Stop, Christian passer-by!—Stop, child of God, an adjectival modification in nominal form of the ... more Stop, Christian passer-by!—Stop, child of God, an adjectival modification in nominal form of the noun And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod "poet," but as a verbal form in the active voice, thereby in A poet lies, or that which once seem'd he. dicating the type of activity in which the poet engages. In O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.; stead of once "seeming" a poet, in the sense of appearing That he who many a year with toil of breath at one time to have been a poet, the author is now consid Found death in life, may here find life in death! ered a "poet of seeming" in the sense of creating appear Mcrcy for praise—to be forgiven for fame ances in verbal art form. The idea that Coleridge was a He ask'd, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same! "poet of seeming" instead of merely seeming to have been (all poems cited from E. H. Coleridge, ed [1912]) a poet offers us a much wider prospect from which we can come to reconsider some of the later poems. This sense of The "Epitaph" of S.T.C. might be taken as a straightthe word "seem'd" in the "Epitaph" uncovers a much forward request for prayers for the soul of the departed auricher and more fruitful meaning, indicating the manner of thor and an exhortation to live in the hope of Christ's poeticization of the author, and giving the reader a clue for mercy and forgiveness, which was the hope of the author. understanding the content of the later Coleridge, which is A pious approach to the epitaph would immediately evoke held up for reconsideration by the very words of the author that response: a dutiful prayer out of respect for the dead himself. And such a reconsideration will eventually lead us and a resolve to live a Christian life reformed from pride. back to the "Epitaph" of S.T.C., allowing for a reconstruc However, the "Epitaph" is also a poem, a succinct comtion, on the basis of some of the later poems, of a fuller mentary on the life and work of the poet himself, and a remeaning of the Christian paradox here expressed: "That flection and assessment of the intentions and attainments he who many a year with toil of breath / Found death in of that poetic life. As such, the "Epitaph" as a literary work life, may here find life in death" (Epitaph, 5-6).1 directs us not to a contemplation of the life after the death of the poet, as requested, but to a consideration of the life The shift in assigning the epistemological value of before the death of the poet, and, particularly, to that life as 'seem'd' from Coleridge qua poet to poet qua poet is not an a poetic life. arbitrary one. The shift in such thinking amounts to a re consideration in poetry of the poetic art as such, and the The manner in which Coleridge pauses to identify meaning or substance of the products of that art. This type himself as a poet might be put down to humility, for which of critical thinking Coleridge was wont to do in his critical fame was forsaken in favor of mercy and forgiveness; or it and philosophical writings; however, the exploration of this might be explained as an indication of this sense of failure topic was not confined to those types of writing alone, but as a poet, the type of failure which is most emphatically and was carried over into his poetry as well. Exploring how exquisitely expressed in "Dejection: An Ode." Coleridge came to understand poetic practice and its prod ucts in his later poetry, will reveal the meaning of what I My genial spirits fail; have called a "poetry of something," insofar as this charac An what can these avail terization can be made of his poetry.2 To lift the smothering weight from off my breast? It were a vain endeavour, The question of the reality of the imagination and its Though I should gaze for ever products is raised in a short poem in dialogue form called On that green light that lingers in the west: "Phantom or Fact." The author lying in bed imagines a I may not hope from outward forms to win form which visits his room evoking a love that is so real and The passion and the life, whose fountains are within (39pure that the imagination seems not in control of the im 46). age. Though a product of the mind, its form and reality appears to come from without: " 'Twas my own spirit The harmony between the subjective and the objective, the newly come from heaven, / Wooing its gentle way into my natural and the spiritual, which was the ideal of Coleridge's soul!" (5-6) The effect of this image upon the author is poetic vision, is attained and sustained by the imagination, questionable, producing a change without a change, and a the power he lamented the loss of in "Dejection." The rerecognition without a recognition: " 'Twas all another, fea sult is alienation, the isolation of the soul from nature, and ture, look, and frame, / And still, methought, I knew, it was the suspension of joy in the perception of beauty. Theabilthe same!" (11-12) The riddling description of this brief oc ity of the young poet was bright but…
Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, 2010
I PROPOSE IN THIS ARTICLE to explore C. S. Lewis's notion of the self as represented in The G... more I PROPOSE IN THIS ARTICLE to explore C. S. Lewis's notion of the self as represented in The Great Divorce. (1) In particular, I wish to address the question of Lewis's rhetorical strategy, his use of the tropes of allegory and symbol, as a way of representing the Christian understanding of sin and redemption against the backdrop of modernity's view of human nature. In key respects, The Great Divorce can be seen as a modernized version of Dante's Divine Comedy. The parallel between the two can be seen in the attempt to depict the choices of souls and their divergent destinations in either heaven or hell, as seen after death. This is the drama that undergirds the entire narrative in The Great Divorce, with the title of the work indicating the fundamental disjunction between choosing heaven or hell, a choice offered to each soul in a holiday from hell. The parallel to this in The Divine Comedy is seen most clearly in Dante's depiction of the confluence of human freedom and divine justice, presented in canto II of the Inferno in the image of lost souls who, upon entering Charon's boat to be carried across the River Acheron, are said by Virgil to choose to enter Hell: all those who perish in the wrath of God assemble here from all parts of the earth; they want to cross the river, they are eager; it is Divine Justice that spurs them on, turning the fear they have into desire. (2) Lewis's general depiction of the possibilities open to the human soul, which find their trajectories in two diametrically opposed destinations, is in agreement with Dante's representation of heaven and hell as the final end of the opposite and ultimately irreconcilable desires of love and hatred for self, nature, and God. However, this parallel, which indicates that Dante and Lewis share a common worldview rooted in an orthodox Christian anthropology and metaphysics, points to a fundamental distinction in their respective modes of representation of the economy of salvation and damnation. For in the Divine Comedy, as seen