length neither can be, nor ought to be, all poetry. Then the question is what is poetry? How is it different from poem? To quote Coleridge: “What is poetry? is so nearly the same question with, what is a poem? The answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other. For it is a distinction resulting from the poetic genius itself, which sustains and modifies the images, thoughts, and emotions of the poet's own mind. Thus the difference between poem and poetry is not given in clear terms. Even John Shawcross writes;

“This distinction between ‘poetry’ and ‘poem’ is not clear,

 and instead of defining poetry he proceeds to describe a poet,

 and from the poet he proceeds to enumerate the characteristics

 of the imagination”.

This is so because ‘poetry’ for Coleridge is an activity of the poet’s mind, and a poem is merely one of the forms of its expression, a verbal expression of that activity, and poetic activity is basically an activity of the imagination.

Poem is a nature function as Coleridge explaining his idea and view towards it by saying that poem is a heart of reality work that poet convey the feeling by rhyme and that took place as golden shield. A poem, therefore, may be defined as, that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.

Thus, according to Coleridge, the poem is distinguished form prose compositions by its immediate object. The immediate object of prose is to give truth and that of poem is to please. He again distinguishes those prose compositions (romance and novels) from poem whose object is similar to poem i.e. to please. He calls this poem a legitimate poem and defines it as, “it must be one, the parts of which mutually support and explain each other; all in their proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose and known influences of metrical arrangement”. Therefore, the legitimate poem is a composition in which the rhyme and the metre bear an organic relation to the total work.  While reading this sort of poem “the reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasurable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself”. Here Coleridge asserts the importance of the impression created by the harmonious whole of the poem. To him, not one or other part but the entire effect, the journey of reading poem should be pleasurable. Thus Coleridge puts an end to the age old controversy whether the end of poem is instruction or delight. Its aim is definitely to give pleasure, and further poem has its own distinctive pleasure, pleasure arising from the parts, and this pleasure of the parts supports and increases the pleasure of the whole.

Here, David Daiches further writes in A Critical History of English Literature,

“The employment of the secondary imagination is a poetic activity, and we can see why Coleridge is let from a discussion of a poem to a discussion of the poet’s activity when we realize that for him the poet belongs to the larger company of those who are distinguished by the activity of their imagination.”

By virtue of his imagination, which is a synthetic and magical power, he harmonize and blends together various elements and thus diffuses a tone and spirit of unity over the whole. It manifests itself most clearly in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities such as,

 (I) Of sameness, with difference,

(II) Of the general, with the concrete,

(III) The idea, with the image,

(IV) The individual, with the representative,

(V) The sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects,

(VI) A more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order,

(VI) Judgment with enthusiasm. And while this imagination blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, it subordinates to nature, the manner to the matter, and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poem.

 Coleridge sought to give the charm of novelty to things of everyday objects - by making supernatural natural. He lived in the world of fancy and thoughts, and for him poem is everything is tell and nothing is say. We can say this view of him towered poem is a charm to convey the feeling and in the best way. The treatment and subject matter should be, to quoted here, Coleridge,

“The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sun-set diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature.”

Hence, Coleridge is the first English critic who based his literary criticism on philosophical principles. While critics before him had been content to turn a poem inside out and to discourse on its merits and demerits, Coleridge busied himself with the basic question of ‘how it came to be there at all’. He was more interested in the creative process that made it, what it was, then in the finished product.

♫ Coleridge’s view on poem and prose:-

• Let’s look on both perspectives first;

♠ Coleridge’s view on Poem: The poem contains the same elements as a prose composition. But the difference is between the combination of those elements and objects aimed at in both the composition.

“In Imaginative power and Narrative Skills, Coleridge surpassed Wordsworth”

 According to the difference of the object will be the difference of the combination. If the object of the poet may simply be to facilitate the memory to recollect (remember) certain facts, he would make use of certain artificial arrangement of words with the help of metre. As a result composition will be a poem, merely because it is distinguished from composition in prose by metre, or by rhyme. In this, the lowest sense, one might attribute the name of a poem to the well-known enumeration of the days in the several months;

“Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November, &c.”

Rhyme:

Most traditional poems use rhyme as a basic device for holding the poem together. Rhyme is the agreement in sound between words or syllables. The best way to think of rhyme is not as a series of lock stepping sound effects but as a system of echoes. Poets use rhyme to recall earlier words, to emphasize certain points, and to make their language memorable. In fact, rhymes can be extremely effective in making language take hold in a reader’s mind.

• Lines from S.T. Coleridge’s “The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner”;

“And I had done a hellish thing

And it would work’em woe:

For all averred, I had killed the bird

That made the breeze to blow. Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay,

That made the breeze to blow.”

