When Socrates banishes the poets from his ideal state, he proposes to justify this measure by telling poetry that there is an Ancient Quarrel between it and philosophy.1 This seems to be one of Socrates' 'noble lies', since in the fifth century BC the Quarrel, far from ancient, was of quite recent origin.2 Why did Plato, the poetic philosopher, endorse the banishment and stir up the Quarrel? Countless attempts have been made to explain away this puzzle,3 but it remains a central and inescapable element of the Republic and (if more mildly) the Laws. Coleridge himself recognized this in saying that 'Plato banished the poets with more than Christian wrath':4 neatly underlining the fact that an attitude to art which one might today term 'puritan' in fact spans both Christian moralists and the pre-Christian Plato.
Indeed the Ancient Quarrel, genuinely ancient by Coleridge's time, can be seen as one of Plato's enduring legacies: subsequent writers in all periods have taken up his challenge to produce a defence of poetry,5 or conversely have sought to confirm the exclusion of poetic expression from philosophical reflection. Shelley's first version of his famous concluding sentence to the 'Defence of Poetry' was: 'Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world'; but the Ancient Quarrel showed itself when he deleted the words 'and philosophers'.6 This was, as it were, the other side of the coin from Kant's insistence that poetry should not be allowed to infiltrate the purity of philosophical discourse.
Coleridge was double-minded in this regard as in so many others, but this particular manifestation of double-mindedness runs parallel to, and is to some extent informed by, conflicting tendencies in Plato himself. That Plato's writings are (in Coleridge's phrase) 'poetry of the highest kind',7 but that he nevertheless argues for the banishment of poetry, I take to reflect a genuine ambivalence: and I think that a comparable ambivalence appears in Coleridge. This might appear an odd claim about a writer who memorably insists that 'no man was ever a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher', and who encouraged Wordsworth to write 'THE FIRST GENUINE PHILOSOPHIC POEM'.8 Let us recall, however, the young Coleridge's description of the age of the Gnostics: 'intellectual Brilliance received the honours due only to patient investigation, and the Philosopher invading the province of the Poet endeavoured to strike and dazzle by bold Fiction, and allegoric Personification'.9 Here, at the very outset of his intellectual career, he suggests that poetry and philosophy ought to maintain fully separate provinces. Many years later, in the Opus Maximum, the Kantian in Coleridge strives to preserve philosophy's distinct sphere by purifying his language as far as possible from heteronomous poetic adornment; and it was part of his own self-mythology that 'abstruse research' could not coexist with his youthful poetic genius, but dampened and replaced it.10 But the most influential manifestation of the Quarrel is in Biographia Literaria, in which the theory of Imagination represents a deliberate but incomplete attempt to yoke philosophical and poetic acts of mind. Notoriously, the work splits approximately in two: book one on philosophy, book two on poetry. At the end of book one Coleridge announces a 'transcendental deduction' of the faculty of Imagination, which will provide a firm philosophical ground for the criticism of (Wordsworth's) poetry in book two. The deduction, however, breaks off with an esoteric gesture: the fictitious letter from a friend recommending that Coleridge defer the complex proof to a later publication.11 In book two Coleridge nevertheless proceeds to employ the concept of Imagination as though it had in fact been 'deduced'.
The split between poetry and philosophy in the Biographia12 has been very influential. Although many critics have nevertheless discerned structural unity in the work, this is a relatively new tendency.13 Contemporaries had little hesitation in dismissing that part 'which our author calls Philosophy',14 while later in the century Leslie Stephen robustly diagnosed the Biographia's' dislocation: it was 'put together with a pitchfork'153 Victorian critics, indeed, routinely divided Coleridge's work into the poetic and philosophical — invariably preferring the former. Thus although the title of Leigh Hunt's work Imagination and Fancy (1844) sounds Coleridgean, it bypasses Coleridge's theory entirely: rather Hunt's purely intuitive method of spotting poetic beauties resembles Arnold's notion of the 'touchstone', and whilst he delights in Coleridge's poetry, he dismisses his philosophy and theology.16 Later critics followed this pattern by developing Coleridge's notion of 'practical criticism'77 at the same time as deploring his 'metaphysics' — essentially accepting Biographia book two while rejecting book one. In Paul Hamilton's words:
Coleridge's public failure to unite philosophical theory with the practical criticism of poetry has had a momentous effect on subsequent literary criticism. It helped critics from Arnold to Leavis to overestimate the importance of a pure practical criticism, and even to believe in the possibility of its self-sufficiency. In their work practical criticism retains an air of philosophical seriousness, along with the tacit belief that we need not bother to explain the philosophy.18
Concomitant with this tendency to separate poetry from philosophy were judgements like this (by T. S. Eliot):
Nor am I sure that Coleridge learned so much from German philosophers, or earlier from Hartley, as he thought he did; what is best in his criticism seems to come from his own delicacy and subtlety of insight as he reflected upon his own experience of writing poetry.19
I. A. Richards responds to Eliot by observing the unfairness of insisting that Coleridge's 'own' poetic subtlety owed nothing to his omnivorous study of philosophy;20 but then the author of Practical Criticism intimates a similar prejudice when he asserts that 'the more transcendental parts of Coleridge' form 'an indispensable introduction (from which we may disengage ourselves later) to his theory of criticism'.21 It could even be said that this premise of a divided Coleridge has long been central to English Literature as an institutional discipline, given its prominence in such foundational figures.
Critics continue to divide Coleridge in this way, revealing their personal priorities as they do so. McFarland, for instance, sees an 'immensely more urgent role, in his intellectual economy, of philosophy and theology rather than of literature and poetry'.22 The Ancient Quarrel, then, reverberates through Coleridge's afterlives: as well it might, given the substantial parallels and allusions in his writing to Plato's attacks on and implicit defences of poetry.
A preparatory note on terms and historical context will help to suggest the informing quality of Plato's discourses within Coleridge's writing. 'Poetry' and 'philosophy' being broad terms whose meaning evolved over a long period from Plato to Coleridge, the largely ahistorical, comparative method of the present chapter requires some defence. What validates this method, I think, is that Coleridge himself was alert to the significations of these Greek terms. First, Coleridge states in consciously Platonic terms that 'Philosophy, defines itself as an affectionate seeking after the truth':23 the word 'affectionate' picking up the Greek etymology ('philo') and suggesting the kind of non-disinterested approach to thought which I have discussed above as 'reading by anticipation'. Coleridge's usage, then, is faithful to Plato's technical sense of'loving/desiring the vision of truth".24 In Republic Socrates gives the famous definition of the philosopher as lover of Sophia — usually translated 'wisdom', but since this is a vague word, Havelock's circumlocution may be more appropriate: 'a cognition of those identities which "are", and "are forever", and are "imperceptible";' i.e. the Ideas.25 This applies remarkably well to Coleridge's post-Kantian concept of intuitive Reason.
Secondly, Coleridge responds to the complexities of the Greek terms Πoἰησιζ and μovσικηἠ. Modern scholars place these concepts at the heart of Plato's anti-poetic discourse. Πoἰησιζ means 'making' and covers all the productive arts and crafts. It is the ancestor of our notion of 'creativity'. Πoἰησιζ had a close relationship with μovσικηἠ, a term that includes but is not confined to music: it encompasses euphony in poetry, and rhythm in gymnastics. Movσικἠ and Πoἰησιζ intertwined in the Greek oral culture, in the form of the drama to which citizens flocked as a religious event; and of rhapsodes' recitations of Homer, Hesiod, and other epic poetry (Plato's phrase 'μovσικἠν Πoιησιζ' has been translated 'practising the arts'.26) It has been convincingly argued that the main object of Plato's attack on the poets was in fact Πoἰησιζ in this wide sense: Plato wanted to replace the irrationality of emotional performances with the reflective rationality of the written word. The banishment of the poets, that is, must be seen in the context of the profound shift during Plato's time, enabled by new technology, from a predominantly oral culture (reflected for instance in Republic 603b) to an increasingly literate culture. Hence the centrality of reform in education (Παιδεἰα) in the Republic. Homer is said to be the poet who 'educated Greece':27 that children learned Homer by rote for information in religious and technical matters Plato regards as unphilosophical and corrupting.28 A comment in Protagoras sketches this conventional method of education: children
are given the works of good poets to read at their desks and have to learn them by heart, works that contain numerous exhortations, many passages describing in glowing terms good men of old, so that the child is inspired to imitate them and become like them.29
Put like this, it could sound unobjectionable enough, but Plato has the character Adeimantus describe the disadvantage of this procedure in the Republic: it encourages a kind of opportunistic eclecticism in the young men's attitude to moral conduct, based on chance quotations of Homer and Hesiod to the effect that justice is arduous and unrewarding.30
I elaborate on Plato's attacks on poetry below. Here I wish to note, first, that Coleridge 'cherished a wish' to institute a term as nearly equivalent as possible to ΠΟἰησις to encompass the arts in this wide, Greek sense: 'poesy';31 and second, that he approves Socrates' statement in Republic that the guardians must take particular care to prevent any novelties in μΟυσικἠ. Socrates and his interlocutor agree that μΟυσικἠ can be a particularly insidious vehicle of lawlessness since it is popularly considered mere harmless play. Yet
becoming familiar by degrees it insensibly runs into the manners and pursuits; and from thence, in intercourse of dealings one with another, it becomes greater; and from this intercourse it enters into laws and policies with much impudence, Socrates, till at last it overturns all things, both public and private.32
Coleridge's comment catches the spirit of this passage, giving μΟυσικἠ the widest possible signification: 'Most singular and weighty remark — but what are we to understand by Music? I answer — all the pleasures of Taste; imprimis — and explicitly. Implicitè autem, the Rhythm, the Tune, of a Nation's Thoughts — '.33
Coleridge then quotes two further sentences, to the effect that novelties in μΟυσικἠ are dangerous, and never occur without change to the laws of a city. That Coleridge saw deep contemporary relevance in this observation is shown by the fact that he also cited it in his letter to Lord Liverpool in which he urges the need for philosophy to guide statecraft.34 Novelties in μΟυσικἠ, Coleridge seems to agree with Socrates, infiltrate every level of society, and so must be controlled from the top: by Reason in the individual, by the governors in a state. Whilst endorsing the wide signification of Plato's term μΟυσικἠ, Coleridge adds that 'Fact bears Plato out even in Music, in its stricter or narrower sense as Metre and Tune', including even 'the rhythm of Prose', which in English has been corrupted by French influence.35 Given Coleridge's sensitivity to Plato's terms, then, I use the word 'poetry' with the full connotations of ΠΟἰησις.