most clearly in the Inferno, the body is employed as a figure of sinful desire with corporeal and spatial images representative of sin itself. The very opacity of bodies indicates a resistance to the divine will, and the narrowing of the concentric circles of Hell symbolize the narrowing of desire in the direction of self and away from God. The body itself comes to symbolize the sin of which the soul is guilty as the contrapasso in turn fits the sin. For example, in canto XIII of the Inferno, the final end for suicides is to be severed from their own bodies, which will hang from trees, a punishment that mirrors the suicides' act of severing themselves from their earthly lives (see Inferno, canto XII, 103-8). Similarly, in canto XXVIII, Mahomet himself articulates the reason for his particular punishment, which has been incurred through the sin of schism: "'Because I cut the bonds of those so joined, / I bear my head cut off from its life source, / which is back there, alas, with its trunk'" (Inferno, canto XXVIII, 139-41). The point is that justice is done according to the overriding desire of the particular soul, which is confirmed by a comment Virgil makes in canto XIV of the Inferno to Capaneus, whose sin is blasphemy: O Capaneus, since your blustering pride will not be stilled, you are made to suffer more: no torment other than your rage itself could punish your gnawing pride more perfectly. (Inferno, canto XIV, 63-66) In contrast to this, The Great Divorce represents Hell as a place of wide open spaces, indicating the alienation and distance sin creates between souls. This is most clearly represented in the figure of Napoleon, whose palace was visited by two Ghosts after a journey that took "about fifteen thousand years." The house remains with "nothing near it for millions of miles." (3) The ephemeral nature of the inhabitants of Hell--their insubstantiality, indicated by the appellation of "Ghosts"--in contrast with the concreteness of the Solid People and the stark and unyielding reality of Heaven marks the contrast between Lewis's rhetorical strategy and Dante's mode of representation. …
In his room in Malta on February 12, 1805, at precisely 1:30 in the afternoon, Coleridge records ... more In his room in Malta on February 12, 1805, at precisely 1:30 in the afternoon, Coleridge records the decisive moment, after a "7 or 8 year ... passage from Unitarianism," at which the "awful Truth" of the doctrine of the Trinity "burst upon" him. Coleridge wrote in Notebook entry 2448: "No Christ. No God" (Notebooks, 2: 2448). The entry comes after another recorded at noon, in which Coleridge claimed that the "metaphysics and radical theology of the lower Platonists" is in agreement with "the true meaning of Plato, and harmonizable with the doctrines of the orthodox Xstian" (Notebooks, 2: 2447). The Notebooks from this period reveal a confluence of reflections on aesthetics and Christian belief. From these one can conclude that the Mediterranean climate awakened Coleridge's sense how sunlight plays in the cognition of form. Shortly after arriving at Malta, Coleridge drew the following parallel: "The eye cannot behold the Sun ... nor the Soul God ...--The Light shines about, not into them" (Notebooks, 2: 2164). The entries reveal Coleridge's discovering the principles of aesthetic form in the Mediterranean seascape. These are the basic elements: first., the principle of unity in "multeity," a Coleridgean term first presented in the Malta notebooks (Notebooks, 2: 2344); secondly, the distinction, developed later in the Biographia Literaria, between Fancy and images ordered by thought and reality (Notebooks, 2:2543); third, aesthetic intuition, originating in the senses, by and through which the ideal is an object (Notebooks, 2: 2274); fourth, the act of seeking in nature the expression of the human soul, in form (Notebooks, 2: 2546). In all of these elements, the role of light dominates Coleridge's attempts to formulate an account of aesthetic intuition in which natural objects, human, subjectivity, and the spiritual realm in God, coalesce. After Malta, Coleridge traveled to Rome, where he spent a good deal of time looking at Italian paintings. The Notebooks, which are sketchy and incomplete, are dominated by comments on the paintings of American artist, Washington Allston, whom Coleridge met shortly after arriving in Rome. The experience of Italian art and its influence on Coleridge appear in his assessment of Allston's work. "Allston's Landscape" in Diana and Her Nymphs in the Chase is described in detail in a spring, 1806, Notebook entry (2: 2831), with special attention to its composition, whereby the effect of light organizes the parts into a whole. Coleridge catches the way the various elements in the painting are illuminated by sunlight, constituting the form of unity in the painting which he describes as "[t]he divine semitransparent and grey-green Light." The entire effect of this canvas is telescoped, in the very next Notebook entry, onto his aesthetic experience in Rome where he spent the month before at the Vatican and inside the Sistine Chapel: The quiet circle in which Change and Permanence co-exist, not by combination or juxtaposition, but by an absolute annihilation of difference/column of smoke, the fountains before St. Peter's, waterfalls/GOD!--Change without loss--change by a perpetual growth, that the past, & the future included in the Present//oh! it is aweful (Notebooks, 2: 2832). An entry written during a stay at Allston's country villa in Olevano Romano records how Allston's use of light function both to illuminate objects and as a wholly separable component: "What Tone to colors, chiaro-Oscuro to Light & Shade: viz, such a management of them that they form a beautiful whole, independent of the particular Images colored, lit up, or shaded" (Notebooks, 2: 2797). Unfortunately, if Coleridge did make a more fuller record of his aesthetic experiences in Rome, as he says he did, they are lost (see Holmes, 64). But later writings explain how artistic representation, as seen through Allston's paintings, informs his understanding of the way natural symbolism points to spiritual truths. …
This paper explores the key argumentative strategies by which Philip Sidney and Percy Bysshe Shel... more This paper explores the key argumentative strategies by which Philip Sidney and Percy Bysshe Shelley deploy their conceptions of the poet in their prose works defending the place of poetry in English culture. Though Plantonists, both Sidney and Shelley ground their accounts of poetic creativity in the Aristotelian concept of the poet as maker. However, given the different historical, philosophical, and religious contexts which separate these two great theorists of poetic practice, what the poet makes in poetic creation diverges markedly for Sidney and Shelley. My discussion centers on exploring the precise nature of the faculty of imagination in the context of Sidney’s Renaissance understanding of human anthropology, and Shelley’s account of imagination in relation to Enlightenment concepts of modern science and philosophical pragmatism. Both Sidney and Shelley argue for poetry as originating in a divine source of power; this results in the ironic conclusion that Shelley proposes a ...
