What is the main idea of Biographia Literaria?
In one of the most famous passages in Biographia Literaria, Coleridge offers a theory of creativity (pp. 95-96). He divides imagination into primary and secondary. Primary imagination is common to all humans: it enables us to perceive and make sense of the world.
What is Coleridge's idea of a good poet expressed in Biographia Literaria?
Coleridge believes that the poet's soul is the appropriate place of poetic activity. A poet has poetic genius. He modifies the feelings, thoughts, emotions and images of his own mind. He is a great modifier of different emotions.
Who has written Biographia Literaria?
Samuel Taylor ColeridgeBiographia Literaria / AuthorSamuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He also shared volumes and collaborated with Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Charles Lloyd. Wikipedia
What is Coleridge's theory of imagination?
Imagination- Coleridge‟s “esemplastic” power is intuitive, unitive, faculty that sees the Whole behind the parts, the One behind the many. Where reason analyzes and reduces into parts, Imagination puts the parts back together into a Whole and takes us to the hidden metaphysical unity behind multiplicity.
What is Coleridge's theory of poetry?
Coleridge established the conception of organic theory of literature and the modern criticism of English literature was originated by him. He considers that the poetry is the synthesis of the whole activity of the poet. So poetry is connected to the highest value of art.
What is Coleridge's idea of fancy?
According to Coleridge, imagination is the faculty associated with creativity and the power to shape and unify, while fancy, dependent on and inferior to imagination, is merely “associative.”
Why was Biographia Literaria written?
The work was originally intended as a preface to a collected volume of his poems, explaining and justifying his own style and practice in poetry.
What are the features of Coleridge's poetry?
All Traits of Romanticism: His poems are an epitome of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality (Ideals of the French Revolution). Also, individualism, sensuousness, love for Nature, inspiration from self can be seen as embellishments in his works.
What is Coleridge most famous poem?
God save thee, ancient Mariner!'God save thee, ancient Mariner! Written in 1797-8, this is Coleridge's most famous poem – it first appeared in Lyrical Ballads.
What are the two types of imagination according to Coleridge?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge divides imagination into two parts: the primary and secondary imagination.
What type of work is Biographia Literaria?
Overview. The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge published Biographia Literaria, his semiautobiographical work on aesthetic theory, in 1817.
What is the philosophy of Coleridge?
For Coleridge, the essence of the universe is motion, and motion is driven by a dynamic polarity of forces that is both inherent in the world as potential and acting inherently in all manifestations.
What are the different views expressed by Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria XIV about imagination and fancy discuss?
This discussion regarding the difference between fancy and imagination is in chapter XIII of "Biographia Literaria" {1817} but it is incomplete and left abruptly. Coleridge points out that, the mind becomes mechanical, a mere association of ideas, nature without life under the impact of fancy.
What are Coleridge views on poetry as explained in Chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria?
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.
What does the poet do as stated by Coleridge in Chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria?
In Chapter XIV of Biographia Literaria, Coleridge's view on nature and function of poetry is discussed in philosophical terms. The poet within Coleridge discusses the difference between poetry and prose, and the immediate function of poetry, whereas the philosopher discusses the difference between poetry and poem.
What is Coleridge's best poem?
'God save thee, ancient Mariner! Written in 1797-8, this is Coleridge's most famous poem – it first appeared in Lyrical Ballads.
What is the biographia literaria?
The Biographia Literaria is a critical autobiography by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published in 1817 in two volumes. Its working title was 'Autobiographia Literaria'. The formative influences on the work were Wordsworth's theory of poetry, the Kantian view of imagination as a shaping power (for which Coleridge later coined the neologism "esemplastic"), various post-Kantian writers including F.W.J. von Schelling, and the earlier influences of the empiricist school, including David Hartley and the Associationist psychology.
When was the biographia literaria published?
1817. The Biographia Literaria is a critical autobiography by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published in 1817 in two volumes. Its working title was 'Autobiographia Literaria'.
What is Coleridge's autobiography?
The work grew to a literary autobiography, covering his education and studies, and his early literary adventures, an extended criticism of William Wordsworth 's theory of poetry as given in the 'Preface' to the Lyrical Ballads (a work on which Coleridge collaborated), and a statement of his philosophical views.
Who defined the imagination?