This chapter proceeds in four further sections. First, I sketch Plato's hostility to mimetic poetry and its possible corrupting effects, alongside Coleridge's comparable hostility to a similar phenomenon in his own time. Secondly, I discuss the later, Neoplatonic defence of mimetic art as imitating the Ideas rather than objects of sense-perception: I describe how this line of thought was teased out of Plato's works themselves, particularly the Timaeus's account of the Demiurge's act of creation. Coleridge, I show, picked up this defence through Plotinus and Schelling, assimilating it to his own experience of the struggle involved in poetic composition. Thirdly, I come to Plato's second model for poetic production (apart from mimesis): divine inspiration. Focusing on the Socratic dialogue Ion, I note that Plato's attitude to inspiration is, like that of mimesis, explicitly negative, but with positive implications based on the possibility of rationally scrutinizing the utterances of the inspired poet or rhapsode. Again I compare Coleridge's suggestive thoughts on the question of divine inspiration, in his case in a Christian context. Fourth and last, I tie the two Platonic models of mimesis and inspiration together in a reading of the poem 'Kubla Khan', with its Demiurge-like creator, inspired poet, and ironically critical Preface.
In Plato's writings are to be found two models of poetic production (which are, with the single exception of Laws 719c—d, never treated together): mimesis and inspiration. Both are hostile models, albeit with sufficient saving clauses for a long Neoplatonic tradition to have portrayed Plato as a champion of poetry. In the Republic Socrates describes poetry as mimetic, attacking it from this basis in books two, three, and ten. Three basic charges are made: poetry is impious, propagating lies about the gods; it stirs up undisciplined emotion, encouraging the listener (for this is an oral culture) to imitate bad passions; and it is epistemologically suspect, being a 'copy' at two removes from the Ideas which are truly real. Though these can be treated as discrete points, they are united by two fears: of the unphilosophical irrationality of popular culture, and, congruently, of the moral effects of poetry on the mind of audiences. These are preoccupations Coleridge emphatically shares.
First, then, Socrates insists that, like bad craftsmen who cannot copy a model properly, poets misrepresent the gods, who are in reality good and unchanging, as passionate and fickle.36 Coleridge's frequent comparisons of religion with poetry ('I have often thought that religion [. . .] is the poetry of mankind'37) align him with this view: he too believes that poetry is integral to the upholding of true religion, and when abused, corrodes it. Hence his attack, in the tradition of the Cambridge Platonists, on Lucretian poetry which is ostensibly philosophical, but actually undermines divine truth:
I have heard it said that an undevout astronomer is mad. [. . .] Much more truly, however, might it be said that, an undevout poet is mad: in the strict sense of the word, an undevout poet is an impossibility. I have heard of verse-makers (poets they are not, and can never be) who introduced into their works such questions as these: — Whether the world was made of atoms? — Whether there is a universe? — Whether there is a governing mind that supports it? As I have said, verse-makers are not poets: the poet is one who carries the simplicity of childhood into the powers of manhood; who, with a soul unsubdued by habit, unshackled by custom, contemplates all things with the freshness and the wonder of a child; and, connecting with it the inquisitive power of riper years, adds, as far as he can find knowledge, admiration; and, where knowledge no longer permits admiration, gladly sinks back again into the childlike feeling of devout wonder.38
Coleridge may have in mind such poets as Erasmus Darwin, whose epic verse wittily promotes a mechanistic world-view. The conceptual basis of the argument, however, resembles Socrates': that the divine is to be identified with the Good, whereas so-called poets deny divinity or portray it sceptically. Coleridge is further suggesting that the intellectual sophistication of verse-makers precludes the proper wonder of the philosopher who knows his own ignorance; the habit-purging 'feeling of divine wonder' being exactly what he associates with Socrates and Plato.
This comparison needs a qualification, certainly: whereas Coleridge is attacking bad poets (thus his memo to write 'Of the harm that bad Poets do in stealing & making unnovel beautiful Images'39), Socrates is attacking those normally considered greatest, chiefly Homer. The views of Socrates and Coleridge are therefore not perfectly symmetrical. There is, though, a substantial parallel, neatly apparent in their respective invocations of the shape-shifting god Proteus, who seems a natural test case for poetic representation, given the possibilities of mythologizing him as one or many or both simultaneously. Socrates complains of the poets' lies about Proteus.40 According to him, gods are unchanging (a view of divinity that prefigures the theory of Ideas developed later in the Republic41), whereas the poets themselves, like the Proteus of their lies, change their identity with every character they create. When Coleridge describes Shakespeare as a Proteus-figure because he 'darts himself forth' to animate myriad characters, this might sound like exactly what Socrates objects to about dramatists. Yet Coleridge takes for granted that a divinity should retain a constant identity: Proteus-Shakespeare 'becomes all things, yet forever remaining himself'.42 That Coleridge, contra Plato, is able to attribute this essential changelessness to the poet, is in fact consistent with the 'higher' view of mimesis hinted at by Plato, as I discuss below: Plato no less than Coleridge distinguishes good from bad poetry and poets.
Socrates' second criticism, that poetry tends to stir up excessive and harmful emotion, relates especially to the performance-culture of his day, but remains a deep anxiety with Coleridge. The censure can be divided into two parts. First, Socrates is concerned that auditors of rhapsodic and tragic performances will imitate the bad passions represented there, inducing cowardice and lack of self-control. The mimetic chain would resemble the chain of inspiration imagined in Ion: poets imitate people who are mad, bad, and dangerous to know; the auditors imitate the poets' imitations; and the cycle continues. The poet pleases the theatregoing crowd by imitating weak and irrational characters, since those are most familiar to the crowd: he therefore 'excites and nourished this [worst] part of the soul, and, strengthening it, destroys the rational'.43
Comparable is Coleridge's loathing of what the 'Preface' to Lyrical Ballads attacks as 'sickly and stupid German Tragedies'. He claims that 'the so called German drama', better named the 'jacobinical drama', is itself feebly imitative.44 Worse, tragedies such as Maturin's Bertram are sensationalist, over-stimulating the mind of the audience so that it craves more, literally a vicious circle. Watching the crowd's rapturous approval of a bad character Coleridge reflects: 'The familiarity with atrocious events and characters appeared to have poisoned the taste, even where it had not directly disorganized the moral principles, and left the feelings callous to all the mild appeals, and craving alone for the grossest and most outrageous stimulants'.45 This link between taste, moral principles, and habit is very similar to that made by Socrates, who fears that drama can 'create in our youth a powerful habit of wickedness' (ΠΟνηρἰας).46 It would be dangerous for them to begin to enjoy imitating bad models: for 'imitations, if from earliest youth they be continued onwards for a long time, are established into the manners and natural temper, both with reference to the body and voice, and likewise the dianoetic power'.47 In Coleridge's words: '[w]e insensibly imitate what we habitually admire'.48
The habit of inward (dis)harmony is no less key to the second part of Socrates' objection that poetry stirs up bad emotion. Explaining his apparently odd question whether the guardians should be imitative (μιμητικοὐς) or not,49 Socrates repeats the principle that each individual should follow one occupation, since if dispersed among many, (s)he will fail in all. We cannot play a serious part in life while imitating the vicissitudes of fictional characters, whether as actors or enthusiastic spectators.50 So too Coleridge attacks the self-dispersal involved in habitual novel-reading: the reverse side of the coin to his praise of Platonic philosophy as never allowing the mind to depart from itself. Novels which pretend to moral propriety, such as Richardson's Clarissa or Pamela, in fact encourage the mind to dwell on the various 'criminal' indulgences they describe: 'they poison the imagination of the young with continued doses of tinct. Lyttae' (an aphrodisiac). Coleridge contrasts Fielding's Tom Jones, a novel often wrongly 'censured as loose': 'There is a cheerful, sun-shiny, breezy spirit that prevails everywhere, strongly contrasted with the close, hot, day-dreamy continuity of Richardson'.51 Could this be a Platonic breeze? It is Socrates who says that artists must be sought who can discern the true nature of the beautiful,
that our youth, dwelling as it were in a healthful place, may be profited on all sides; whence, from the beautiful works, something will be conveyed to the sight and hearing, as a breeze bringing health from salutary places; imperceptibly leading them on directly from childhood, to the resemblance, friendship, and harmony with right reason.52
Both Coleridge and Plato assert the need for a kind of active energy in the production and consumption of art, deploring its lack in the majority of works.
The third prong of Socrates' attack on poetry is epistemological: mimetic representations occur at two removes from reality. This assertion appears in book 10, at some distance from the criticism of poetry in books 2—3:53 it is enabled by the theory of Ideas developed in the intervening books. Socrates isolates three levels of reality, which correspond to the three levels of the soul, τὁ λογιστικὀν (the reasoning part), τὁ θυμοειδἐς (the spirited part), τὁ ἐπιθυμητικὀν (the desiring part).54 Objects — he gives the examples of a bed and a chair — have three manifestations: the Idea of the bed, made by God;55 the physical bed made by the carpenter; the copy of the bed made by a painter or, by extension, mimetic poet. The implication drawn is that the poet, operating on the lowest level of reality, appeals habitually to the basest element of the soul. Moreover, poets have no real knowledge, otherwise they would really construct the bed instead of merely representing it; Homer would have become a statesman instead of writing about statecraft.
