LITERARY CRITICISM

Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria has been called the best piece of literary criticism in English and the most annoying book in any language. In the Shakespearean Criticism and the Miscellaneous Criticism, edited by T. M. Raysor, is to be found most of the rest of the literary criticism. The Anima Poetae, edited by E. H. Coleridge, is a choice small selection of literary pieces from the notebooks. I reprint here a few items in order to give them more accurately, particularly item 122 (see pp. 155-6) on which so much ink has been needlessly spilt.

Coleridge has received very high praise as a critic but never a full study of his principles and methods of criticism. Yet his theory of the imagination, and his application of it in discussing the dynamic unity of literary works, particularly Shakespeare’s plays, his dismissal of the whole paraphernalia of genres and the rules for them, his insistence on the necessity of seeing a work of imagination not by some external standard but in relation to the writer’s purposes, and his view of poetry as excluding nothing and involving the harmonious reconciliation of everything, transformed English criticism and helped to transform English literature. Even some anti-romantic poets and critics of our time have been more influenced by him, directly or indirectly, than they appear to recognize.

The best thing about his criticism is that it is not necessary to agree with it in order to be stimulated by it and to find it intelligent.

For a clarifying brief study of Coleridge as critic there is nothing more central than Professor Basil Willey’s Warton Lecture on ‘Coleridge on Imagination and Fancy’ (Proceedings of the British Academy, 1946). Mr. Herbert Read’s recently published lecture, Coleridge as Critic, Faber and Faber, 1949, sketches in some of the philosophical background of Coleridge’s criticism, and assigns him a place in the history of existentialism.