In his room in Malta on February 12, 1805, at precisely 1:30 in the afternoon, Coleridge records ... more In his room in Malta on February 12, 1805, at precisely 1:30 in the afternoon, Coleridge records the decisive moment, after a "7 or 8 year ... passage from Unitarianism," at which the "awful Truth" of the doctrine of the Trinity "burst upon" him. Coleridge wrote in Notebook entry 2448: "No Christ. No God" (Notebooks, 2: 2448). The entry comes after another recorded at noon, in which Coleridge claimed that the "metaphysics and radical theology of the lower Platonists" is in agreement with "the true meaning of Plato, and harmonizable with the doctrines of the orthodox Xstian" (Notebooks, 2: 2447). The Notebooks from this period reveal a confluence of reflections on aesthetics and Christian belief. From these one can conclude that the Mediterranean climate awakened Coleridge's sense how sunlight plays in the cognition of form. Shortly after arriving at Malta, Coleridge drew the following parallel: "The eye cannot behold the Sun ... nor the Soul God ...--The Light shines about, not into them" (Notebooks, 2: 2164). The entries reveal Coleridge's discovering the principles of aesthetic form in the Mediterranean seascape. These are the basic elements: first., the principle of unity in "multeity," a Coleridgean term first presented in the Malta notebooks (Notebooks, 2: 2344); secondly, the distinction, developed later in the Biographia Literaria, between Fancy and images ordered by thought and reality (Notebooks, 2:2543); third, aesthetic intuition, originating in the senses, by and through which the ideal is an object (Notebooks, 2: 2274); fourth, the act of seeking in nature the expression of the human soul, in form (Notebooks, 2: 2546). In all of these elements, the role of light dominates Coleridge's attempts to formulate an account of aesthetic intuition in which natural objects, human, subjectivity, and the spiritual realm in God, coalesce. After Malta, Coleridge traveled to Rome, where he spent a good deal of time looking at Italian paintings. The Notebooks, which are sketchy and incomplete, are dominated by comments on the paintings of American artist, Washington Allston, whom Coleridge met shortly after arriving in Rome. The experience of Italian art and its influence on Coleridge appear in his assessment of Allston's work. "Allston's Landscape" in Diana and Her Nymphs in the Chase is described in detail in a spring, 1806, Notebook entry (2: 2831), with special attention to its composition, whereby the effect of light organizes the parts into a whole. Coleridge catches the way the various elements in the painting are illuminated by sunlight, constituting the form of unity in the painting which he describes as "[t]he divine semitransparent and grey-green Light." The entire effect of this canvas is telescoped, in the very next Notebook entry, onto his aesthetic experience in Rome where he spent the month before at the Vatican and inside the Sistine Chapel: The quiet circle in which Change and Permanence co-exist, not by combination or juxtaposition, but by an absolute annihilation of difference/column of smoke, the fountains before St. Peter's, waterfalls/GOD!--Change without loss--change by a perpetual growth, that the past, & the future included in the Present//oh! it is aweful (Notebooks, 2: 2832). An entry written during a stay at Allston's country villa in Olevano Romano records how Allston's use of light function both to illuminate objects and as a wholly separable component: "What Tone to colors, chiaro-Oscuro to Light & Shade: viz, such a management of them that they form a beautiful whole, independent of the particular Images colored, lit up, or shaded" (Notebooks, 2: 2797). Unfortunately, if Coleridge did make a more fuller record of his aesthetic experiences in Rome, as he says he did, they are lost (see Holmes, 64). But later writings explain how artistic representation, as seen through Allston's paintings, informs his understanding of the way natural symbolism points to spiritual truths. …
The question of the relationship between Freud and philosophy has been raised and explored in sem... more The question of the relationship between Freud and philosophy has been raised and explored in seminal ways through the linguistic account of Freudian psychoanalysis given by Jacques Lacan, and by the hermeneutic criticism of Freud's works by Paul Ricoeur. In each case, Freudian theory is employed as a method by which symbolic representation is placed under interrogation, and is critically appropriated into a system of signs for Lacan, and a theory of symbolic representation for Ricoeur.' The critical value of Freudian psychoanalytic theory for an understanding of the work of phenomenology in these contexts emerges from the radical critique of consciousness which is at the heart of Freud's project. In the case of Ricoeur, which is my major concern in this essay, Freud reveals the unspoken meaning of Husserlian phenomenology, by recovering the unconscious as the unreflected source of intentionality, thereby linking the method of phenomenological reduction with "an epoch in reverse" that serves to establish the relation between consciousness and the unconscious.2 Ricoeur's analysis of Freud in relation to Husserl recovers the bodily element which is present to intentionality, but which is initially by-passed in the reduction of consciousness secured through the phenomenological attitude. In this, Freudian psychoanalysis links with the phenomenological method as modes of analysis which recover meaning through acts of interpretation: Phenomenology attempts to approach the real history of desire obliquely; starting from a perceptual model of the unconscious, it gradually generalizes that model to embrace all lived or embodied meanings, meanings that are at the same time enacted in the element of language. Psychoanalysis plunges directly into the history of desire, thanks to that history's partial expression in the derealized field of transference. (390; emphasis in original) For Ricoeur, Freudian psychoanalysis recovers the materiality of consciousness which is forgotten in the reduction of the ego to the field of the phenomenological epoche. The present essay returns to these forgotten origins of consciousness in the body by way of an analysis that links Freud to an earlier thinker on dreams: the English poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The justification for this linkage will be established through the course of a dialectical analysis of the accounts given by Coleridge and Freud on the interpretation of the meaning of dreams. Let it suffice to say at this point that at key points in their analyses, Coleridge and Freud share a common ground concerning the origin, phenomenal form, and narrative structure of dreams, and in such a way that sheds light on the nature of consciousness itself, albeit in diametrically opposed ways for each. It is this common point of origin of dreams established