Coleridge agrees about the worthlessness of a mere copy: 'a good Portrait [. . .] becomes more and more like in proportion to its excellence as a Work of Art — While a real Copy, a Fac Simile, ends in shocking us'.56 This is at the root of his objection in Biographia to Wordsworth's aim of imitating 'the real language of men' in poetry, which Coleridge interprets with polemical literalness as 'a language taken [. . .] from the mouths of men in real life'.57 The absurdity of the notion of the poet providing transcripts of rustic conversation provides a platform for Coleridge to desynonymize the terms 'copy' and 'imitation'; the former a precise and overly particular reproduction of its original, the latter capturing the spirit of the original and therefore fulfilling Aristotle's dictum that 'poetry is essentially idea'.58
The desynonymy of imitation from copy to denote a superior model of poetic mimesis was long central to Coleridge's criticism,59 but the distinction is already present in Plato. A clear example occurs in Cratylus, when Socrates declares that it is not 'necessary to attribute to an image [εἰκὁν] every thing belonging to that which it represents, in order to its becoming an image [. . .] it does not necessarily follow, that if anything is taken away or added, it will no longer be an image'.60 For the image to be interesting (or tasteful, in Coleridgean terms), it must in some respect differ from its original. The great range of contexts for Plato's use of the concept of imitation throughout the dialogues, indeed, cumulatively implies this desynonymy: our thoughts and arguments are imitations of reality (Timaeus 47b—c; Critias 107b—c); words are imitations of things (Cratylus 423c—424b); sounds imitate divine harmony (Timaeus 8ob); time imitates eternity (Timaeus 38a); laws imitate truth (Politicus 300c); human governments imitate true government (Politicus 293e); devout men try to imitate their gods (Phaedrus 252c—d, 253b; Laws 713e); and most importantly for the present context, visible figures are imitations of eternal ones (Timaeus 50c). In each of these cases it is not conceivable that 'imitation' is intended as the attempt at precise reproduction which Socrates ascribes to the poets. W. J. Verdenius (from whom I draw these examples) sums up in Coleridgean language: 'This is sufficient proof that Platonic imitation is bound up with the idea of approximation and does not mean a true copy'.61
That is not to claim that Plato valorizes difference in these instances — quite the reverse, given the hierarchical view of reality they reflect. Yet there are hints in Plato from which can be constructed a defence of mimetic art as willed imitation, rather than passive copy. One of Socrates' leading questions about the method of the painter constitutes just such a hint: 'Do you think he tries in each case to imitate the thing itself in nature or the works of craftsmen?'62 Glaucon replies on cue that painters copy the creations of artificers; but he might have answered that they can imitate the Ideas. It is in fact via this possibility that writers since at least the time of Cicero have elevated poetry from the mediocre and dangerous activity condemned by Socrates into the means of contemplating the highest reality.63
Moreover, defenders of this view were able to look to a model already present in Plato's writing. For Timaeus relates that the Demiurge (δημουργὀς translates as 'craftsman') fashioned the world by looking, not to a changeable pattern (παραδειγμἀ), which would be a blasphemous notion (and paradoxical, for how could a generated model previously have existed?), but to an eternal one — generally identified with the Ideas spoken of in other dialogues. For this reason, Timaeus says, the world is the fairest of all things that have come into being, although imperfection lingers since the Demiurge is not omnipotent.64 The Demiurge (as Iris Murdoch writes) is 'Plato's portrait of the artist and a6ost attractive figure'.65
Plotinus takes up this notion to defend and exalt art — 'art' for Plotinus being τἰχνη, precisely the status that Socrates had denied to ποἰησις. He imagines two blocks of stone lying side-by-side, one a crude lump, the other sculpted into a statue of a god or man by a craftsman (δημιουργὀς). In both casts the material is the same, yet we find the latter beautiful, the former not. This must be due to something that does not reside in the material: that is the 'forming principle' (λὀγον οῠ ποιεῖ) introduced by the art. What we behold in the statue, however, is not the pure Idea of beauty, but beauty only 'as far as the stone has submitted to the art'.66
The example of a statue (ἄγαλμα, which also means 'image') is not arbitrary, since statues were sacred objects into which the spirit of a god or great man was thought to enter; thus Plato describes the universe fashioned by the demiurge as τῶν ἀιδἰων θεῶν γεγονὸς ἂγαλμα, which has been translated both 'a shrine brought into being for the everlasting gods' and 'a created image of the everlasting gods'.67 To keep both meanings in mind at once is to see how Plotinus builds on a regard for art as sacred which is already present potentially in Plato. So Plotinus, disputing Plato's explicit condemnation of mimetic art, insists that 'the arts do not simply imitate [nature], but they run back up to (ἀνατρἐχουσιν) the forming principles (λόγους) from which nature derives'.68
Admittedly this Neoplatonic defence of poetry finds few modern supporters: Iris Murdoch, for instance, writes that
[t]he tempting correction [to the Republic's disparaging concept of mimetic art] was made by Plotinus when he suggested that the artist does not copy the material object but copies the Form: a view which on examination turns out to be even more unsatisfactory.69
She does not elaborate on this 'examination', but it probably has to do with her conviction that the doctrine of Ideas is incoherent, precisely because it relies on a metaphor of 'imitation' that she finds basically unsatisfying.70 Coleridge, on the other hand, as I have already discussed in Chapter 2, adhered even in the teeth of Kant's Critiques to a notion of 'constitutive Ideas', and appealed to Plotinus on beauty in the Principles of Genial Criticism and Biographia Literaria.
Indeed Plotinus' views, first that art imitates the very Ideas from which natural phenomena themselves derive, and second, that a particular work of art never attains the perfect beauty of the forming principle (λόγος) itself because the material only ever partially 'submits' to the art, appealed in a poetic context both to Schelling and (partly via Schelling) to Coleridge. Coleridge referred to Plotinus on beauty in the Principles of Genial Criticism, as discussed in Chapter 2, above. These views also inform Coleridge's practical criticism of Shakespeare, especially in his insistence that critics such as Johnson are at fault for isolating particular beauties and defects in each play without taking proper account of the informing Idea, the 'distinct object' of the whole. So Coleridge exclaims to his notebook that it is absurd to measure black spots against white in a work of art, for
The Poet & his Subject, are they not as the Δημιουργος & υλή of Plato — If the υλη were not of itself reluctant & naked & ungratifying, what need of the Demiurge — and tho' he may hinder this, & alter it, & form, & educe perpetual good even out of the worst evil, can he annihilate the υλη without evanishment of the ιδεα? — 71
Plato does not actually use the word ὑλή ('wood', in its original meaning, but it came to signify 'prime matter', as opposed to the intelligent formative principle, reason or νοῦς) to describe the Receptacle (ὑποδοχἠν) upon which the Demiurge imprints his creation;72 this is instead a Neoplatonic term consonant with Plotinus' emphasis on the struggle of a craftsman to subdue recalcitrant material. Thus Henry More defines it with vivid imprecision as 'Hyle, Materia Prima, or that dark fluid potentiality of the creature, the straitnesse, repugnancy, and incapacity of the creature: as when its being this, destroyes or debilitates the capacity of being something else, or after some other manner'.73 It remains an open question whether, as the Neoplatonists held, Plato taught that matter is the principle of evil. Coleridge, at any rate, supported this interpretation of Plato, and came to adopt similar language himself in his later Genesis-based speculations about the creation of the universe.74 The association Coleridge makes between ὑλή and evil is thus strictly speaking Neoplatonic rather than Platonic; but it does satisfyingly reflect Timaeus' doctrine that 'this universe was fashioned in the beginning by the victory of reasonable persuasion over Necessity'. 'Necessity' (ἀνάγκη)) refers not to natural laws but rather to the opposite, a chaotic factor that exists in the world at all times and can be 'persuaded' yet never abolished by reason.75 In this light Coleridge's suggestion becomes clear, that the Demiurge-poet cannot 'annihilate the υλη without evanishment of the ιδεα'.76 Struggle, for Coleridge, is integral to the process of composition.
The rhythm of the above-quoted Notebook entry embodies the poet's sometimes frustrating search for words to embody an Idea: the ὑλη, whose qualities are evoked in ponderous polysyllables ('reluctant & naked & ungratifying') is assailed by the nimble activity of the poet ('alter it, & form, & educe'). Activity, indeed, is the defining facet of the Demiurge-poet: just as for Plato the Demiurge is (unlike Jehovah!) without jealousy and exercises a benevolent will (βουλήσεως) in creating, so Coleridge's equable man of genius possesses 'an endless power of combining and modifying' ideas.77 This is Coleridge's equally Platonic reply to Plato's accusation that poets are passive imitators of inferior things: the work of art on the contrary is valuable in so far as it has cognitive content, infused by the poet's active 'struggle' to stamp an Idea on intractable material.
