However abstruse, whatever its resort to technical terms or neologism, a philosophical argument belongs to verbal and written discourse. This entails questions of 'style'. Different philosophies, different philosophers have their differing styles. A metaphysics, an epistemology will have its voice, often immediately recognisable. In turn, there have been among philosophers literary masters. At the outset, ancient Greek thought did not separate the poetic from the philosophical. The poem, as in the case of Parmenides or Empedocles, was a legitimate means of philosophic argument, even of a technical nature. [. . .] Prose came to prevail in philosophy, but often of an inspired and highly personal order. There is scarcely a greater dramatist of reason or, perhaps, dramatist tout court, than Plato. [. . .] In the history of English language literature [. . .] such symbiosis is rarer. English-American literary sensibility is wary of abstraction and of doctrine. It flinches from intellectual technicality or that which 'has a palpable design upon us' (where Keats's warning can serve as a natural definition of moral philosophy). There have been exceptions.
GEORGE STEINER 1
This book examines the philosophical writing of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in the light of his relationship to Plato. The title Platonic Coleridge refers in the first instance to the fact that I document, as far as possible, when and via which texts and commentaries Coleridge read Plato, and that I provide a critical account of his explicit comments on 'the divine philosopher'. At the same time, however, I discuss Platonic Coleridge in a comparative sense, arguing that the form and content of Coleridge's writing, mainly but not exclusively his later prose, can be usefully interpreted with reference to Plato's thought. This dual approach ensures that my readings of Coleridge through a Platonic lens are grounded in the historical detail of Coleridge's reception of Plato.
Coleridge made ambitious claims for himself as a philosopher, above all as a Platonic philosopher. In Biographici Literaria, for instance, he announces his 'system' to be 'no other than the system of Pythagoras and of Plato revived and purified from impure mixtures'.2 As Walter Pater wrote, he claims Plato 'as the first of his spiritual ancestors'.3 Coleridge repeatedly and without undue modesty linked himself with Plato, praising him in the highest terms as a congenial spirit. But are his invocations of Plato substantial, or instead rhetorical flourishes which might conceal some ulterior motive? Responses to Coleridge's self-fashioning as a modern Plato polarized among his contemporaries, and continue to polarize today, into those willing to accept Coleridge's own expansive claims with little demur, and those who consider them empty or even dishonest. On the one hand, the painter Washington Allston was so impressed by Coleridge's philosophical discourse that he found himself 'almost tempted to dream that I have once listened to Plato in the groves of the Academy'.4 A visitor to Coleridge during his Highgate years reminisced similarly (in terms which counterbalance Carlyle's famous portrait of the dismally snuffling elderly metaphysician):
I remember with delight the instruction and pleasure I derived from these discourses, which cannot be better compared than with the dialogues of Plato. The finest loftiest ideas, pouring forth amidst the most blooming poetical phrases, allegories and types, now spiced with Socratic irony, now strengthened by close and all-penetrating argumentation, afforded me an intellectual banquet, nowhere to be met either here or in any part of the continent.5
Coleridge always wrote and talked with an audience in mind, and if his audience drew such comparisons with Plato, he was doubtless delighted. On the other hand, however, contemporary reviewers disdained his Platonic pretensions,6 and even sympathetic readers sometimes became impatient: thus Mary Moody Emerson told her nephew that she thought Coleridge a 'blockhead' for placing his intellect on a par with Plato (and Milton).7 This polarity, as I have said, persists today. Pamela Edwards has recently described Coleridge as 'from first to last, a great classical scholar', whose Platonic Idealism underpins a consistent and principled approach to political thought.8 Yet the suspicion remains that this kind of conclusion may accept Coleridge's rhetoric too readily on its own terms. Where is the evidence for Coleridge's great classical scholarship? Even a thirty-four-volume Collected Coleridge replete with learned annotation has not fully resolved this nagging question. Thomas McFarland, the most robust modern apologist for Coleridge as a philosopher, writes that 'Coleridge is always indebted, and most of all to Plato and Kant'; but whilst he is thorough on Kant, McFarland emphasizes a little narrowly that Plato was, for Coleridge, 'eminently a prolegomenon to Christianity'.9 Owing largely to McFarland's efforts,10 it is no longer the fashion to condemn Coleridge as a plagiarist; but a moderated scepticism lingers, as when Paul Hamilton begins an essay with the open question: 'Is Coleridge philosophically interesting?'11 More specifically, G. N. G. Orsini insists in his authoritative work Coleridge and German Idealism that 'it is precisely on Plato that Coleridge is least satisfactory'.12 Orsini, though broadly sympathetic to Coleridge, feels that he lacks any clear historical Sense, especially of Plato, whom he confuses (thinks Orsini) with Kant and the post-Kantians.13