by both Coleridge and Freud that allows for their differences on the meaning of dreams as a form of conscious activity to shed light on the economy of symbolic representation within the context of the exchange between subject and object. In this regard, Ricoeur's account of the importance of dreams for an understanding of Freud's critique of consciousness establishes the groundwork for my study: "By making dreams not only the first object of his investigation but a model . . . of all the disguised, substitutive, and fictive expressions of human wishing or desire, Freud invites us to look to dreams themselves for the various relations between desire and language" (5). However, in replacing Husserl in relation to Freud with Coleridge according to Ricoeur's model in the present study, my argument will amplify Ricoeur's claim concerning dreams as a model for Freudian interpretative analysis, to show that Freud's use of dreams as the model for an interpretation of desire reduces all modes of consciousness to fiction, thereby reducing all acts of representation by consciousness to illusion. In doing so, my confrontation of Coleridge with Freud on dreams will suggest a problem with the Husserlian notion of intentionality itself, a problem which Ricoeur's analysis, for all its subtlety and rigor, fails to address. …
Stop, Christian passer-by!—Stop, child of God, an adjectival modification in nominal form of the ... more Stop, Christian passer-by!—Stop, child of God, an adjectival modification in nominal form of the noun And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod "poet," but as a verbal form in the active voice, thereby in A poet lies, or that which once seem'd he. dicating the type of activity in which the poet engages. In O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.; stead of once "seeming" a poet, in the sense of appearing That he who many a year with toil of breath at one time to have been a poet, the author is now consid Found death in life, may here find life in death! ered a "poet of seeming" in the sense of creating appear Mcrcy for praise—to be forgiven for fame ances in verbal art form. The idea that Coleridge was a He ask'd, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same! "poet of seeming" instead of merely seeming to have been (all poems cited from E. H. Coleridge, ed [1912]) a poet offers us a much wider prospect from which we can come to reconsider some of the later poems. This sense of The "Epitaph" of S.T.C. might be taken as a straightthe word "seem'd" in the "Epitaph" uncovers a much forward request for prayers for the soul of the departed auricher and more fruitful meaning, indicating the manner of thor and an exhortation to live in the hope of Christ's poeticization of the author, and giving the reader a clue for mercy and forgiveness, which was the hope of the author. understanding the content of the later Coleridge, which is A pious approach to the epitaph would immediately evoke held up for reconsideration by the very words of the author that response: a dutiful prayer out of respect for the dead himself. And such a reconsideration will eventually lead us and a resolve to live a Christian life reformed from pride. back to the "Epitaph" of S.T.C., allowing for a reconstruc However, the "Epitaph" is also a poem, a succinct comtion, on the basis of some of the later poems, of a fuller mentary on the life and work of the poet himself, and a remeaning of the Christian paradox here expressed: "That flection and assessment of the intentions and attainments he who many a year with toil of breath / Found death in of that poetic life. As such, the "Epitaph" as a literary work life, may here find life in death" (Epitaph, 5-6).1 directs us not to a contemplation of the life after the death of the poet, as requested, but to a consideration of the life The shift in assigning the epistemological value of before the death of the poet, and, particularly, to that life as 'seem'd' from Coleridge qua poet to poet qua poet is not an a poetic life. arbitrary one. The shift in such thinking amounts to a re consideration in poetry of the poetic art as such, and the The manner in which Coleridge pauses to identify meaning or substance of the products of that art. This type himself as a poet might be put down to humility, for which of critical thinking Coleridge was wont to do in his critical fame was forsaken in favor of mercy and forgiveness; or it and philosophical writings; however, the exploration of this might be explained as an indication of this sense of failure topic was not confined to those types of writing alone, but as a poet, the type of failure which is most emphatically and was carried over into his poetry as well. Exploring how exquisitely expressed in "Dejection: An Ode." Coleridge came to understand poetic practice and its prod ucts in his later poetry, will reveal the meaning of what I My genial spirits fail; have called a "poetry of something," insofar as this charac An what can these avail terization can be made of his poetry.2 To lift the smothering weight from off my breast? It were a vain endeavour, The question of the reality of the imagination and its Though I should gaze for ever products is raised in a short poem in dialogue form called On that green light that lingers in the west: "Phantom or Fact." The author lying in bed imagines a I may not hope from outward forms to win form which visits his room evoking a love that is so real and The passion and the life, whose fountains are within (39pure that the imagination seems not in control of the im 46). age. Though a product of the mind, its form and reality appears to come from without: " 'Twas my own spirit The harmony between the subjective and the objective, the newly come from heaven, / Wooing its gentle way into my natural and the spiritual, which was the ideal of Coleridge's soul!" (5-6) The effect of this image upon the author is poetic vision, is attained and sustained by the imagination, questionable, producing a change without a change, and a the power he lamented the loss of in "Dejection." The rerecognition without a recognition: " 'Twas all another, fea sult is alienation, the isolation of the soul from nature, and ture, look, and frame, / And still, methought, I knew, it was the suspension of joy in the perception of beauty. Theabilthe same!" (11-12) The riddling description of this brief oc ity of the young poet was bright but…