Thus the secondary Imagination is 'co-existent with the conscious will': it 'dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify'.78 The Demiurge's fidelity to Reason in his struggle to create good things informs Coleridge's persistent defence of poetry:
Idly talk they who speak of Poets as mere Indulgers of Fancy, Imagination, Superstition, &c — They are the Bridlers by Delight, the Purifiers, they that combine them with reason & order, the true Protoplasts, Gods of Love who tame the Chaos.79
The Ancient Quarrel can potentially be reconciled by virtue of the true poet's philosophical activity of willing: 'a Poet cannot be a great Poet but as being likewise & inclusively an Historian and Naturalist in the Light as well as the Life of Philosophy. All other men's Worlds (κοσμοι) are his Chaos'.80 This implies that the poet finds his raw materials in the world that the non-poet regards as simply given. In his last years Coleridge was to develop this interest into rich speculations on the Mosaic account of creation.81 The quotations just cited, however, are closer to Schelling's notion that the work of art as a product of the creative imagination is a 'Begrenzung' [boundary] of the 'Chaos' of the Absolute: Chaos, for Schelling, is not simply negation of form, but rather the paradox that all possible form exists together, undifferentiated. 'Ohne Begrenzung könnte das Grenzenlose nicht erscheinen' [Without a boundary the boundless could not appear].82
Schelling, indeed, developing Plotinus' notion that art 'runs back up to' the Ideas, produced in Über das Verhältnis der bildenden Künste zu der Natur (1807) an account of mimesis which Coleridge took up enthusiastically.83 Schelling dismisses 'dienstbare Nachahmung' [servile imitation] with the ethical argument used also by Plato and Coleridge, that such copyists more often and with greater inclination prefer 'das HäBliche' [the ugly] to 'das Schöne' [the beautiful].84 (Earlier Schelling had offered an interpretation of Plato's banishment of the poets as 'Polemik gegen den poetischen Realismus' [polemic against poetic realism].85) If servile copying constitutes unacceptable immersion in material particularity, however, ancient attempts to imitate the Idea of Beauty itself were, on the other hand, 'wie schöne Worte, denen die Taten nicht entsprechen' [like fine words to which the deeds do not conform].86 What is required is a 'lebendige Mitte' [living middle] between these extremes: one contemplates nature, then withdraws from it, distancing oneself from the product (natura naturata) in order to grasp the creative power (natura naturans) at work in producing, before finally 'returning' to nature.87 The possibility of such a process of withdrawal and re-engagement presupposes that the human mind shares a common ground with nature. In Coleridge's compressed summary for the lecture 'On Poesy or Art' (1819):
If the Artist painfully copies nature, what an idle rivalry! If he proceeds from a Form, that answers to the notion of Beauty, namely, the many seen as one — what an emptiness, an unreality — as in Cypriani — The essence must be mastered — the natura naturans, & this presupposes a bond between Nature in this higher sense and the soul of Man — .88
Coleridge's self-exhortation that the essence (the natura naturans) 'must be mastered' lays exactly that stress on Will which we have already seen to be characteristic of his defence of poetry. His next point is that although the 'same powers' appear in both man and nature, 'there is no reflex act' in nature, so that the latter acts 'without reflection, and consequently without Morality'. In nature, 'Plan and Execution' are simultaneous; in man, creation is informed by 'reflection'. This notion is very close to Schelling, but also to the account of 'plastick nature' in Cudworth's True Intellectual System:89 Cudworth concludes that although nature is in one sense a more perfect artist than the human being, able to do without the laborious 'knockings and thrustings' of human work, it is inferior in the sense that it is not 'master of that wisdom according to which it acts, but only a Servant to it, and drudging executioner of the same'.90
The essential difference of Coleridge's lecture 'On Poesy or Art' from Schelling's essay lies in the fact that 'Schelling's ideas provided Coleridge with nothing to correspond to his own concern with the act of will'.91 One telling local example of this is that whereas Schelling writes, 'every creature of nature has but one moment of the true perfection of beauty' ('ein jedes Gewächs der Natur [hat] nur einen Augenblick der wahren vollendeten Schönheit'), Coleridge puts the emphasis on Will: 'Each thing, that lives, has its moment of self-exposition'.92
To sum up my argument so far: Plato's condemnation of poetic mimesis resonated with Coleridge's apprehension regarding the dangerous irrationality of bad art, which he, like Plato, saw as intoxicating when consumed by a passive public. The Neoplatonic defence of art as imitating the Ideas, rather than sense-objects, resting as it did on the busy, benevolent figure of Plato's Demiurge, helped Coleridge to justify 'good' art, because it enables an emphasis on the Will of the artist — and thus on an active mode of production and appreciation. Coleridge labels the first, passive kind of mimesis 'copy', and the latter, active kind 'imitation'.
Coleridge pursues this concept of Will as the 'ground' common to man and nature in the 'Essays on Method' in the 1818 Friend, and most fully and complexly in the Opus Maximum, as I discuss in Chapter 5, below. I wish now to keep in mind Coleridge's persistent emphasis on the Will of the poet in the context of the other model for poetic production common to Coleridge and Plato: inspiration.
Plato's treatment of inspiration, as in the case of mimesis, falls into two categories: Socrates' negative or deflationary propositions on the one hand, and on the other the positive implications of his own apparently inspired utterances. Also as with mimesis, Plato is sceptical of the value of inspiration because of its passivity: that the inspired speaker is by definition out of his or her senses casts doubt on the source and significance of the inspiration. If inspiration is to be recuperated rationally it must be by a process of after-reflection that would be better denoted 'philosophical' than 'poetic'. Again, close analogues for this kind of scepticism and recuperation are to be found in Coleridge. Coleridge's struggles with the concept and experience of inspiration have often been considered in the context of biblical hermeneutics and sometimes of Renaissance concepts of poetic madness.93 I want to suggest that still more light is shed on Coleridge's dilemmas by a return ad fontes, to Plato's ambivalent presentation of inspiration.94
The passivity and hence doubtful value of poetic inspiration is emphasized in the brief, witty dialogue Ion. This emphasis is the more striking given that it was not customary to see contradiction, as Socrates does, between poets' inspiration and the status of their poems as τέχνη 'in pre-Platonic literature poets are portrayed both as sophoi "wise men", who have access to knowledge through the inspiration of the Muses, and as skilled craftsmen'.95 Socrates' key speech in Ion at once revitalizes the tradition of inspiration with its striking imagery; and deflates it with its ascription to poets of an irrationality incommensurate with τέχνη. Socrates is ostensibly explaining why the rhapsode Ion gives bravura recitations and expositions of Homer, but is at a loss to comment on other poets, and even falls asleep on hearing their poems. Socrates suggests the reason to be that Ion's profession depends not on τέχνη, but a divine force from the Muses.96 Like a chain of magnetic rings, poet, rhapsode, and audience are bound by a chain of divine enthusiasm. Focusing increasingly on the poets and himself rising into an elevated metrical discourse, Socrates compares poets in the act of composition to wild Bacchic maidens under the influence of Dionysus, declaring: 'For a poet is a thing light, and volatile, and sacred; nor is he able to write poetry, till the Muse entering into him, he is transported out of himself, and has no longer the command of his intellect'.97
Given that epic composition and recitation were both oral arts, the dialogue does not clearly distinguish the two, and Ion agrees to this last proposition of Socrates, confessing that he himself is not in his right mind when reciting Homer: his soul is carried away in an ecstasy. In the context of the dialogue this is tantamount to owning that his utterances are devoid of cognitive content; and Socrates drives home his argumentative advantage by forcing Ion to admit that he has no technical knowledge of any of the topics of Homer's verse. In the course of this conversation Socrates also exposes Ion as a fraud. He traps Ion by asking whether during his inspired renditions he is aware of inducing similar effects of wild irrational emotion in the audience. Ion responds that he is ('For at every striking passage I look down from my pulpit round me, and See the people suitably affected by it: now weeping, then looking as if horror seized them; such emotion and astonishment are spread through all'), and congratulates himself on provoking this response because it guarantees him payment.98 This cynical boast unwittingly reveals that while performing Ion is not enraptured by divine mania, but rather keeps his eye consciously on the audience, being concerned purely with appearances. The conclusion to the dialogue underlines this. Asked 'Which do you prefer to be thought, dishonest or inspired?', Ion is content to be thought inspired, thus confirming his dishonesty.99
Given the intellectual limitation and even fraudulence of his interlocutor, it is problematic to read Socrates' central speech as a resounding affirmation of poetic inspiration. One such earnest reading (by Stolberg) prompted Goethe, in the ironically titled essay 'Plato as comrade of a Christian revelation', strongly to emphasize the stupidity of Ion, to the extent of denying that Socrates intends any comment on the nature of poetry: 'Der berühmte, bewunderte, gekrönte, bezahlte Jon sollte in seiner ganzen BlöBe dargestellt werden, und der Titel müBte heiBen: Jon oder der beschämte Rhapsode; denn mit der Poesie hat das ganze Gespräch nichts zu thun' [The famous, admired, crowned, paid Ion should be presented in his whole ignorance, and the title ought to read: Ion or the shamed rhapsode; for the whole dialogue has nothing to do with poetry].100 As in several dialogues, insists Goethe, Socrates speaks 'nur ironisch' [only ironically].
Yet the irony, though undeniable, is far from straightforward, given that Socrates' speech on inspiration is structurally central, elevated in tone and imagery, and contrasts strikingly with the teasing mockery to which he subjects Ion throughout the rest of the dialogue. Dramatically, too, Ion's reaction seems to enact the truth of Socrates' assertion of the mesmerizing effect of inspired utterance on the auditor: he replies, 'ἄπτει γάρ πώς μου τοῖς λόγοις τῆς ψυχῆς' [I feel as it were in my very soul, Socrates, the truth of what you say]: 'very strong and significant' words, as Floyer Sydenham noted.101 So, amplifying Goethe's comment, it would be misleading to call this irony in the simple sense of saying one thing but evidently meaning something different. Vlastos's distinction between 'simple' irony (using the definition just given) and 'complex' irony is helpful here: in complex irony the 'surface content is meant to be true in one sense, false in another'.102 The latter more appropriately describes Socrates' riddling mode of irony than the former, and helps to explain how Ion can dramatize both ridicule of an unintelligent performer and a serious comment on poetic production.