The disjunction between these assessments seems in part a legacy of the old plagiarism debate: Coleridge criticism has long consisted mainly of attack and defence, and the defence has often emphasized the rich tapestry of Coleridge's intellectual background, in order to exonerate him from accusations that he was a parroter of Schelling, or a misreader of Kant, or an inadequate peddler of philosophical fragments. Thus there is an abundance of synthesizing studies of influences on Coleridge — but these can often leave the impression that Coleridge was a kind of sponge,14 more or less adequately soaking up others' thought. Of course, a distinguished sequence of critics has fruitfully taken this tack, from John H. Muirhead through Owen Barfield to Mary Anne Perkins, not to mention McFarland.15 The danger, however, is that (as Neil Vickers observes), 'Coleridge scholarship is full of researchers working on some unfamiliar body of knowledge which they then hold up as the mould from which the pattern of Coleridge's evolution as a poet or thinker was taken'.16 The proliferation of such studies has led to a situation in which Hamilton writes of 'the disastrous figure of Coleridge, that desperate housing-problem for both English criticism and the continental tradition of philosophy he plagiarized'.17 The old charge of plagiarism returns in this characterization, in an imprecise form (is it possible to plagiarize a tradition?); and the puzzle about Coleridge's Plato and Coleridge's Platonism is no closer to elucidation.
In what follows, I contest Orsini's judgement that Coleridge is 'least satisfactory' on Plato. In so doing I answer Hamilton's question whether Coleridge is 'philosophically interesting': yes, and routine references to his confusion or unoriginality must be examined very carefully indeed. Rather than attempt a McFarland-like defence of Coleridge's erudition, however, I subordinate the question of influences on Coleridge. Instead my study is a comparison of ideas, though grounded at every point in an investigation of Coleridge's own reading and criticism of Plato. By avoiding the two critical extremes — dismissing Coleridge as unoriginal or 'not a philosopher', or else maintaining his rigour at every point — I hope to illuminate important aspects of both the form and content of his work. Further, I answer the question 'why Plato?', putting Coleridge's Platonism in the context of contemporary English discussions of Plato and Socrates, as well as —crucially — the post-Kantian revival of interest in the 'philosophical artist'.
I want to suggest here how each of my following five chapters may be seen as responding to one of the major critical suspicions regarding Coleridge's relationship to Plato.
(i) It is sometimes felt that Coleridge's ambitious invocations of Plato might even conceal a certain ignorance of the dialogues. On his own account, he studied various Neoplatonists first, and Plato only later, and his references to Plato tend to be relatively unspecific. In Chapter 1, I set Coleridge's earlier encounters with Plato in historical context, considering the lack of interest in Plato in the universities, the Dissenters' portrayal of him as a mystificatory proto-Trinitarian who had perverted the admirable moral teaching of Socrates, and the peculiar translations of Thomas Taylor. I then analyse Coleridge's own critical mythology, drawing out what he meant by having read Plato 'by anticipation'. It is true that Coleridge emphasized the priority of Platonism in his intellectual development partly in order to play down his debt to the German philosophers. However, without claiming that Coleridge was a great philologist, I show how his intuitive sympathy with Plato, remarkable at that time, manifested itself through comments on anamnesis. I argue that Coleridge considered the attempt to distinguish Plato from the later Neoplatonists of great importance.
(ii) Coleridge sometimes appears to confuse Plato with Kant. When Coleridge's comments on Plato are not taken seriously, it is often because critics assume — with some reason — that the name of Plato is merely invoked to disguise the extent of Coleridge's engagement with and borrowing from modern German thought. My second chapter analyses Coleridge's reception of Kant, since Coleridge does indeed treat Plato and Kant as symbiotic. Again I contextualize this reception, detailing the unfavourable conditions which any attempt to mediate Kantian thought encountered in England at the turn of the century. These conditions, I argue, partly account for Coleridge's notorious indirectness in his metaphysical writing: he constantly struggled with the problem of how to communicate Truth to an audience unprepared to receive it. Most importantly, however, Coleridge regarded Plato and Kant as united on most philosophical questions, but as differing on the 'highest' question of philosophy: whether the Ideas are regulative or constitutive. I suggest that although he was strongly conscious of Kant's disapproval of the 'exaggerated' language of Platonic discourse, he developed what he recognized as Kantian hints in order to challenge the boundaries the German philosopher set on human knowledge.