♠ Coleridge’s view on Prose: The conception on the matters and situation take place in the creational way to drown in hierarchy that can better impact in humans mind. We see that a poem contains the same elements as a prose composition; the difference therefore must consist in a different combination of them, in consequence of a different object proposed. Prose writings and its immediate purpose and ultimate end. In scientific and historical composition, the immediate purpose is to convey the truth facts. In the prose works of other kinds romances and novels, to give pleasure in the immediate purpose and the ultimate end may be to give truth. Thus, the communication of pleasure may be the immediate object of a work not metrically composed. Coleridge, as the editor of her father's posthumously published prose works. The Biographia Literaria was widely read and reviewed at the time of its original publication and it remains the best known of Coleridge's prose works.

            It’s a type of the view towards the reader and perspective through the art and it’s tale well, we can say that more to think and more to growth by that also it’s difficult to determine but the fact is always be like this to order such as words in their best order.

♣ Now, let’s see his view towered both Poem and Prose:

           

                        “We may say that Element of mysticism in diction - he differentiates prose and poetry in diction.”

            The creation on purpose that mixture in what to say that convey in the prose and poem it’s a simple way that can make magical thought, imagination and muse. He determines that “Would then the mere super addition of metre, with or without rhyme, entitle these to the name of poems?” To this Coleridge replies that if metre is super added the other parts of the composition also must harmonise with it. In order to deserve the name poem each part of the composition, including metre, rhyme, diction and theme must harmonise with the wholeness of the composition. Well, in prose the things are uncertain to say but by the derived the nature to tale that can be prepare in such order.

           

            In fact controversy is not seldom excited in consequence of the disputants attaching each a different meaning to the same word; and in few instances has this been more striking, than in disputes concerning the present subject. If a man chooses to call every composition a poem, which is rhyme, or measure, or both, I must leave his opinion uncontroverted. The distinction is at least competent to characterize the writer's intention. If it were subjoined, that the whole is likewise entertaining or affecting, as a tale, or as a series of interesting reflections, I of course admit this as another fit ingredient of a poem, and an additional merit.

            But if the definition sought for be that of a legitimate poem, I answer, it must be one, the parts of which mutually support and explain each other; all in their proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose and known influences of metrical arrangement.   

The philosophic critics of all ages coincide with the ultimate judgement of all countries, in equally denying the praises of a just poem, on the one hand, to a series of striking lines or distichs, each of which absorbing the whole attention of the reader to itself disjoins it from its context, and makes it a separate whole, instead of an harmonizing part; and on the other hand, to an unsustained composition, from which the reader,

 ‘collects rapidly the general result unattracted by the component parts.’

The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasurable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself. Prose is to drown the artistic way the peaceful design to say. Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power; or like the path of sound through the air; at every step he pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him onward.

Moreover, Coleridge busied himself with the basic question of ‘how it came to be there at all’. He was more interested in the creative process that made it, what it was, then in the finished product. It’s a renew of the people and take it as a new welcome. Well, in this way,

Coleridge’s goal is to;

“discover what the qualities in a poem are, which may be deemed promises and specific symptoms of poetic power, as distinguished from general talent determined to poetic composition by accidental motives, by an act of the will, rather than by the inspiration of a genial and productive nature”

Coleridge has always been confronted with a daunting problem in the sheer volume and incredible variety of his writings. His career as an intellectual figure spans several decades and encompasses major works in several discrete fields, including poetry, criticism, philosophy, and theology. The great variety of Coleridge's achievement, and the incomplete or provisional state of most of his writings, poses an enormous obstacle for any reader. Yet the richness and subtlety of his prose style, his startling and often profound insights, and his active, inquiring quality of mind provide ample recompense. Coleridge is now generally regarded as the most profound and significant prose writer of the English Romantic period. No longer dismissed as a mere footnote to his poetry, his prose is coming to be understood as an important achievement in its own right, with continued relevance to the fundamental issues of our own times.

Imagery, “affecting incidents; just thoughts; interesting personal or domestic feelings; and with these the art of their combination or intertexture in the form of a poem and prose.”

Here, we see Coleridge sometimes seems inconsistent in the development of essential terms and concepts; but his repeated avowal of "the necessity of bottoming on fixed Principles" lends rigor and relevance to all of his prose writings, far beyond their immediate context. In "Coleridge" (1840) John Stuart Mill argued that Coleridge's essential contribution to political discourse is precisely this commitment to absolute principle, as opposed to Jeremy Bentham's narrowly utilitarian views. Coleridge's 1795 lectures elucidate the early development of his quest for absolute principles in politics, philosophy, and religion. Henceforth his writing would celebrate the power of the imagination as it seeks to counter the tyranny of objects. This inward turn is also a linguistic turn, since it invokes the power of language to determine our conception of what we perceive. The "Dejection Ode" is the last of Coleridge's great poems, and the end of his long love affair with the beautiful objects of the natural world; yet it also marks a new beginning in his career as a prose writer, as he struggled to discover words adequate to convey the essential meaning of human experience, the ultimate questions of being and knowledge.

To be concluding:

            Hence, through all the details and faces the concept is clear, Coleridge’s view of poem and prose and he says that;

            “I wish our cleaver young poets would remember my homely definition of prose and poem; that is,

“Prose - words in their best order;

Poem - the best words in the best order.”

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