Socrates' irony here is not simple (in the sense of proposing that poets and rhapsodes operate by divine inspiration, while obviously meaning to undermine this proposition by applying it to Ion) but rather complex, admitting the possibility and potency of inspiration, while questioning its value: if even this hapless rhapsode can trade on inspiration, what guarantee can there be that it is a good? That it results in the irrational frenzy of the audience is, to the rational mind, a further point in its disfavour. A subsidiary implication of Socrates' complex irony is that, because poetic inspiration lacks a cognitive dimension, it is difficult to separate it from the dishonest pretence to knowledge that Ion so crassly exemplifies. And it would not be any better if poets were to give up the claim to knowledge, since their art would then be for that very reason, on Socrates' terms, worthless. Socrates calls the poets 'mouthpieces' (ἑρμηνῆς) of the Gods, a term which strongly emphasizes the passivity of transmission.103
The same point emerges from the fact that in Phaedrus Socrates asserts poetic madness to be a gift from the gods, yet places the poet only in sixth place in the hierarchy of ways of life.104 The latter evaluation does not mean that Plato wishes to present Socrates as despising poetry per se. Rather, as Verdenius explains, any such positive valuation 'ist aber mit der Überzeugung verbunden, daB der Erkenntniswert der Poesie nur ein geringer sein kann. Dieser geringe Erkenntniswert beruht auf demselben Faktor, der im positiven Sinne den ästhetischen Wert der Poesie bestimmt, nämlich auf der Mania' [is, however, connected with the persuasion that the cognitive worth of poetry can only be a slight one. This slight cognitive worth results from the same factor, which in the positive sense determines the aesthetic worth of poetry, i.e. mania].105 Thus when Socrates calls poetry or the poet 'divine', we should not rush to characterize this as either total approbation or simple irony: this attribution of divine status 'steht nicht im Widerspruch zu der Kritik, die Platon an der Dichtung übt, denn das Wort θεῖος impliziert nicht immer "gut" oder '"absolut", sondern bedeutet nur, was das Alltägliche übersteigt' [does not stand in contradiction to the criticism which Plato makes of literature, for the word θεῖος does not always imply 'good' or 'absolute', but rather means only that which goes beyond the everyday].106
Indeed in Phaedrus Socrates makes explicit what was implicit in Ion, that there is a good and a bad kind of inspiration: 'there are two species of mania; the one arising from human diseases; but the other from a divine mutation, taking place in a manner different from established customs'.107 Coleridge approaches this distinction in his desynonymization of enthusiasm and fanaticism; like Socrates he discerns
Two kinds of Madness — the Insania pseudo-poetica, i.e. nonsense conveyed in strange and unusual Language, the malice prepense of vanity, or an inflammation from debility — and this is degenerate/the other the Furor divinus, in which the mind by infusion of a celestial Health supra hominis naturam erigitur et in Deum transit — and this is Surgeneration, which only the Regenerate can properly appreciate,108
The word 'appreciate', suggesting a rational, critical activity, is quietly key in this formulation. Both Plato and Coleridge emphasize the necessity of critically sifting inspired utterances. In Plato's case this is well exemplified by two statements occurring in fairly close proximity in the Laws. The Athenian Stranger declares first that 'poets as a class (τὸ ποιητικόν) are divinely gifted and are inspired when they sing, so that with the help of Graces and Muses they frequently hit on how things really happen'.109 But afterwards he continues that 'a poet, when he sits on the tripod of the muse, is not in his right senses, but, like a fountain, readily pours forth the influx which he has received: and that, his art being imitative, he is often compelled, when representing men that are contrary to each other, to contradict himself; and does not know whether these things, or those, are true'. 110 Are these two statements mutually contradictory? They are not, I would suggest, if Socrates' own distinction between good and bad inspiration is taken into account.
This distinction, implicit in Ion, is presented clearly in Socrates' two speeches in Phaedrus. During the first speech (designed to persuade a boy to accept a non-lover instead of someone who is really in love), Socrates begins speaking in verse: first dithyrambic and then heroic, as he says. He represents himself as inspired, fearing that if he continues the speech he will lose all rational control: 'Do you not perceive that, being then urged by you, and assisted by Providence, I should be most evidently agitated by the fury of the Nymphs?'111 Ironic though this remark is, since in a sense it continues the amatory insinuation of the preceding speech by recalling attention to Phaedrus' beauty, it is the prelude to a critical examination of the 'inspired' speech. Warned by his mysterious daemonic sign, Socrates decides that the speech was in fact impious towards the divinity of love. (Coleridge, who in the Philosophical Lectures speculates on the nature of Socrates' daemon, sometimes claims to undergo a similar experience, as when he breaks off a discussion of the Day of Judgement 'warned from within and from without, that it is profanation to speak of these mysteries'.112) Socrates then attempts to redeem himself through the second speech. This speech appears prima facie entirely earnest. In elevated language, similar to though more sustained than that of the central speech in Ion,113 Socrates praises divine madness and discerns four types of it: mantic, telestic, poetic, and erotic. Hence Ficino, who regards poetic madness as both thematically central to the Phaedrus and instrumental in its composition, harmonizes this description with the statements on inspiration in Ion and Meno, to expound Plato's 'doctrine of mania'.114
However, irony is detectable in this second speech of Socrates too. The reflexivity of Socrates' praise of mania while in a state of mania himself is one signal of this;115 and two further ironies in particular are noteworthy. First, Socrates elaborately frames the speech by attributing it to the poet Stesichorus (and retrospectively attributing the earlier speech to Phaedrus the Myrrhinusian). The first words of the speech are in fact a quotation from Stesichorus: 'False is the tale [. . .]'. As the poet Gray pointed out, 'It is observable that Socrates whenever he would discourse affirmatively on any subject, or when he thought proper to raise or adorn his style, does it not in his own person, but assumes the character of another'.116 Second, just as after the first speech, Socrates afterwards comments on the mental state in which he gave it: he even pretends that his rapture was so powerful that he can no longer remember what he said.117 If this second speech constituted a recantation of the first, he now offers an ambiguous recantation of this one in turn:
And I know not how, while we are representing by images the amatory passion, we perhaps touch upon a certain truth; and perhaps we are at the same time hurried away elsewhere. Hence, mingling together an oration not perfectly improbable [οὐ παντάπασιν ἀπίθανος], we have produced a Certain fabulous hymn, and have with moderate abilities celebrated your lord and mine, Phaedrus, viz. Love.118
Such a degree of modesty appears perplexing, even given Socrates' habitually bantering tone. The key points for my purposes are that Socrates both frames and analyses the inspired speech, ironizes it (even feigning a struggle to recollect it), and finally expresses uncertainty about its value.
Tigerstedt, having elaborated on the ironic elements of the speech, asks whether we should not simply 'follow Socrates himself in declaring the whole speech "a play" — poetry not philosophy?'119 His answer is that this is a counterintuitive response to such a sublime speech, and that we can better solve the dilemma by recalling that Socrates' speech is a myth, and as such neither pure allegory nor pure fiction. 'The purpose of the myth is to express what cannot be expressed by dialectic, and it does this as a persuasive rhetorical device, subordinate to dialectic rather than as an intuition transcending dialectic'.120 This seems to me true as far as it goes, but I wish to offer in addition an interpretation that I will then show to be consonant with some of Coleridge's writing about inspiration. Socrates' speech, taking the framing devices — the attribution to Stesichorus and the ambiguous rumination about its value — as integral parts, is indeed ironic. The mode of irony, however, is (to return to Vlastos' terminology) 'complex', rather than the 'simple' mode implied by Tigerstedt.121 The speech is ironic because whenever a speaker reflects on his own inspired utterance this is necessarily ironic: it is a process of setting at conscious remove thoughts which had initially possessed the speaker. Yet this would seem to be, in Socrates' terms, exactly what is required if an inspired utterance is to be validated at all. 'For all his, qualified, praise of enthusiasm, Socrates-Plato never becomes an irrationalist'.122 Ion's inspiration was deemed worthless or dishonest, at any rate dangerous, because Ion was unable or unwilling to submit his own or Homer's words to reflective scrutiny. The same criticism could apply by extension (though Socrates is more cautious about this) to oracles, who transmit wisdom unconsciously from an unknown source. The lower, unsatisfactory senses of both inspiration and mimesis merge in this critique. Socrates himself, on the other hand, guarantees the value of his own inspired utterance by the act of doubting it. Such a guarantee is purchased by deflating the sublime register, but it is unavoidable if poetry is to be accorded, in Platonic terms, philosophical credentials. Socrates insists — unconventionally — on the passive, possessed nature of poetic inspiration, which is far from an active collaboration with the Muse.123 Cognitive content is infused only by subsequent reflection.
A statement by Timaeus can be taken as a partial gloss on this point:
But that Divinity assigned divination [μαντικὴν] to human madness [ἀφροσύνη] may be sufficiently inferred from hence; that no one while endued with intellect [ἔννους] becomes connected with a divine and true prophecy; but this alone takes place either when the power of prudence is fettered by sleep, or suffers some mutation through disease, or a certain enthusiastic energy: it being in this case the employment of prudence [ἔμφρονος] to understand what was asserted either sleeping or waking by a prophetic or enthusiastic nature; and so to distinguish all the phantastic appearances as to be able to explain what and to whom anything of future, past, or present good is portended. But it is by no means the office of that which abides and is still about to abide in this enthusiastic energy, to judge of itself either concerning the appearances or vociferations. Hence it was well said by the ancients, that to transact and know his own concerns and himself, is alone the province of a prudent man. And on this account the law orders that the race of prophets [προφητῶν, better translated 'interpreters' or 'spokesmen'] should preside as judges over divine predictions; who are indeed called by some diviners — but this in consequence of being ignorant that such men are interpreters of ænigmatical visions and predictions, and on this account should not be called diviners, but rather prophets [i.e. interpreters] of divinations.124
Although this passage explicitly asserts the need for after-reflection on the inspired utterance, however, there is a difference between this and the process dramatized in Phaedrus. Whereas this passage, which unlike Phaedrus 265a treats inspiration through 'enthusiastic energy' on the same level as inspiration through bodily disease, insists that the enthusiast and the interpreter must be different people (the oracle and the priest), Socrates in Phaedrus acts as his own interpreter: the poet as philosophic critic.