(iii) Many critics question whether Coleridge really contributed to 'philosophy' at all. The implication of this doubt is twofold: Coleridge's thought is presented too unsystematically; and his language is that of a poet, lacking the proper rigour of (notably) Kant. In Chapter 3 I address the latter point. I argue that the tension between poetry and philosophy is in fact significantly registered in Coleridge's writing; and that this tension can be traced back to the Ancient Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy instituted by Plato himself in the Republic. Plato offers two essentially negative models for poetic production: mimesis and inspiration. Coleridge employs both these models in his own criticism, and shares the Platonic anxiety that poetic language may be sub-philosophical. I see these issues as complexly embodied in the poem 'Kubla Khan' and its later preface, in which Coleridge celebrates inspiration, yet betrays anxiety about its irrational provenance and uncertain value.
(iv) It is often felt that Coleridge co-opts Plato to his own polemic because of a lack of historical sense. Thus Alan P. R. Gregory argues that in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Coleridge indulged in 'the anachronistic conformation of ancient philosophy to contemporary controversial needs'.18 Coleridge's historical sense was undoubtedly different from ours, but I argue in Chapter 4 for the cogency of the Lectures. Lecture Four on Plato is pivotal in this series, and I describe how Plato was central to Coleridge's vision of the circular movement of philosophical history. I discuss both his borrowings and dissension from the German historian W. G. Tennemann in detail. In particular, Coleridge accepted Tennemann's view that Plato held two sets of doctrines: exoteric and esoteric. I suggest that this is a useful model for considering Coleridge's own practice: in parallel with the 'exoteric' public lectures, for instance, are Coleridge's 'esoteric' marginalia to Tennemann, which take the problems of moral purification and the nature of Ideas to a deeper level. Finally, I discuss Coleridge's hints as to how it might be possible to regain access to the secret teaching of Plato.
(v) Returning to a point made under (ii) above, Coleridge is often thought to be disqualified from the status of'philosopher' by his fragmentary output. In particular, he failed to fulfil so many promises: what happened to the 'transcendental deduction' of the faculty of Imagination he promised in the thirteenth chapter of the Biographia? However, in the wake of the publication of all Coleridge's texts, including the elusive Opus Maximum, a full reassessment is underway, in which the extent of Coleridge's achievement is finally being recognized.19 My fifth chapter aims to contribute to this reassessment. I employ the esoteric—exoteric distinction again, discussing the Essays on Method in The Friend (exoteric, published) alongside the Opus Maximum (esoteric, dictated to a few Coleridgean initiates). In the Essays on Method, Coleridge invokes Plato's authority by way of truncating his investigation into the 'ground' of philosophical method. In the Opus Maximum, however, Coleridge is no longer anxious about the need to communicate with a popular audience, and attempts a full investigation into that 'ground', which he defines as Will. The Idea of Will and the origin of evil, topics which Coleridge eschews when writing exoterically, are convincingly treated in the esoteric work. A final point is that in the lexically labyrinthine Opus Maximum 'philosophy' might seem to have banished 'poetry" —but I show how this picture is complicated by some allusions to Milton.
I suggest in this way that the philosophical Lectures and the Opus Maximum deserve more attention than they normally receive from readers with a primarily literary interest in Coleridge; and conversely that where Coleridge is often considered to be confusing different discourses, we might better see his writing precisely as registering productive anxiety or challenge to boundaries such as that so often erected between poetry and philosophy.
* * *
In the foregoing summary I have introduced three concepts that will intertwine throughout the book: the esoteric—exoteric distinction; the anxiety of reception (to borrow Lucy Newlyn's helpful term);20 and the Ancient Quarrel between poetry and philosophy. I should clarify further how these concepts inform a comparison between Coleridge and Plato.
The notion that Plato in some sense had an esoteric philosophy is well attested, and endorsed by many recent critics of Plato. According to the Seventh Letter, the most important aspects of his philosophy remained unwritten: this is consistent with the enforcement of the Superiority of the spoken word over the written in Phaedrus. Aristotle, too, testifies to Plato's maintaining unwritten doctrines. Such evidence coincides with many readers' sense of something undeclared in Plato's dialogues: some mysterious kernel beyond what Coleridge called the poetic drapery.