The famous definition of the imagination emerges from a discussion of Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling , amongst others. (Being fluent in German, Coleridge was one of the first major English literary figures to discuss Schelling's ideas, in particular.)
Is Tristram Shandy's biography linear?
The work is long and seemingly loosely structured, and although there are autobiographical elements, it is not a straightforward or linear autobiography. Its subtitle, 'Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions', alludes to The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, suggesting that the formal qualities of the Biographia are intentional. The form is also meditative. As Kathleen Wheeler shows, the work is playful and acutely aware of the active role of the reader in reading.
When was the biographia literaria published?
Last Reviewed on March 4, 2020, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 360. The Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge was published in 1817. It is autobiographical in nature and discusses Coleridge's sense of the stages that a poet goes through during their lifetime, though not in chronological order.
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What does Coleridge say about the evolution of writers?
Coleridge muses on the evolution of writers, using writers' predilection for compound words as an illustration of their maturity. He notes that even famous writers such as Milton and Shakespeare moved away from such articulations as they evolved.
What is the primary imagination?
He distinguishes the “primary,” which he describes as the divine ability to create, the source of all animate power. The “secondary” imagination is the human ability to create through the inventive perception and recollection of images. Last is the “fancy,” which is simply the ability to remember.
What is the name of the book that Coleridge wrote about his secondary education?
Ostensibly a literary biography, Biographia Literaria: Or, Biograhical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, is also one of the greatest works of literary criticism. Coleridge begins by discussing his secondary education, particularly in classical poetry, under James Bowyer at Christ’s Hospital Grammar School.
Overview
The Biographia Literaria is a critical autobiography by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published in 1817 in two volumes. Its working title was 'Autobiographia Literaria'. The formative influences on the work were Wordsworth's theory of poetry, the Kantian view of imagination as a shaping power (for which Coleridge later coined the neologism "esemplastic"), various post-Kantian writers including F.W.J. von Schelling, and the earlier influences of the empiricist school, including David Hartley a…
Structure and tone
The work is long and seemingly loosely structured, and although there are autobiographical elements, it is not a straightforward or linear autobiography. Its subtitle, 'Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions', alludes to The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, suggesting that the formal qualities of the Biographia are intentional. The form is also meditative. As Kathleen Wheeler shows, the work is playful and acutely aware of the activ…
Critical reaction
Critics have reacted strongly to the Biographia Literaria. Some early readers thought it demonstrated Coleridge's opiate-driven decline into ill health, and soon after Coleridge's death he was accused of plagiarising Schelling. But by the early twentieth century it had emerged as a major if puzzling work in criticism and theory, with George Saintsbury placing Coleridge next to Aristotle and Longinus in his influential History of 1902-04. Recent criticism has been divided between th…
Content
The work was originally intended as a preface to a collected volume of his poems, explaining and justifying his own style and practice in poetry. The work grew to a literary autobiography, covering his education and studies, and his early literary adventures, an extended criticism of William Wordsworth's theory of poetry as given in the 'Preface' to the Lyrical Ballads (a work on which Coleridge collaborated), and a statement of his philosophical views.
Imagination
The first volume is mainly concerned with the evolution of his philosophic views. At first an adherent of the associationist psychology of the philosopher David Hartley, he came to discard this mechanical system for the belief that the mind is not a passive but an active agent in the apprehension of reality. The author believed in the "self-sufficing power of absolute Genius" and distinguished between genius and talent as between "an egg and an egg-shell". The first volume …
Wordsworth and poetic diction
The later chapters of the book deal with the nature of poetry and with the question of diction raised by Wordsworth. While maintaining a general agreement with Wordsworth's point of view, Coleridge elaborately refutes his principle that the language of poetry should be one taken with due exceptions from the mouths of men in real life, and that there can be no essential difference between the language of prose and of metrical composition. A critique on the qualities of Words…
The missing transcendental deduction
At the beginning of chapter 13, Coleridge attempts to bring his philosophical argument to a head with the following claim:
DESCARTES, speaking as a naturalist, and in imitation of Archimedes, said, give me matter and motion and I will construct you the universe…. In the same sense the transcendental philosopher says; grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, …
Bibliography
• Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Edited by James Engell. Princeton: PUP/Bollingen, 1983. ISBN 0-691-01861-8
• Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. (1817) Edited by Nigel Leask. (London: J. M. Dent, 1997. ISBN 0-460-87332-6