Semblance and Aesthetic Autonomy in Coleridge’s Criticism

Abstract

In March 1810 Coleridge jotted down a brief but revealing reminder to himself in his notebooks: ‘I wish much to investigate the connection of the Imagination with the Bildungstrieb’ (CN, III, 3744). The specific reference here is possibly to a passage in Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters that considers the different ways ‘der göttliche Bildungstrieb’ (‘the divine impulse to form’) directs itself in the moral world (IX. 6, 58–9; also 331–2). What lay behind Coleridge’s remark was 15 years’ familiarity with Schiller’s work and thought, from his early reading of the plays and his conversations with Beddoes and others in the 1790s to his translation of Wallenstein, his work on the poetry and his study of the aesthetic essays in the first decade of the 1800s. As Coleridge later began to formulate and express his mature aesthetics in the years that followed, in The Friend, Biographia Literaria and the lectures on literature, he continued to draw on Schillerian terms and ideas. The abiding presence of Schiller in Coleridge’s work during these years is the subject of this chapter and the next