Coleridge speculated interestedly about the esoteric doctrines of Plato, partly because this notion harmonized with his own practice. Among Coleridge's contemporaries, it was the philosophically erudite commentator Henry Crabb Robinson who recognized that he was consciously reviving the ancient distinction between the esoteric and exoteric; discussing the mixture of philosophical depth with popular religion in Aids to Reflection, Robinson noted that this work was an exception in that Coleridge 'was not unwilling in one publication to write both esoterically & eAroterically'.21 In most of his publications, Coleridge's prose abundantly generates a sense of the esoteric, through ruptures in argument, abrupt silences, and quotations of poetry where argument is awaited. Coleridge was reluctant to publish his work, often cripplingly so, in part owing to a belief that certain material should be withheld from the public. During the Highgate years he wrote and spoke extensively on philosophy to an exclusive inner circle.
A further similarity between the writings of Coleridge and Plato is that they so foreground their literary form that neither can be reduced to a complete system without a fatal desiccation. This is all too well indicated by the lifelessness of systematizations by two of Coleridge's contemporaries: Tennemann's System tier Plittoiuschen Philosophic and J. H. Green's Spiritual Philosophy: Founded on the Teaching of the Late S. T. Coleridge.
Rather than relentlessly systematize the fragments, we might consider why a philosopher should maintain esoteric doctrines, or give the impression of doing so, or both. I suggest two overlapping reasons. The first is the anxiety of reception. Anxiety of reception is caused by the possibility of political reprisals against authors of certain types of writing; by the threat of hostile reviews; or by the belief that most readers are unqualified or unworthy to receive the material. All three of these conditions apply to Coleridge, and all except fear of reviewers to Plato. Coleridge himself, with an eye on his own situation as mediator and interpreter of Platonic philosophy, discusses the reasons for Plato's esoterica in precisely these terms.
The second reason I suggest for maintaining esoterica (or appearing to do so) consists in a belief about the objects of philosophy. Key to the idealisms of both Plato (in many dialogues) and Coleridge (in his later prose) is the conviction that Ideas actively shape our mind, and that through Reason or Imagination we can attain direct intuition of the Ideas. If this is the case, our inner world is not constituted by language alone, In the highest activity of philosophy (which in the Opus Maximum Coleridge concurs with Plato in naming dialectic), words should convey their own inadequacy, dissolving to enable the activity of direct intuition. This conviction precludes systematic writing, in the sense that a static edifice of propositions automatically claims for itself an adequacy to reality which Plato and Coleridge deny. If language is to point beyond itself in this way, however, it must be a kind of language that is not committed to its own denotational and logical adequacy to its objects; and of such language one salient form is poetic. It is poetic philosophy that appears to leave things unsaid, and so offers a tantalizing sense of esoteric doctrines lying beyond the text.
The poetic element of idealist philosophy is not lightly achieved, however. 'To poeticize philosophy and to philosophize poetry — such was the highest aim of all romantic thinkers', declared Ernst Cassirer;22 and those English and German Romantics who pursued this aim, including Coleridge, often looked naturally to Plato as a precedent or model. Nevertheless, a contrary model loomed larger still: Kant, who in an essay of 1796 attacked contemporary poetic, platonizing philosophers as merely decking out their presumptuous, ungrounded assertions. 'Philosophy is fundamentally prosaic', insisted Kant, who pointed to Plato as the originator of this vain tendency in philosophical writin g. This censure is consistent with the restriction Kant places on speculative Reason. Unlike Coleridge and much of Plato, Kant denies that human Reason can have access to the noumenal realm. That being so, the kind of poetic language which aims to convey the experience of contact with Ideas can only ever be decorative rather than insightful; in Coleridgean terms, fanciful rather than imaginative. This makes it opposed to the serious business of philosophy. For Kant, poetry is an enemy of philosophy when it encroaches on philosophical territory.
