On Poetry and Philosophy: Romantic Feeling and Theory in Coleridge and Schelling

Abstract

If there is a single feature of Coleridge’s writing by which (at least in academic circles) he is most often distinguished from other English Romantics, it is his intellectualism. Though Keats’s criticism of his inability to remain ‘content with half-knowledge’ has undergone numerous modifications in succeeding centuries, indeed, the Romantic philosophical tendencies which (among other qualities) Coleridge’s work exemplifies are still not infrequently the target of critical deprecation.¹ T. S. Eliot’s remark that Biographia shows ‘the disastrous effects of long dissipation and stupefaction of his powers in transcendental metaphysics’ is perhaps the most absurd of twentieth-century assessments; yet it is chiefly feminist critics who now most energetically deprecate Coleridge’s intellectualism, especially as exemplifying the pursuit of individual power by which Mellor, in particular, characterizes the work of male Romantics.² Despite the prestige which his literary theories (in particular) have enjoyed since the Victorian period, moreover, many are in doubt as to the relationship between the extremes of abstraction which characterize much of his later thought, and the vigour and concreteness of his language and imagery in poems such as ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Ancient Mariner’.