Stop, Christian passer-by!—Stop, child of God, an adjectival modification in nominal form of the ... more Stop, Christian passer-by!—Stop, child of God, an adjectival modification in nominal form of the noun And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod "poet," but as a verbal form in the active voice, thereby in A poet lies, or that which once seem'd he. dicating the type of activity in which the poet engages. In O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.; stead of once "seeming" a poet, in the sense of appearing That he who many a year with toil of breath at one time to have been a poet, the author is now consid Found death in life, may here find life in death! ered a "poet of seeming" in the sense of creating appear Mcrcy for praise—to be forgiven for fame ances in verbal art form. The idea that Coleridge was a He ask'd, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same! "poet of seeming" instead of merely seeming to have been (all poems cited from E. H. Coleridge, ed [1912]) a poet offers us a much wider prospect from which we can come to reconsider some of the later poems. This sense of The "Epitaph" of S.T.C. might be taken as a straightthe word "seem'd" in the "Epitaph" uncovers a much forward request for prayers for the soul of the departed auricher and more fruitful meaning, indicating the manner of thor and an exhortation to live in the hope of Christ's poeticization of the author, and giving the reader a clue for mercy and forgiveness, which was the hope of the author. understanding the content of the later Coleridge, which is A pious approach to the epitaph would immediately evoke held up for reconsideration by the very words of the author that response: a dutiful prayer out of respect for the dead himself. And such a reconsideration will eventually lead us and a resolve to live a Christian life reformed from pride. back to the "Epitaph" of S.T.C., allowing for a reconstruc However, the "Epitaph" is also a poem, a succinct comtion, on the basis of some of the later poems, of a fuller mentary on the life and work of the poet himself, and a remeaning of the Christian paradox here expressed: "That flection and assessment of the intentions and attainments he who many a year with toil of breath / Found death in of that poetic life. As such, the "Epitaph" as a literary work life, may here find life in death" (Epitaph, 5-6).1 directs us not to a contemplation of the life after the death of the poet, as requested, but to a consideration of the life The shift in assigning the epistemological value of before the death of the poet, and, particularly, to that life as 'seem'd' from Coleridge qua poet to poet qua poet is not an a poetic life. arbitrary one. The shift in such thinking amounts to a re consideration in poetry of the poetic art as such, and the The manner in which Coleridge pauses to identify meaning or substance of the products of that art. This type himself as a poet might be put down to humility, for which of critical thinking Coleridge was wont to do in his critical fame was forsaken in favor of mercy and forgiveness; or it and philosophical writings; however, the exploration of this might be explained as an indication of this sense of failure topic was not confined to those types of writing alone, but as a poet, the type of failure which is most emphatically and was carried over into his poetry as well. Exploring how exquisitely expressed in "Dejection: An Ode." Coleridge came to understand poetic practice and its prod ucts in his later poetry, will reveal the meaning of what I My genial spirits fail; have called a "poetry of something," insofar as this charac An what can these avail terization can be made of his poetry.2 To lift the smothering weight from off my breast? It were a vain endeavour, The question of the reality of the imagination and its Though I should gaze for ever products is raised in a short poem in dialogue form called On that green light that lingers in the west: "Phantom or Fact." The author lying in bed imagines a I may not hope from outward forms to win form which visits his room evoking a love that is so real and The passion and the life, whose fountains are within (39pure that the imagination seems not in control of the im 46). age. Though a product of the mind, its form and reality appears to come from without: " 'Twas my own spirit The harmony between the subjective and the objective, the newly come from heaven, / Wooing its gentle way into my natural and the spiritual, which was the ideal of Coleridge's soul!" (5-6) The effect of this image upon the author is poetic vision, is attained and sustained by the imagination, questionable, producing a change without a change, and a the power he lamented the loss of in "Dejection." The rerecognition without a recognition: " 'Twas all another, fea sult is alienation, the isolation of the soul from nature, and ture, look, and frame, / And still, methought, I knew, it was the suspension of joy in the perception of beauty. Theabilthe same!" (11-12) The riddling description of this brief oc ity of the young poet was bright but…
Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, 2010
I PROPOSE IN THIS ARTICLE to explore C. S. Lewis's notion of the self as represented in The G... more I PROPOSE IN THIS ARTICLE to explore C. S. Lewis's notion of the self as represented in The Great Divorce. (1) In particular, I wish to address the question of Lewis's rhetorical strategy, his use of the tropes of allegory and symbol, as a way of representing the Christian understanding of sin and redemption against the backdrop of modernity's view of human nature. In key respects, The Great Divorce can be seen as a modernized version of Dante's Divine Comedy. The parallel between the two can be seen in the attempt to depict the choices of souls and their divergent destinations in either heaven or hell, as seen after death. This is the drama that undergirds the entire narrative in The Great Divorce, with the title of the work indicating the fundamental disjunction between choosing heaven or hell, a choice offered to each soul in a holiday from hell. The parallel to this in The Divine Comedy is seen most clearly in Dante's depiction of the confluence of human freedom and divine justice, presented in canto II of the Inferno in the image of lost souls who, upon entering Charon's boat to be carried across the River Acheron, are said by Virgil to choose to enter Hell: all those who perish in the wrath of God assemble here from all parts of the earth; they want to cross the river, they are eager; it is Divine Justice that spurs them on, turning the fear they have into desire. (2) Lewis's general depiction of the possibilities open to the human soul, which find their trajectories in two diametrically opposed destinations, is in agreement with Dante's representation of heaven and hell as the final end of the opposite and ultimately irreconcilable desires of love and hatred for self, nature, and God. However, this parallel, which indicates that Dante and Lewis share a common worldview rooted in an orthodox Christian anthropology and metaphysics, points to a fundamental distinction in their respective modes of representation of the economy of salvation and damnation. For in the Divine Comedy, as seen most clearly in the Inferno, the body is employed as a figure of sinful desire with corporeal and spatial images representative of sin itself. The very opacity of bodies indicates a resistance to the divine will, and the narrowing of the concentric circles of Hell symbolize the