Yet what is so interesting about the poetic language of both Plato and Coleridge is that, in some of their writings, both approach this Kantian view. It is Plato who in The Republic has Socrates describe an Ancient Quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Socrates banishes the poets from the ideal republic because poetry is irrational and hence unphilosophical; poets copy the sensible world, which itself is only a copy of the Ideas. Poetry being thus at two removes from the Ideas, it can have no role in philosophical discourse, and those who copy the actions glorified by poets are entirely irrational. Coleridge too was alarmed by mimetic art, believing that it dulled the critical faculties of readers and audiences. Nevertheless for Plato and Coleridge there remains an alternative, 'good' kind of figurative discourse, whose possibility is held open by Plato's use of myths, Socrates* daemonic intuitions, or Coleridge's appreciation of the poetic Imagination. This notion of 'poetic' cognition is readily figured or understood as 'inspiration', as explored by Socrates in Phaedrus and Coleridge in 'Kubla Khan'. If inspired poetry is thought of as imitating the Ideas rather than copying the sensible world, it might be denoted philosophical. And yet it is difficult to be certain about the source of inspiration, and Plato and Coleridge both treat the experience with a degree of ironic detachment, thus differentiating themselves from enthusiastic mysticism. Linked to this, both Plato and Coleridge often appear in agreement with Kant's conviction that philosophy ought to be systematic, and therefore unpoetic. My final chapter reads The Friend and the Opus Maximum as struggling productively with these problems.
★ ★ ★
In these readings I move in a different direction from some other recent studies that have accepted the importance of Plato to Coleridge, notably those of Eric G. Wilson and Mary Anne Perkins. Wilson casts Plato as a villain in Coleridge's development.23 Apparently unconsciously echoing an old argument of Stephen Potter's,24 Wilson suggests that Coleridge inhabits two worlds: the lively, green world of poetry; and the static, grey world of metaphysics, the latter presided over by Plato. As long as Coleridge remained open-minded and willing to inhabit the authentic 'limbo' of fluctuating, temporal human experience, his poetic genius flourished. But he succumbed to a craving for the Platonic certainties of eternity and rationality: 'he murders energy and loves form', thus killing off his own creativity (shooting his albatross, perhaps). In Wilson's opinion, although Plato's early work was commendably open-ended, later Plato wrote 'pseudo-dialectic', which has unfortunately persisted in Western thought. In pseudo-dialectic, the semblance of investigation is merely a mask for the purpose of asserting the life-negating doctrine of Ideas and denying the reality of our everyday world. That this is an oversimplification is evident, for instance, from the fact that the late dialogue Parmenides appears to critique the theory of Ideas, and ends with a conclusion in which nothing is concluded.25 Plato, as in fact Coleridge understood, does not fit this — or indeed any — paradigm so neatly. Yet Wilson is able to amass considerable support for his one-sided construction of Plato as a deplorable, authoritarian metaphysician, from Nietzsche to Isaiah Berlin.
Wilson's argument had, though, effectively already been answered by Perkins's article 'Coleridge and the "Other Plato" '.26 Perkins highlights the parallel between postmodern deconstructions of Plato and those of Coleridge. Both are based, she points out, on prior constructions of the two writers as conservative in the worst sense, propagating empty metaphysics to denigrate corporeality and suppress concrete efforts at social reform. Coleridge's Platonism is sometimes seized upon as the root of 'authoritarian cultural politics';27 or (as in Wilson's work) blamed for the decay of his poetic sensibility. Such views are founded, as Perkins notes, on the fact that
[i]mplicit within the tradition of Anglo-American philosophy since the Enlightenment is the axiom that ideas are opposed to reality. This makes it impossible to consider an 'ideal Realism' as anything but pure contradiction. Ideas have gradually been assumed as 'unreal' or 'other worldly'. They may be images, objects, pictures — sense-dependent but inferior to the reality which they represent.28
This of course was the Lockean tendency Coleridge laboured to resist — especially in his campaign against 'the despotism of the eye', as I discuss later — and he told his lecture-audience that the greatest art has been produced under Platonist world-views. In opposition to the postmodern construction of Plato, Perkins cites a recent call for a return to the 'other Plato'29 — the artist, the defender of dialogue which resists closure. According to Perkins, we can rediscover the 'other Coleridge', a creature of openness and inquiry, simultaneously with the 'other Plato'.