A little obliquely, one might see echoes of these two models in Coleridge's critical thought. On the one hand, Biographia book two consummates his early, not entirely self-deprecating praise of Wordsworth's genius: 'Wordsworth descended on him, like the Γνῶθι σεαυτόν from Heaven; by shewing to him what true Poetry was, he made him know, that he himself was no Poet' — an ambiguous compliment to pay a writer who claimed to be a man speaking to men. 125 In Biographia Coleridge demonstrates that the heavenly poet needs a more rational spokesman both to guide and interpret him if he is to produce 'the FIRST GENUINE PHILOSOPHIC POEM'.126 Coleridge's Wordsworth has 'the vision and the faculty divine', but little of the critical acumen that Coleridge claims for himself. On the other hand, Coleridge has a self-interpreting, gloss-writing persona, the desire 'to be my own Hierocles', to attain to 'a notion of his notions'.127 It is this persona which relegates the poem 'Kubla Khan' to the status of 'a vision in a dream' and hence a 'psychological curiosity' — of which more shortly.
The irony integral to a reflection on an inspired utterance is extended by writing it down. If the Republic's attack on mimetic ποίησις constitutes, as I outlined above, partly an attack on the education system of the oral culture which prescribed uncritical rote-learning of poetry, I consider the ironizing of inspiration to form part of this process. The subsequent discussion in Phaedrus contrasting the written with the spoken word introduces a further layer of framing, and hence irony, in Socrates' speeches: they have been remembered and re-composed by Plato, thus setting the moment of irrational inspiration at yet a further remove.
I have already indicated the similarity between Plato's and Coleridge's concern with the difficult task of rationally validating inspired utterance, to endorse poetry through philosophy. This is a further manifestation of Coleridge's double mindedness, since as Burwick aptly puts it: 'In his intellectual struggle to resolve the dilemma of the "mad rhapsodist" Coleridge wanted to have it both ways. He wanted to affirm the creative capacities of intuition and imagination without denying divine agency'.128 On the one hand, he was attracted to the Ficinian tradition which saw a genuine 'doctrine of mania' in Phaedrus and Ion, and which seems to find consummate expression in Shakespeare's lines, 'The Lunaticke, the Lover, and the Poet, | Are of imagination all compact'. On the other hand, Coleridge would surely have resisted the popular assumption that these lines represent Shakespeare's defence of his own imaginative art. He probably appreciated the irony that Shakespeare gives this speech to a sceptic (Duke Theseus);129 an irony that is 'complex' much in Vlastos' sense. For he inferred enough care in Shakespeare's composition to insist that 'Shakespeare was no passive vehicle of inspiration, possessed by the spirit, not possessing it': the constant keynote of his Shakespeare criticism is the appreciation of Shakespeare's judgement over his genius, his facility of active 'meditation' above and beyond passive 'observation'.130 Shakespeare's feelings were crucially 'under the command of his own Will 131 For like Plato, Coleridge regards the unwilled nature of inspiration as problematic.
There is admittedly a specifically Christian and therefore post-Platonic dimension to Coleridge's concern, which became explicit in Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit: the question of inspiration is central to the status of the Bible. In Confessions, however, Coleridge argues that inspiration 'in the Sense of Information miraculously communicated by Voice or Vision' is by itself useless, for it extinguishes the congenial humanity of the prophets without which they would lack common ground for communicating with readers. Coleridge therefore wishes to redefine inspiration to denote when 'the Writer or Speaker uses and applies his existing Gifts of Power and Knowledge under the predisposing, aiding & directing actuation of God's Holy Spirit'.132 The majority of the Bible is not dictated by God, therefore not infallible; but it is the exclusively human process of after-reflection which ensures its value — a process continued through centuries of Church tradition.
Behind this commonsensical-sounding solution lies, as Anthony Harding has demonstrated, an extensive field of Romantic thought about inspiration. From Coleridge's perspective, the inspired quality of Scripture was vindicated by the tradition of commentary which followed, and the continuing response of readers within that tradition. The random inspiration of a Brothers or a Southcott on the other hand, lacking a normative tradition to support it, would be in Coleridge's terms mere fanaticism: as with that other crowd-puller Ion, the doubt about the genuineness of their prophecies mingles inevitably with a doubt as to their honesty. The problem of distinguishing true from false inspiration agitated those Romantic poets, as Harding points out, who wanted to recover the Miltonic, vates tradition of the inspired singer. Besides attempting to take on the role of inspired seer, Harding writes, they also 'had to act as their own normative tradition, their own "church", in judging the fitness of their work to be received into the canon of inspired utterance'.133 Important is not so much the fact of inspiration itself, but the willed reflection on it: 'To have been inspired is not trivial, but it is not everything. What is much more important is to decide what it means to have been inspired'.134 Harding explains this through the Romantic sense of belatedness; as Collins had asked in 'Ode on the Poetical Character', 'Where is the bard whose soul can now | Its high presuming hopes avow?' This belatedness, the (in Schiller's sense) sentimental situation of the poet always nostalgic for but unable to recapture the immediacy of naive utterance, produces irony.
Yet this irony, far from being purely a post-Miltonic phenomenon, was already audible in Plato; and Coleridge detected it also in at least one later writer, Böhme. (As I described in Chapter I, Coleridge recognized substantial affinities between Plato and Böhme, though the irony that is conscious in the founder of the Academy is less likely to be so in the unlearned cobbler.) Böhme wrote of having experienced an essential vision in a quarter of an hour, of which he claimed his entire work thereafter was an 'unfolding': 'For I had a thorough View of the Universe, as in a Chaos, wherein all Things are couched and wrapped up, but it was impossible for me to explain the same'. Coleridge underlines the word 'explain', commenting in the margin:
explicate, develope, unfold — Germanicè auseinandersetzen. When a modern Orthodoxist of the Protestant Arminian Church will explain to me what he means by Inspiration, Inspired Penmen, Inspired Writ, &c, by something more than by synonimes — i.e. when he explains <the sense,> and not merely construes the words by help ofEntick's English Dictionary — then I will tell him whether I think Behmen's Writings, or the Author, inspired — or any portion of the former grounded in unaided & partial recollections of inspired Truths: for as such, the Author himself offers them to us — & therefore as not infallible. 135
Coleridge's phrasing is almost litigiously convoluted, but given that he believes Bohme's writing to be neither ventriloquistic (dictated by God) nor fraudulent, he must be suggesting that its value derives from the effort of recollection — that Platonic concept again — which is always partial. To have perceived inspired truth (beheld the Ideas, as in the myth of pre-existence in Phaedrus, or the pregnant 'Chaos' of Böhme) is not everything: a willed, philosophical unfolding, 'unaided' by divine prompting, must follow. The insufficiency of inspiration by itself is evoked by Coleridge's sceptical but tortured rhetorical question:
If a man could pass thro' Paradise in a Dream, & have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his Soul had really been there, & found that flower in his hand when he awoke — Aye? and what then?136
Coleridge had in fact already posed this question in 'Kubla Khan'.
Ever since 'Kubla Khan', readers and writers have been fascinated by its figuration of inspiration.137 I want now to read the poem and its Preface in terms of the two Platonic models for poetic production I have so far discussed separately: the demiurgic mimesis, and inspiration.
The poem has, as W. J. Bate observes, a two-part structure frequently seen in Romantic odes. The first part, the 'odal hymn', presents a 'challenge, ideal, or prototype that the poet hopes to reach or transcend'; the second part, 'proceeding from that challenge', forms a concluding 'credo', a 'personal [expression] of hope or ambition'.138 That is to say, lines 1—36 describe Kubla's creativity, while the final eighteen lines hope for a creativity in the poet which would be analogous; or perhaps more than analogous, identical, since he hopes to 'build that dome in air' (italics added), the very dome that Kubla decrees.
There is a difference, however: the difference between building and decreeing. Coleridge's source for the first few lines, Purchas His Pilgrimage, says simply: 'In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Palace', whereas Coleridge inserts an emphasis on will ('decree'), which makes it more like the divine Fiat.139 (Perhaps Robert Browning was thinking of this in a poem behind which 'Kubla Khan' stirs, 'Abt Vogler': 'But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can, / Existent behind all laws, that made them and, lo, they are!':140 the otherwise awkwardly placed word 'can' might work as a pun on 'Kubla Khan', since Coleridge's circle would have pronounced it that way.141 Kubla's power is such that he can.) Kubla decrees order in the aboriginal chaos, creates a paradise where there was nothing but 'fertile ground'. The poet, on the other hand, will have to 'build' the dome, which suggests the same task undertaken with more effort. Seeing the divine Fiat in Kubla's decree raises the temptation of reading forward in Coleridge's work to the primary imagination as 'a repetition in the finite mind in the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM' and the secondary, poetic imagination as a willed 'echo' of this.142
However, this is not a satisfying equation, not least because the manner and result of Kubla's creation of his paradise are in fact far removed from anything likely to be attributed to the Christian logos. Rather his creation is 'an order to tame what he perceives as disorder, enacting the desire for mastery over natural multiplicity which is figured in the cultivated formality of his pleasure-dome gardens';143 while the chaos of unsculpted nature continues to loom outside the walls, in the form of a 'savage place' impervious to Kubla's desires (and perhaps 'forests ancient as the hills' might remind us of ὑλή in its root meaning of 'wood'). This paradise, moreover, 'contains knowledge of the threat of its own possible destruction',144 since Kubla is aware of 'Ancestral voices prophesying war'. Despite his attempt to establish a paradise in which there will be an everlasting present full of pleasure, the past intrudes — something mysteriously prior to the mighty builder — predicting that the future holds unrest in store. Kubla's creation is grand, but grandeur is not exempt from time.
