Introduction About Coleridge's Work

By Author: Christ Pual
Total Articles: 55
Comment this article

For Brice, the early poem Religious Musings, with its confident assertion of the unclouded vision of the elect and the impending Second Coming, gave way, in the wake of the disasters in revolutionary France and Coleridge's personal distress, to an anxiety that far from reading symbolic meanings in the forms of nature and history, he may simply have been projecting them from his all too fallen self. This seems a little strained in respect to 'Frost at Midnight': to say that the 'dim sympathies' Coleridge sees between himself and the film on the grate represent 'simply an act of Thomas Sabo Charms narcissistic projection that he instantly recognizes and condemns' overlooks the poem's meditative tone. On the other hand, Brice's interpretation illuminates 'Dejection: An Ode' well, and opens an avenue into much of Coleridge's later work.

In an analysis of Coleridge's sympathetic explanation of the vision suffered by Luther, when the latter supposedly hurled an inkpot at the devil he saw appearing in his room, Brice teases out the uncomfortable closeness of symbolic ...
... perception to delusion. Coleridge's fear of delusion emerges again through a detailed reading of Lay Sermons. Here, notes Brice, Coleridge ventures to interpret the book of the world with much less confidence than he displays in interpreting the Bible, and so betrays his uneasiness about the argument from design that he is trying to sustain. This line of thought could have been pursued into Coleridge's eventual demolition of the design argument in the Opus Maximum. Brice, however, steers equally appropriately into Aids to Reflection, a work that insists powerfully on the fallen status of human nature. For Brice, the mature Coleridge's knotty meditation on the way analogical language may convey spiritual truths ultimately gives rise to a deflationary conclusion: a symbolic expression 'is no more or less than a metaphor one has faith in' (p. 200). All his Thomas Sabo Jewellery attempts to read a divine script in nature, then, collapse into a slightly desperate appeal to 'faith and revelation' in the face of Hume's sceptical fork. Though tenable from a modern perspective, Brice's reading falters on the claim that Coleridge's recommendation of faith 'robbed him of his ability to communicate with his audience and age' (p. 190). On the contrary, the immense popularity of Aids of Reflection in the nineteenth century owed much to its reputation as a convincing rebuttal of scepticism.

The lucidity and rigour of Coleridge and Scepticism should recommend it not just to Coleridgeans, but to any reader interested in interactions between literature and philosophy in the long eighteenth century. The work exhibits, however, the very modesty that it traces in the philosophers under discussion, leaving many suggestive points of departure behind above all the complex question of Coleridge's interpretation of Kantian aesthetics.