Valuable though this approach is in correcting a prevalent bias, though, it does not tell the whole story, since it replaces one modern construction of Plato with another. From Coleridge's perspective there is no straightforward dichotomy between Plato as poet (artistic, open, dialogue-writing, hero) and Plato as metaphysician (logical, closed, system-building, villain). The two are admittedly distinct in Coleridge's presentation, but they co-exist: he regards the former Plato as exoteric, the latter as esoteric. He considered that 'the writings of Plato [. . . are] poetry of the highest kind', but also that 'it would be in the highest degree presumptuous to affirm anything positively of the Platonic System as there is too much Reason to fear that we do not possess the Key to its Nomenclature'.30 Coleridge implies that Plato's esoteric system itself, however, was crucially informed by a turn to the sublime, communicated through art. This esoteric—exoteric distinction including an esoteric turn to art is mirrored, often consciously, in Coleridge's own major prose.31 Meanwhile I agree with Wilson insofar as he detects a tension between poetic and philosophical writing in Coleridge, and his reference of this to Plato. Rather than blaming Coleridge's Platonism for his supposed loss of creativity, however, I construe the tension in terms of the Ancient Quarrel between poetry and philosophy, which Socrates elucidated and which continued productively to trouble Coleridge. Like David Jasper, then, I avoid the artificial separation of Coleridge's philosophical from his literary pursuits;32 but whereas Jasper traces 'in Coleridge's writings his endeavours to perceive the nature of divine revelation in his experience of poetic inspiration and creativity',33 I tend to find tension rather than harmony.
I have mentioned the traditional adversarial—defensive polarity in Coleridge studies, but a decade ago, Seamus Perry's book Coleridge and the Uses of Division moved the discussion to a new level. Perry demonstrates that a critical appreciation need not attempt to smooth out Coleridge's 'double-mindedness' and contradictoriness, but can even see it as 'a kind of enabling inconsistency'.34 Since then, several books have explored the philosophical dimensions of Coleridge's writing more thoroughly than ever before. I have already referred to Perkins and Gregory, and most recently some distinguished work has appeared on the German context of Coleridge's thought: Reid's exploration of concepts of form and symbol, Hamilton's subtle study of Coleridge among the post-Kantians, and Berkeley's authoritative treatment of Coleridge in relation to Spinozism and the Pantheism Controversy precipitated by Friedricb Jacobi.35 I regret having read Berkeley's book too late to absorb it fully into my argument, since it contains penetrating discussions of the concepts of Reason and Will, which I address especially in the final chapter of the present book. Since Berkeley leaves Plato(nism) out of account, however, his work complements rather than conflicting with my own.
A recent work of great importance to my argument is Douglas Hedley s study of the Christian Platonism of Aids to Reflection. I restrict my discussion to the works Coleridge wrote before the publication of Aids (1825), but I attempt to follow Hedley's lead in several respects, especially with regard to Coleridge's relationship to his German contemporaries. As he argues, 'the great revival of Platonism in Germany in the eighteenth century was ushered in by Kant'.36 However, in defining Coleridge's Platonism, writes Hedley,
it is necessary to put his thinking into the context where the English universities still demanded subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles, the first being the doctrine of the Trinity, and where thinkers such as Priestley were arguing that the doctrine constitutes a non-biblical 'corruption' smuggled into Christianity by Platonizing Church Fathers. Hence the 'Platonism' at stake is not that of Plato's dialogues, or the 'unwritten doctrines' of the Academy, but the allegorising metaphysics of Middle and Neoplatonism which, indeed, formed such a crucial component of Christian theology, and the stream of 'Christian Platonism' which was so potent in the early modern period in Florence and Cambridge.37
The tradition Hedley outlines is indeed central to Coleridge, and I discuss Coleridge's Platonic Trinity in Chapters 1 and 5. Nevertheless, my approach differs from Hedley's in emphasizing precisely the Platonic dialogues and unwritten doctrines. One aspect of Coleridge's Platonism was his desire to strip away the accretions of centuries, and return ad fontes, which required him to consider (even though he could not resolve) the question of which sources for Plato's philosophy were most reliable. Reconstructing Coleridge's views of Plato himself (not of Plotinus, Ficino, the Cambridge Platonists, and so on, important though those philosophers were as lenses on the 'divine Plato') enables me to compare Coleridge's own struggle to mediate an idealist philosophy exoterically and esoterically. I speculate further that Coleridge may even have learned to divide his own work into esoteric and exoteric from his readings of Plato.
