Samuel Taylor Coleridge Definition of Poetry

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Definition Of Poetry (1836)
[from: Shakespeare, With introductory matter on Poetry, the Drama, and the Stage. ]
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/coleridge/samuel_taylor/shakespeare-ben-jonson-beaumont-and-
fletcher/chapter1.html
Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to
metre. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication, of truth; the
proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure. This definition is
useful; but as it would include novels and other works of fiction, which yet we do not call poems, there
must be some additional character by which poetry is not only divided from opposites, but likewise
distinguished from disparate, though similar, modes of composition. Now how is this to be effected? In
animated prose, the beauties of nature, and the passions and accidents of human nature, are often
expressed in that natural language which the contemplation of them would suggest to a pure and
benevolent mind; yet still neither we nor the writers call such a work a poem, though no work could
deserve that name which did not include all this, together with something else. What is this? It is that
pleasurable emotion, that peculiar state and degree of excitement, which arises in the poet himself in
the act of composition;—and in order to understand this, we must combine a more than ordinary
sympathy with the objects, emotions, or incidents contemplated by the poet, consequent on a more
than common sensibility, with a more than ordinary activity of the mind in respect of the fancy and the
imagination. Hence is produced a more vivid reflection of the truths of nature and of the human heart,
united with a constant activity modifying and correcting these truths by that sort of pleasurable
emotion, which the exertion of all our faculties gives in a certain degree; but which can only be felt in
perfection under the full play of those powers of mind, which are spontaneous rather than voluntary,
and in which the effort required bears no proportion to the activity enjoyed. This is the state which
permits the production of a highly pleasurable whole, of which each part shall also communicate for
itself a distinct and conscious pleasure; and hence arises the definition, which I trust is now intelligible,
that poetry, or rather a poem, is a species of composition, opposed to science, as having intellectual
pleasure for its object, and as attaining its end by the use of language natural to us in a state of
excitement,—but distinguished from other species of composition, not excluded by the former criterion,
by permitting a pleasure from the whole consistent with a consciousness of pleasure from the
component parts;—and the perfection of which is, to communicate from each part the greatest
immediate pleasure compatible with the largest sum of pleasure on the whole. This, of course, will vary
with the different modes of poetry;—and that splendour of particular lines, which would be worthy of
admiration in an impassioned elegy, or a short indignant satire, would be a blemish and proof of vile
taste in a tragedy or an epic poem.
It is remarkable, by the way, that Milton in three incidental words has implied all which for the purposes
of more distinct apprehension, which at first must be slow-paced in order to be distinct, I have
endeavoured to develope in a precise and strictly adequate definition. Speaking of poetry, he says, as in
a parenthesis, “which is simple, sensuous, passionate.” How awful is the power of words!—fearful often
in their consequences when merely felt, not understood; but most awful when both felt and
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understood!—Had these three words only been properly understood by, and present in the minds of,
general readers, not only almost a library of false poetry would have been either precluded or still-born,
but, what is of more consequence, works truly excellent and capable of enlarging the understanding,
warming and purifying the heart, and placing in the centre of the whole being the germs of noble and
manlike actions, would have been the common diet of the intellect instead. For the first condition,
simplicity,—while, on the one hand, it distinguishes poetry from the arduous processes of science,
labouring towards an end not yet arrived at, and supposes a smooth and finished road, on which the
reader is to walk onward easily, with streams murmuring by his side, and trees and flowers and human
dwellings to make his journey as delightful as the object of it is desirable, instead of having to toil with
the pioneers and painfully make the road on which others are to travel,—precludes, on the other hand,
every affectation and morbid peculiarity;—the second condition, sensuousness, insures that framework
of objectivity, that definiteness and articulation of imagery, and that modification of the images
themselves, without which poetry becomes flattened into mere didactics of practice, or evaporated into
a hazy, unthoughtful, day-dreaming; and the third condition, passion, provides that neither thought nor
imagery shall be simply objective, but that the passio vera of humanity shall warm and animate both.
To return, however, to the previous definition, this most general and distinctive character of a poem
originates in the poetic genius itself; and though it comprises whatever can with any propriety be called
a poem (unless that word be a mere lazy synonym for a composition in metre), it yet becomes a just,
and not merely discriminative, but full and adequate, definition of poetry in its highest and most
peculiar sense, only so far as the distinction still results from the poetic genius, which sustains and
modifies the emotions, thoughts, and vivid representations of the poem by the energy without effort of
the poet’s own mind,—by the spontaneous activity of his imagination and fancy, and by whatever else
with these reveals itself in the balancing and reconciling of opposite or discordant qualities, sameness
with difference, a sense of novelty and freshness with old or customary objects, a more than usual state
of emotion with more than usual order, self-possession and judgment with enthusiasm and vehement
feeling,—and which, while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art
to nature, the manner to the matter, and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the images,
passions, characters, and incidents of the poem:—

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Definition Of Poetry (1836)

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