The fragility that coexists with grandeur is underlined in the six-line interlude at the centre of the poem, beginning: 'The shadow of the dome of pleasure | Floated midway on the waves'.145 Despite the opinion of many critics that 'Kubla Khan' presents a precisely delineated topography, these lines are puzzling: where are the waves? Rivers do not usually have waves, so the location might be the 'lifeless ocean', in which case 'midway' suggests quite far out to sea; though the sea is at least five miles away, and probably much further, since the river also has to flow through caverns 'measureless to man' before reaching it. Over this distance, not only can Kubla hear the 'tumult' of river sinking into ocean, but can also (it is implied) see the shadow of his dome on the sea. The effect of this emphasis on distance is to suggest the vast scale of Kubla's work. Yet the surrounding natural chaos is by implication vaster still, and that word 'shadow' hints strongly at the ephemeral nature of the dome: it perhaps gestures to the Republic's notion that art is at two removes from reality, and to the Myth of the Cave.146 (The word 'device' further stresses the artifice of Kubla's creation.) The impression is like that of the line in Shelley's 'Ozymandias', 'Look on my works ye Mighty and despair': what had been the triumphant words of a creative tyrant change their meaning into a self-mockery millennia later, once the 'lone and level waste' — like the chaos surrounding Kubla's dome — has reconquered. Elsewhere, Coleridge too used this image for the transience of attempts to impose artifice upon nature: 'the mighty columns were but sand, | And lazy snakes trail o'er the level ruins!"147
If 'it would be wrong' (as Beer says) 'to see Kubla as representing the [serenely triumphant] highest type of genius',148 then, yet the power of his will has something of the divine Fiat about it, is he not similar to Plato's Demiurge as Coleridge imagined him, subduing the ὑλή with partial success? Support for this speculation can be found in Coleridge's above-quoted question, 'The Poet & his Subject, are they not as the Δημιοργος &υλή of Plato?' For the concluding eighteen lines of 'Kubla Khan' show the poet trying to be 'as' the creator of the dome (which among many possible symbolisms could suggest the pendent world, exactly what the Demiurge creates).149
The play of tenses in this stanza again underlines the ephemerality of the present moment. To paraphrase the content: once upon a time the poet heard an Abyssinian maid sing about paradise,150 and if in the future he could fully recollect the song, then he would be filled with inspiration, provoking admiration and astonishment in his audience. Inspiration is fleeting, and its value dependent on a willed recollection — 'Could I revive within me [. . .]'. But whereas with the Demiurge-Kubla to will was to create (Kubla can), the poet is stuck in the conditional tense (could), diffident in spite of his proclaimed ambition.151
Before pursuing this thought I want to add some observations to the large body of critical comment about the Platonic inspiration evoked in the closing lines. John Beer has uncovered numerous literary echoes in the poem,152 a few of which are from Akenside, whose Pleasures of Imagination was a major source for Coleridge's 1795 lectures. I propose one further echo. Akenside invokes the 'Genius of Ancient Greece' and in particular a wild-minded, inspired Plato consonant with Coleridge's early portrayal of him:
Could but my happy hand intwine a wreath
Of Plato's olive with the Mantuan bay,
[. . .]
Then should my powerful voice at once dispell
Those monkish horrors; should in words divine
Relate how favour'd minds like you inspir'd
[. . .]153
The movement of the verse in describing conditional inspiration ('could [. . .] should') is very similar to that of Coleridge's 'Could [. . .] 'twould': both poets hark back to a temporally distant Platonic inspiration which may or may not be still recoverable.
As for the predicted awe of the onlookers admiring the poet who 'on honeydew hath fed, | And drank the milk of Paradise', Socrates' central speech from the Ion has been routinely cited as a source ever since Elisabeth Schneider declared it 'obvious':154
For the priests of Cybele perform not their dances, while they have the free use of their intellect; so these melody poets pen those beautiful songs of theirs only when they are out of their sober minds. But as soon as they proceed to give voice and motion to those songs, adding to their words the harmony of music and the measure of dance, they are immediately transported; and, possessed by some divine power, are like the priestesses of Bacchus, who, full of the god, no longer draw water, but honey and milk out of the springs and fountains; though unable to do any thing like it when they are sober.155
This does correspond persuasively to 'Kubla Khan': the earth-goddess 'Cybele' in particular, whose rites were frenzied, is thought to be one of the mythological figures animating the name Kubla ('Cubla' in the Crewe Manuscript).156 However, Euripides' Bacchae itself should not be discounted from the matrix of background texts, especially since Coleridge repeatedly borrowed Euripides from his college library as an undergraduate, Sydenham notes two correspondences between the above passage from the Ion and the Bacchae, the first of which he translates as follows:
Some, longing for the milder milky draught,
Green herbs or bladed grass of the blest ground
Cropp'd with light finger; and to them, behold,
Out gush'd the milky liquid: trickling down
To others, from their ivy-twined wands
Dropp'd the sweet honey . . .157
And milk and honey reverberate through countless texts, eyer since the Song of Songs. Pindar, another early favourite of Coleridge's, uses milk and honey as a metaphor for poetry, thus like Socrates yoking two usually differentiated types of experience, Bacchic ecstasy and poetic inspiration.158 So the passage from Ion is merely the most convenient representative of a large matrix of these images.
Finally, George Watson has suggested that Coleridge's phrase 'holy dread' is Platonic, citing Laws 67Id (Θεῖον Φόβον) and adding: 'That "Kubla Khan" is in some sense a comment on Plato's theory of poetry is not really in doubt'.159 Although that might sound too precise a source for a phrase as slight as 'holy dread', the context in Laws is pertinent, since the Athenian Stranger is discussing how to govern the music of drinking assemblies, especially the tumultuous rites of Bacchus.160 By way of prologue he insists that poets must be compelled to assert that the good (temperate and just) man is happy,161 and further that the poet must use melodies and words together, with properly judged rhythm (Coleridge's 'mingled measure'?). For the habit of'arranging naked words in measure' is said to be pernicious, as is 'producing melody and rhythm without words', since this is too irrational — 'it is very difficult to know the intention of the rhythm and harmony which subsist without words'. Also unacceptable is the mingling of the harp, the human voice, and animal noises, as this excites irrational laughter. The Muses themselves would never commit these offences, but imitative poets 'are more depraved than the Muses'.162 Good poets, however, would judge harmony and rhythm properly to promote moral discipline. As for the worshippers of Bacchus, the Athenian Stranger points out that because they are drunk, they are easily led: and the best leader is a legislator who is sober, disciplining the unruliness of those who have partaken too freely of the milk of paradise, with 'the most beautiful opposing fear, in conjunction with justice; which divine fear we have denominated shame and modesty'.163 (The parallel with the charioteer, spirited horse and bad horse in Phaedrus is evident.) So the Platonic 'holy dread' seems related to that of the imagined audience of 'Kubla Khan'; Plato and Coleridge again coincide in their anxious concern with audience response.
I wish to modify Watson's claim that 'Kubla Khan' is a comment on Plato's theory (or theories) of poetry to suggest, rather, that it runs parallel to it. Returning to the tentativeness of the conditional tense ('Could I revive within me . . .'), it is possible to see a parallel with Socrates' delivery of his second inspired speech in another persona, and Plato's bathetic ploy of analysing the principles of rhetoric immediately afterwards, thus drawing attention to the process of remembering and recomposition. The poet of'Kubla Khan', as I have suggested, is reflecting on what it was like to have been inspired and what it would be like in the future; in the moment of inspiration itself, such knowledge would be impossible. In Harding's words:
The seer of "Kubla Khan" lost his power to revive within him the maid's symphony and song at the very instant when he recognized the maid as distinct from himself, when he became, that is, conscious of her. The truly possessed or inspired conjurer of a daemon has no notion, while he is in his trance, that the daemon is not himself.164
It is not the vision that fails the bard, but the other way round:
these lines are not spoken in the character of the possessed bard, but, more subtly, in that of the bard who knows what it is to be possessed and knows, too, that this inspired state has now left him, that the poem is written out of the memory of the inspired state rather than out of the inspired state itself165
Harding's further comment that there is a 'startling honesty' about this, in that the poet is not permitted to know 'whether his words are of divine or daemonic origin', seems to me exactly right: no sooner has the poet raised the possibility of imitating the Kubla-Demiurge's creativity through inspiration, than he submits this hope to critical scrutiny and is forced to grasp at a recollection which might never fully return.
The line 'I would build that dome in air' always reminds commentators of Amphion, the inspired singer and orphan who built the walls of Thebes through his music alone. This allusion neatly links with the passage of Cudworth on plastic nature which I cited above. Cudworth writes:
If the oecodomical166 art, which is in the mind of the architect, were supposed to be transfused into the stones, bricks and mortar, there acting upon them in such a manner as to make them come together of themselves, and range themselves into the form of a complete edifice, as Amphion was said, by his harp, to have made the stones move, and place themselves orderly of their own accord, and so to have built the walls of Thebes; or if the musical art were conceived to be immediately in the instruments and strings, animating them as a living soul, and making them to move exactly, according to the laws of harmony, without any external impulse: these, and such like instances, in Aristotle's judgment, would be fit iconisms or representations of the plastick nature, that being art itself acting immediately upon the matter as an inward principle in it.167
The poet in the concluding lines on 'Kubla Khan', however, is discovering that unlike plastic nature, Amphion or Kubla, his own mind is obliged to the difficult effort of willed recollection.