The second healthy tendency in recent Coleridge criticism is that of treating him as a mediator of ideas, exemplified by Daniel Sanjiv Roberts and Lucy Newlyn.38 This is a useful step away from influences on Coleridge. Platonic Coleridge always has a palpable design on readers. He regarded Plato as 'essentially a teacher', and sought to fashion himself in the image of Plato. 'To Coleridge [. . .] I owe education', wrote Sterling3 — probably the most gratifying compliment it was possible to pay him. But Coleridge's relationship with his audiences was notoriously uneasy, and the phrase of Newlyn's I have used already — 'anxiety of reception' — is perfectly apt. Newlyn highlights the irritating quality of Coleridge's prose that results from his fear about readers' reactions. However, she betrays anti-Coleridgean assumptions in certain elisions: presenting, for instance, the 'elitist defensiveness' of Coleridge's prose as lying in 'the philosophical density and obscurantism of its lexical content'.40 The easy alignment of 'philosophical' with 'obscurantism' neglects Coleridge's own distinction between obscurity as an author's fault, and obscurity inherent in the subject. This prejudice is symbolized by the front-cover image of Newlyn's book: Beerbohm's cartoon of the slumped figure of Coleridge table-talking, while the guests yawn. Certainly some contemporaries found Coleridge's monologues in table-talk or in print abstruse and boring. But a significant group felt that they could not read, or hear, enough — Sterling, for instance, J. H. Green, and the above-quoted de' Prati. Whether it is a blessing or a curse to be buttonholed by the Ancient Mariner depends on the character of the Wedding Guest. Hence my insistence on the distinction between the works Coleridge directed to a 'promiscuous public', which caused him anxiety and so generated the reader-baiting devices detailed by Newlyn, and the works addressed to the inner circle of Coleridgean initiates such as Green. In many ways, the latter, 'esoteric' work is more satisfying for the twenty-first-century reader who is privileged to compare and choose.
Through the esoteric—exoteric distinction which Coleridge applied to Plato, then, I aim to bring together the two critical trends just outlined — to treat Coleridge's philosophy seriously, but without losing sight of its determination by the anxiety of reception. The following chapters have a loosely chronological shape: I range across various texts in Chapters 1 and 2 (on his reception of Plato and Kant), beginning from the 1790s and lingering on such works as 'Essays on the Principles of Genial Criticism' (1814); in Chapter 3 I refer mainly to Biogmphia Literaria (published 1817), the Lectures on Literature, 'On Poesy or Art', and 'Kubla Khan' in its published form (1816); and Chapters 4 and 5 treat a cluster oflater works in detail: the 1818 Friend, the 1819 Philosophical Lectures, and the Opus Maximum (conjecturally dated 1820—23).
The roughly chronological shape of this book enables me to emphasize the extent to which the Opus Maximum gathers and attempts to resolve so much of Coleridge's previous Platonic thought. Thus Plato's doctrine of Ideas, to which I refer in every previous chapter, first appears in its full Coleridgean colouring in Chapter 5. Platonic Coleridge is a topic that deserves to be pursued further, through Aids to Reflection (1825), 'On the Prometheus of Aeschylus' (1825), On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829), and the recently published fifth volume of the Notebooks. However, those inescapable preconditions of human experience, time and space, have placed their own restrictions on this study, and to avoid diffuseness I refer only minimally to material after around 1823, when most of Coleridge's writing becomes explicitly theological.
1. Introduction to Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. by Peter Conradi (London: Penguin, 1997), pp. ix—x.
2. BL I, 263.
3. 'Coleridge', in Appreciations (London: Macmillan, 1913; first published 1889), p. 69.
4. The Life and Letters of Washington AUston, ed. by Jared B. Flagg (London: Bentley, 1893), p. 64; reprinted in Coleridge: Interviews, p. 102.
5. Gioacchino de' Prati, 'Autobiography', quoted in M. H. Fisch, 'The Coleridges, Dr. Prati, and Vico', Modern Philology, 41.2 (November 1943), 111—22 (p. 121). Contrast Thomas Carlyle, The Life of John Sterling, ed. by W. Hale White (London: Oxford University Press, 1933; first published 1851), pp. 55—64.
6. See e.g. Hazlitt's review of The Statesman's Manual: Edinburgh Review, 27 (December 1816), 444— 59; reprinted in Coleridge: The Critical Heritage, ed. by J. R. de J. Jackson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), I, 262—77 (p. 264).
7. Letter of October 1829, cited in Laura Dassow Walls, 'Ralph Waldo Emerson and Coleridge's American Legacy', in Coleridge's Afterlives, ed. by James Vigus and Jane Wright (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 112—27, PP- 133—14.
8. Pamela Edwards, The Statesman's Science: History, Nature, and Law in the Political Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 3.
9. Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 44, 207.