narrowing of desire in the direction of self and away from God. The body itself comes to symbolize the sin of which the soul is guilty as the contrapasso in turn fits the sin. For example, in canto XIII of the Inferno, the final end for suicides is to be severed from their own bodies, which will hang from trees, a punishment that mirrors the suicides' act of severing themselves from their earthly lives (see Inferno, canto XII, 103-8). Similarly, in canto XXVIII, Mahomet himself articulates the reason for his particular punishment, which has been incurred through the sin of schism: "'Because I cut the bonds of those so joined, / I bear my head cut off from its life source, / which is back there, alas, with its trunk'" (Inferno, canto XXVIII, 139-41). The point is that justice is done according to the overriding desire of the particular soul, which is confirmed by a comment Virgil makes in canto XIV of the Inferno to Capaneus, whose sin is blasphemy: O Capaneus, since your blustering pride will not be stilled, you are made to suffer more: no torment other than your rage itself could punish your gnawing pride more perfectly. (Inferno, canto XIV, 63-66) In contrast to this, The Great Divorce represents Hell as a place of wide open spaces, indicating the alienation and distance sin creates between souls. This is most clearly represented in the figure of Napoleon, whose palace was visited by two Ghosts after a journey that took "about fifteen thousand years." The house remains with "nothing near it for millions of miles." (3) The ephemeral nature of the inhabitants of Hell--their insubstantiality, indicated by the appellation of "Ghosts"--in contrast with the concreteness of the Solid People and the stark and unyielding reality of Heaven marks the contrast between Lewis's rhetorical strategy and Dante's mode of representation. …
In his room in Malta on February 12, 1805, at precisely 1:30 in the afternoon, Coleridge records ... more In his room in Malta on February 12, 1805, at precisely 1:30 in the afternoon, Coleridge records the decisive moment, after a "7 or 8 year ... passage from Unitarianism," at which the "awful Truth" of the doctrine of the Trinity "burst upon" him. Coleridge wrote in Notebook entry 2448: "No Christ. No God" (Notebooks, 2: 2448). The entry comes after another recorded at noon, in which Coleridge claimed that the "metaphysics and radical theology of the lower Platonists" is in agreement with "the true meaning of Plato, and harmonizable with the doctrines of the orthodox Xstian" (Notebooks, 2: 2447). The Notebooks from this period reveal a confluence of reflections on aesthetics and Christian belief. From these one can conclude that the Mediterranean climate awakened Coleridge's sense how sunlight plays in the cognition of form. Shortly after arriving at Malta, Coleridge drew the following parallel: "The eye cannot behold the Sun ... nor the Soul God ...--The Light shines about, not into them" (Notebooks, 2: 2164). The entries reveal Coleridge's discovering the principles of aesthetic form in the Mediterranean seascape. These are the basic elements: first., the principle of unity in "multeity," a Coleridgean term first presented in the Malta notebooks (Notebooks, 2: 2344); secondly, the distinction, developed later in the Biographia Literaria, between Fancy and images ordered by thought and reality (Notebooks, 2:2543); third, aesthetic intuition, originating in the senses, by and through which the ideal is an object (Notebooks, 2: 2274); fourth, the act of seeking in nature the expression of the human soul, in form (Notebooks, 2: 2546). In all of these elements, the role of light dominates Coleridge's attempts to formulate an account of aesthetic intuition in which natural objects, human, subjectivity, and the spiritual realm in God, coalesce. After Malta, Coleridge traveled to Rome, where he spent a good deal of time looking at Italian paintings. The Notebooks, which are sketchy and incomplete, are dominated by comments on the paintings of American artist, Washington Allston, whom Coleridge met shortly after arriving in Rome. The experience of Italian art and its influence on Coleridge appear in his assessment of Allston's work. "Allston's Landscape" in Diana and Her Nymphs in the Chase is described in detail in a spring, 1806, Notebook entry (2: 2831), with special attention to its composition, whereby the effect of light organizes the parts into a whole. Coleridge catches the way the various elements in the painting are illuminated by sunlight, constituting the form of unity in the painting which he describes as "[t]he divine semitransparent and grey-green Light." The entire effect of this canvas is telescoped, in the very next Notebook entry, onto his aesthetic experience in Rome where he spent the month before at the Vatican and inside the Sistine Chapel: The quiet circle in which Change and Permanence co-exist, not by combination or juxtaposition, but by an absolute annihilation of difference/column of smoke, the fountains before St. Peter's, waterfalls/GOD!--Change without loss--change by a perpetual growth, that the past, & the future included in the Present//oh! it is aweful (Notebooks, 2: 2832). An entry written during a stay at Allston's country villa in Olevano Romano records how Allston's use of light function both to illuminate objects and as a wholly separable component: "What Tone to colors, chiaro-Oscuro to Light & Shade: viz, such a management of them that they form a beautiful whole, independent of the particular Images colored, lit up, or shaded" (Notebooks, 2: 2797). Unfortunately, if Coleridge did make a more fuller record of his aesthetic experiences in Rome, as he says he did, they are lost (see Holmes, 64). But later writings explain how artistic representation, as seen through Allston's paintings, informs his understanding of the way natural symbolism points to spiritual truths. …
This paper explores the key argumentative strategies by which Philip Sidney and Percy Bysshe Shel... more This paper explores the key argumentative strategies by which Philip Sidney and Percy Bysshe Shelley deploy their conceptions of the poet in their prose works defending the place of poetry in English culture. Though Plantonists, both Sidney and Shelley ground their accounts of poetic creativity in the Aristotelian concept of the poet as maker. However, given the different historical, philosophical, and religious contexts which separate these two great theorists of poetic practice, what the poet makes in poetic creation diverges markedly for Sidney and Shelley. My discussion centers on exploring the precise nature of the faculty of imagination in the context of Sidney’s Renaissance understanding of human anthropology, and Shelley’s account of imagination in relation to Enlightenment concepts of modern science and philosophical pragmatism. Both Sidney and Shelley argue for poetry as originating in a divine source of power; this results in the ironic conclusion that Shelley proposes a ...