10. See especially Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, pp. 1—52.
11. 'The Philosopher', in The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 170—86 (p. 170). Cf. Hans Werner Breunig, Verstand und Einbildungskraft in der englischen Romantik: S. T. Coleridge als Kulminationspunkt seiner Zeit (Miinster: Lit, 2002), pp. 6—7: 'Ob Coleridge Philosoph war oder nicht, ist vielleicht nicht so leicht zu entscheiden' [Whether Coleridge was a philosopher or not, is perhaps not so easy to decide].
12. Coleridge and German Idealism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), p. vii —henceforth: Orsini.
13. Orsini, p. 52.
14. 'Sponges: persons who absorbed what they read and returned it nearly in the same state only a little dirtied' (LL I, 203).
15.Muirhead, Coleridge as Philosopher (London: Macmillan, 1930); Barfield, What Coleridge Thought (London: Oxford University Press, 1971); Perkins, Coleridge's Philosophy: The Logos as Unifying Principle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
16. Coleridge and the Doctors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 9.
17. Hamilton, Metaromanticism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 6.
18. Coleridge and the Conservative Imagination (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2003), p. 118.
19. See esp. Jeffrey W. Barbeau, ed., Coleridge's Assertion of Religion: Essays on the (Opus Maximum' (Louvain: Peeters, 2006).
20. Newlyn, Reading, Writing and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). On 'Coleridge's Anxiety' as in general a determining feature of his psychology, see McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 104—36. Coleridge himself confessed to 'the anxiety of authorship': BL I, 233.
21. Robinson, review of The Statesman's Manual, Critical Review (January 1817), V, 42—48, repr. in Coleridge: The Critical Heritage, ed. by J. R. de J. Jackson, vol. 1 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 278-84 (p. 279).
22. An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1962; first published 1944), p. 156.
23. Coleridge's Melancholia (Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 2004).
24. Coleridge and S.T.C. (London: Cape, 1935).
25. Gilbert Ryle, Plato's Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966) banishes the spectre of the monolithic Plato that haunts Wilson.
26. European Romantic Review, 8.1 (Winter 1997), 25—40.
27. Nigel Leask, The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge's Critical Thought (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), p. 4. The politics of Coleridge's idealism is a large topic that I barely broach in this book, and on which Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, intro. F. R. Leavis (London: Chatto and Windus, 1950; reprinted 1980) remains a key evaluation. I feel that attacks on Coleridge's thought as 'romantic ideology' have now been challenged sufficiently strongly that I need not devote space to this matter: see e.g. Seamus Perry, 'Coleridge, the Return to Nature, and the New Anti-Romanticism: An Essay in Polemic', Romanticism on the Net, 4 (November 1996), <http://www. erudit.0rg/revue/r0n/1996/v/n4/005726ar.html> [accessed 7 June 2008].
28. Perkins, p. 34. For Coleridge on ideal realism, see BL I, 260—63.
29. From Richard Bernstein, in The New Constellation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 49—50, who commends John Dewey's 'Back to Plato' movement.
30. SWF I, 140. Coleridge continues: 'the Works of Plato like the sacred Books of the East keep us in continual doubt what is to be understood literally & what figuratively or allegorically'.
31. I touch at various stages on the psychology of the Romantic sublime, but for a fuller treatment see David Vallins, Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism: Feeling and Thought (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000).
32. Coleridge as Poet and Religious Thinker (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985). As Jasper notes, this separation is pressed too far by David Pym, The Religious Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1978) and to a lesser extent James Boulger, Coleridge as Religious Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961).
33. Jasper, p. 144.
34. Coleridge and the Uses of Division (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 3 — henceforth: Perry, Division.
35. Perkins, Coleridge's Philosophy; Gregory, Coleridge and the Conservative Imagination; Nicholas Reid, Coleridge, Form and Symbol: or, the Ascertaining Vision (Sevenoaks: Ashgate, 2005); Paul Hamilton, Coleridge and German Philosophy: The Poet in the Land of Logic (London: Continuum, 2007); Richard Berkeley, Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007).
36. Douglas Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: Aids to Reflection' and the Mirror of the Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 4.
37. Hedley, pp. 6—7.
38. Roberts, Revisionary Gleam: De Quincey, Coleridge, and the High Romantic Argument (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000); Newlyn, as above.
39. Letter to J. C. Hare, first published in Essays and Tales (1848), quoted in C. R. Sanders, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1942), p. 136; cf. Aids, p. cxiv.
40. Newlyn, p. 86.