In his room in Malta on February 12, 1805, at precisely 1:30 in the afternoon, Coleridge records ... more In his room in Malta on February 12, 1805, at precisely 1:30 in the afternoon, Coleridge records the decisive moment, after a "7 or 8 year ... passage from Unitarianism," at which the "awful Truth" of the doctrine of the Trinity "burst upon" him. Coleridge wrote in Notebook entry 2448: "No Christ. No God" (Notebooks, 2: 2448). The entry comes after another recorded at noon, in which Coleridge claimed that the "metaphysics and radical theology of the lower Platonists" is in agreement with "the true meaning of Plato, and harmonizable with the doctrines of the orthodox Xstian" (Notebooks, 2: 2447). The Notebooks from this period reveal a confluence of reflections on aesthetics and Christian belief. From these one can conclude that the Mediterranean climate awakened Coleridge's sense how sunlight plays in the cognition of form. Shortly after arriving at Malta, Coleridge drew the following parallel: "The eye cannot behold the Sun ... nor the Soul God ...--The Light shines about, not into them" (Notebooks, 2: 2164). The entries reveal Coleridge's discovering the principles of aesthetic form in the Mediterranean seascape. These are the basic elements: first., the principle of unity in "multeity," a Coleridgean term first presented in the Malta notebooks (Notebooks, 2: 2344); secondly, the distinction, developed later in the Biographia Literaria, between Fancy and images ordered by thought and reality (Notebooks, 2:2543); third, aesthetic intuition, originating in the senses, by and through which the ideal is an object (Notebooks, 2: 2274); fourth, the act of seeking in nature the expression of the human soul, in form (Notebooks, 2: 2546). In all of these elements, the role of light dominates Coleridge's attempts to formulate an account of aesthetic intuition in which natural objects, human, subjectivity, and the spiritual realm in God, coalesce. After Malta, Coleridge traveled to Rome, where he spent a good deal of time looking at Italian paintings. The Notebooks, which are sketchy and incomplete, are dominated by comments on the paintings of American artist, Washington Allston, whom Coleridge met shortly after arriving in Rome. The experience of Italian art and its influence on Coleridge appear in his assessment of Allston's work. "Allston's Landscape" in Diana and Her Nymphs in the Chase is described in detail in a spring, 1806, Notebook entry (2: 2831), with special attention to its composition, whereby the effect of light organizes the parts into a whole. Coleridge catches the way the various elements in the painting are illuminated by sunlight, constituting the form of unity in the painting which he describes as "[t]he divine semitransparent and grey-green Light." The entire effect of this canvas is telescoped, in the very next Notebook entry, onto his aesthetic experience in Rome where he spent the month before at the Vatican and inside the Sistine Chapel: The quiet circle in which Change and Permanence co-exist, not by combination or juxtaposition, but by an absolute annihilation of difference/column of smoke, the fountains before St. Peter's, waterfalls/GOD!--Change without loss--change by a perpetual growth, that the past, & the future included in the Present//oh! it is aweful (Notebooks, 2: 2832). An entry written during a stay at Allston's country villa in Olevano Romano records how Allston's use of light function both to illuminate objects and as a wholly separable component: "What Tone to colors, chiaro-Oscuro to Light & Shade: viz, such a management of them that they form a beautiful whole, independent of the particular Images colored, lit up, or shaded" (Notebooks, 2: 2797). Unfortunately, if Coleridge did make a more fuller record of his aesthetic experiences in Rome, as he says he did, they are lost (see Holmes, 64). But later writings explain how artistic representation, as seen through Allston's paintings, informs his understanding of the way natural symbolism points to spiritual truths. …
The question of the relationship between Freud and philosophy has been raised and explored in sem... more The question of the relationship between Freud and philosophy has been raised and explored in seminal ways through the linguistic account of Freudian psychoanalysis given by Jacques Lacan, and by the hermeneutic criticism of Freud's works by Paul Ricoeur. In each case, Freudian theory is employed as a method by which symbolic representation is placed under interrogation, and is critically appropriated into a system of signs for Lacan, and a theory of symbolic representation for Ricoeur.' The critical value of Freudian psychoanalytic theory for an understanding of the work of phenomenology in these contexts emerges from the radical critique of consciousness which is at the heart of Freud's project. In the case of Ricoeur, which is my major concern in this essay, Freud reveals the unspoken meaning of Husserlian phenomenology, by recovering the unconscious as the unreflected source of intentionality, thereby linking the method of phenomenological reduction with "an epoch in reverse" that serves to establish the relation between consciousness and the unconscious.2 Ricoeur's analysis of Freud in relation to Husserl recovers the bodily element which is present to intentionality, but which is initially by-passed in the reduction of consciousness secured through the phenomenological attitude. In this, Freudian psychoanalysis links with the phenomenological method as modes of analysis which recover meaning through acts of interpretation: Phenomenology attempts to approach the real history of desire obliquely; starting from a perceptual model of the unconscious, it gradually generalizes that model to embrace all lived or embodied meanings, meanings that are at the same time enacted in the element of language. Psychoanalysis plunges directly into the history of desire, thanks to that history's partial expression in the derealized field of transference. (390; emphasis in original) For Ricoeur, Freudian psychoanalysis recovers the materiality of consciousness which is forgotten in the reduction of the ego to the field of the phenomenological epoche. The present essay returns to these forgotten origins of consciousness in the body by way of an analysis that links Freud to an earlier thinker on dreams: the English poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The justification for this linkage will be established through the course of a dialectical analysis of the accounts given by Coleridge and Freud on the interpretation of the meaning of dreams. Let it suffice to say at this point that at key points in their analyses, Coleridge and Freud share a common ground concerning the origin, phenomenal form, and narrative structure of dreams, and in such a way that sheds light on the nature of consciousness itself, albeit in diametrically opposed ways for each. It is this common point of origin of dreams established by both Coleridge and Freud that allows for their differences on the meaning of dreams as a form of conscious activity to shed light on the economy of symbolic representation within the context of the exchange between subject and object. In this regard, Ricoeur's account of the importance of dreams for an understanding of Freud's critique of consciousness establishes the groundwork for my study: "By making dreams not only the first object of his investigation but a model . . . of all the disguised, substitutive, and fictive expressions of human wishing or desire, Freud invites us to look to dreams themselves for the various relations between desire and language" (5). However, in replacing Husserl in relation to Freud with Coleridge according to Ricoeur's model in the present study, my argument will amplify Ricoeur's claim concerning dreams as a model for Freudian interpretative analysis, to show that Freud's use of dreams as the model for an interpretation of desire reduces all modes of consciousness to fiction, thereby reducing all acts of representation by consciousness to illusion. In doing so, my confrontation of Coleridge with Freud on dreams will suggest a problem with the Husserlian notion of intentionality itself, a problem which Ricoeur's analysis, for all its subtlety and rigor, fails to address. …
Stop, Christian passer-by!—Stop, child of God, an adjectival modification in nominal form of the ... more Stop, Christian passer-by!—Stop, child of God, an adjectival modification in nominal form of the noun And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod "poet," but as a verbal form in the active voice, thereby in A poet lies, or that which once seem'd he. dicating the type of activity in which the poet engages. In O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.; stead of once "seeming" a poet, in the sense of appearing That he who many a year with toil of breath at one time to have been a poet, the author is now consid Found death in life, may here find life in death! ered a "poet of seeming" in the sense of creating appear Mcrcy for praise—to be forgiven for fame ances in verbal art form. The idea that Coleridge was a He ask'd, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same! "poet of seeming" instead of merely seeming to have been (all poems cited from E. H. Coleridge, ed [1912]) a poet offers us a much wider prospect from which we can come to reconsider some of the later poems. This sense of The "Epitaph" of S.T.C. might be taken as a straightthe word "seem'd" in the "Epitaph" uncovers a much forward request for prayers for the soul of the departed auricher and more fruitful meaning, indicating the manner of thor and an exhortation to live in the hope of Christ's poeticization of the author, and giving the reader a clue for mercy and forgiveness, which was the hope of the author. understanding the content of the later Coleridge, which is A pious approach to the epitaph would immediately evoke held up for reconsideration by the very words of the author that response: a dutiful prayer out of respect for the dead himself. And such a reconsideration will eventually lead us and a resolve to live a Christian life reformed from pride. back to the "Epitaph" of S.T.C., allowing for a reconstruc However, the "Epitaph" is also a poem, a succinct comtion, on the basis of some of the later poems, of a fuller mentary on the life and work of the poet himself, and a remeaning of the Christian paradox here expressed: "That flection and assessment of the intentions and attainments he who many a year with toil of breath / Found death in of that poetic life. As such, the "Epitaph" as a literary work life, may here find life in death" (Epitaph, 5-6).1 directs us not to a contemplation of the life after the death of the poet, as requested, but to a consideration of the life The shift in assigning the epistemological value of before the death of the poet, and, particularly, to that life as 'seem'd' from Coleridge qua poet to poet qua poet is not an a poetic life. arbitrary one. The shift in such thinking amounts to a re consideration in poetry of the poetic art as such, and the The manner in which Coleridge pauses to identify meaning or substance of the products of that art. This type himself as a poet might be put down to humility, for which of critical thinking Coleridge was wont to do in his critical fame was forsaken in favor of mercy and forgiveness; or it and philosophical writings; however, the exploration of this might be explained as an indication of this sense of failure topic was not confined to those types of writing alone, but as a poet, the type of failure which is most emphatically and was carried over into his poetry as well. Exploring how exquisitely expressed in "Dejection: An Ode." Coleridge came to understand poetic practice and its prod ucts in his later poetry, will reveal the meaning of what I My genial spirits fail; have called a "poetry of something," insofar as this charac An what can these avail terization can be made of his poetry.2 To lift the smothering weight from off my breast? It were a vain endeavour, The question of the reality of the imagination and its Though I should gaze for ever products is raised in a short poem in dialogue form called On that green light that lingers in the west: "Phantom or Fact." The author lying in bed imagines a I may not hope from outward forms to win form which visits his room evoking a love that is so real and The passion and the life, whose fountains are within (39pure that the imagination seems not in control of the im 46). age. Though a product of the mind, its form and reality appears to come from without: " 'Twas my own spirit The harmony between the subjective and the objective, the newly come from heaven, / Wooing its gentle way into my natural and the spiritual, which was the ideal of Coleridge's soul!" (5-6) The effect of this image upon the author is poetic vision, is attained and sustained by the imagination, questionable, producing a change without a change, and a the power he lamented the loss of in "Dejection." The rerecognition without a recognition: " 'Twas all another, fea sult is alienation, the isolation of the soul from nature, and ture, look, and frame, / And still, methought, I knew, it was the suspension of joy in the perception of beauty. Theabilthe same!" (11-12) The riddling description of this brief oc ity of the young poet was bright but…
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