I have called the poet's doubt-filled conditional tense a 'critical scrutiny' of his inspiration. Coleridge's need to submit irrational inspiration to philosophical analysis, hinted at in the poem, is confirmed and developed in the Preface published with the poem in 1816. The Preface, in fact, repeats the reflective movement of the concluding stanza in a different idiom.168 The poem is now announced as a 'psychological curiosity' as opposed to having any 'poetic merits'; just as Coleridge explained his early interest in Platonism as merely a desire to investigate 'Facts of mind'.169 Suspicious of the irrationality and fleetingness of inspiration, Coleridge demotes 'Kubla Khan' to 'A Vision in a Dream', now claiming that it was composed 'in a profound sleep', as opposed to the 'sort of Reverie' described by the Crewe Manuscript. (This gesture of modesty also seems a symptom of the anxiety of reception: the concern with audience response expressed in the closing lines of the poems is compounded in the act of publication.) The Preface emphasizes the irrationality of the composition: both the images and words 'rose up', very different from Kubla's effortless but willed creation, but exactly like the passive hearing of the maid's song in the 'vision'. And like the concluding section of the poem, the Preface proclaims the need to recollect (the word 'recollection(s)' occurs three times). Only recollection can substantiate the fragile, irrational vision. This activity of the philosopher, however, is all too easily disrupted by worldly intrusions, symbolized by the person from Porlock. Even recollection which was 'distinct' deteriorates to the 'vague and dim' in this way, just as for the child in the 'Immortality Ode' whom life drags ever further from the vision of the Ideas in the state of pre-existence. 'Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind', avers the Preface, 'the Author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him'. So like the conditionally inspired poet of the concluding lines, the author of the Preface is required to exercise the conscious will to recover and thus give value to his 'given' vision. Yet unfortunately it is not easy for the poet to be as the Demiurge-Kubla: the human poet's 'purpose' can be frustrated. The tomorrow when he will sing 'loud and long' and be acclaimed as truly inspired is 'yet to come'; the unifying of irrational creativity with rational reflection — of poetry with philosophy — is perpetually striven for but never secured. The painful struggle of the poet to create, whether figured as a process of taming the chaos, or as anamnesis, remembering an inspired vision, is clearly associated in Coleridge's mind with Plato — not only with Plato's Demiurge, but with the philosopher himself. For Plato's
poetic genius imported in him those deep impressions and a love of them which, mocking all comparison with after objects, leaves behind it thirst for something not attained, to which nothing in life is found commensurate and which still impels the soul to pursue.170
That, however, brings us to Coleridge's direct interpretation of Plato.
1. Two words are used for 'quarrel', διαφορά (607b) and ἐναντιώσεως (607c), both connoting hostility.
2. On the 'noble lie', see Republic 414b—4I5d. On the recent origin of the quarrel, see Plato on Poetry, ed. Penelope Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 18 — henceforth: Murray. (I take all Greek quotations of Ion and Republic from Murray.) Thomas Szlezák notes a precedent in Xenophanes' (sixth-fifth century Bc) criticism of Homer: Der Staat (Düsseldorf and Zurich: Artemis und Winkler, 2000), p. 994.
3. For a selective bibliography see Thomas Gould, The Ancient Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 219—20. Those who play down the banishment tend to see elaborate irony in the Republic as a whole, proposing e.g. that the obvious inhumanity of this and other measures is a signal for us to understand that although 'Man cannot live without ideals, equally man cannot live by ideals alone' (John Herman Randall Jr., Plato: Dramatist of the Life of Reason (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1970), p. 149). Cf. Gadamer's argument that the Republic aims to stimulate moral reform in the individual by providing a picture of the impossible: a state-organized paideia with total censorship guaranteeing harmony among the citizens ('Plato and the Poets', in Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, trans, by P. Christopher Smith (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), 39—72, esp. pp. 51—54). Such interpretations, however, must resort to yet further elaboration to explain Socrates' emphasis on the possible reality of his ideal state (Republic 473c). Among Coleridge's contemporaries, the most noteworthy discussion of the banishment occurs in Schopenhauer's 1819 work Die Welt als Wille und Representation [The World as Will and Representation], but since Coleridge did not know this it would take me too far afield.
4. Phil. Lects. I, 161.
5. Republic 607d—e.
6. The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. by Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, 10 vols (London: Ernest Benn, 1926—30), VII, 20, 140. Shelley, though, claimed Plato as a poet.
7. BL II, 14.
8. BL II, 25—26; 156.
9. Lects. 1795, pp. 196—97, discussed in Chapter I, above.
10. 'Dejection: An Ode', line 89. Cf. 'Davy calls me the Poet-philosopher — I hope, Philosophy & Poetry will not neutralize each other, & leave me an inert mass' (CL II, 668—69).
11. BL I, 300.
12. I am putting in cruder terms what Tim Milnes aptly calls the Biographia's 'hesitation between philosophical dialectic and philosophical aesthetic': 'Eclipsing Art: Method and Metaphysics in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria', Journal of the History of Ideas, 60.1 (January 1999), 125—47 (p. 127).
13. See especially Kathleen M. Wheeler, Sources, Processes and Methods in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
14. Unsigned review, British Critic, 8 (November 1817), 460—81; reprinted in Jackson, ed., Coleridge: The Critical Heritage, pp. 355—75 (p. 375).
15. Stephen, Hours in a Library, 3 vols (London: Folio Society, 1991; first published 1874—79), III, 332. On the troubled genesis of the work, see BL I, li—lxvii.
16. Esp. pp. 263—64. Hunt mentions that a friend had recently shown him a copy of BL, which he had not seen for twenty-two years (p. 4): a reflection of the book's lack of circulation?
17. BL II, 19.
18. Hamilton, Coleridge's Poetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), p. 10.
19. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1933, 1964), p. 80.
20. I. A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination, ed. by John Constable (London: Routledge, 2001; first published 1934), p. II.
21. Coleridge on Imagination, p. 21.
22. 'Aspects of Coleridge's Distinction between Reason and Understanding', p. 167.
23. BL I, 142; cf. CM iv, 112; CM v, 469; SWF 1, 755.
24. Republic 475 e.
25. Republic 480a. Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 282 — henceforth: Havelock.
26. For these definitions I draw on Julias A. Elias, Plato's Defence of Poetry (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), p. 2.
27. Republic 606e.
28. As Havelock argues. Giovanni Reale has recently endorsed this argument but criticized Havelock for ignoring Plato's declarations of the inferiority of the written to the spoken word in Phaedrus and the Seventh Letter. Reale importantly distinguishes three types of orality: (i) poetic-mimetic; (ii) dialectic; (iii) rhetoric: Platone: Alla ricerca della sapienza segreta (Milan: Rizzoli, 1998), pp. 26, 35-72.
29. Protagoras 32565—326a3, trans, from J. M. Cooper, in Plato, Complete Works.
30. Republic 365a—b. Cf. Christopher Janaway, 'Plato and the Arts', in A Companion to Plato, ed. by Hugh H. Benson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 388—400 (pp. 389—90).
31. CN III, 4397 f.49 (March 1818).
32. 424d—e. Cf. Laws 700d.
33. CN III, 4337.
34. CL IV, 762 (2$ July 1817).
35. CN III, 4337 (and n.), an entry of January—April 1817 apparently made with the revised Friend in mind. That Coleridge in this entry quotes in Greek and cites passages of the Laws in addition to the Republic is good evidence of his having studied Plato extensively in Greek.
36. Republic 377e.
37. LL II, 502; cf. LL I, 325-26,
38. LL II, 503.
39. CN I, 470.
40. 38Id. The verb is καταψεύδομι, i.e. to feign, invent; tell lies against. Greek uses the same word (ψεῦδος) for 'fiction' and 'lie'.
41. 'The use of the words ἰδέαις (d2), εἶδος (d3), ἰδέας (d6 and eI) to describe the god's shape or form underlines the link between this passage [Republic 38od] and the later development of the theory of Forms at 476—480 and 523—525' (Murray, p. 147). Cf. 395a—b on the need to imitate one thing only.
42. BL II, 27-28; cf. CN II, 2274.
43. Republic 605b.
44. Of English writers (BL II, 210-12).
45. BL II, 229,
46. 392a.
47. 395d.
48. Friend, 1, 20.
49. 394e.
50. 394e-395b.
51. CM II, 692-93.
52. Republic 40Ic—d.
53. Many commentators see discontinuity between books 2—3 and book 10, especially since in the latter Socrates admits only 'hymns to the gods and praises of good people' (607a), a radical restriction compared with the earlier books. I follow Susan B. Levin, however, in treating book 10 as a continuation. Levin notes that books 2—3 focus on children (for whom a range of poetry may have a pedagogic role), book 10 on adults (who in public events may use only praise-poems): The Ancient Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry Revisited: Plato and the Greek Literary Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 152—66. Cf. Murray, p. 185.
54- 435C-44IC; 595a-b.
55. An interpretative crux, since nowhere else does Plato suggest that God makes the Ideas, nor that there is an Idea of every mundane object. (Cf. Parmenides 130b—e, where Socrates queries whether to posit Ideas of hair, dirt, mud, etc.) For a critical summary and the clever suggestion that Socrates is here ironically parodying the imitative poets who ascribe unworthy activities such as bed-making (and by implication sleeping and sex) to the gods, see Charles Griswold, 'The Ideas and the Criticism of Poetry in Plato's Republic, Book X', Journal of the History of Philosophy, 19 (1981), 135—50. Republic 598b helped give rise to the Neoplatonic notion that the Ideas exist in the divine mind: see further p. 123 n. 149 below.
56. CN III, 4397 f.49; cf. CN III, 3592.
57. BL II, 42.
58. BL IIII, 43, 45.
59. See Frederick Burwick, Illusion and the Drama: Critical Theory of the Enlightenment and Romantic Era (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), pp. 209—29.
60. Cratylus 432b—d.
61. Verdenius, Mimesis: Plato's Doctrine of Artistic Imitation and its Meaning to Us (Leiden: Brill, 1949), pp. 16-17.
62. Republic 597e—598a, trans, by G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve, in Plato, Complete Works, ed. by John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), p. 1202.
63. See M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 42—46; Murray, pp. 198—99.
64. 28a—29d. See F. M. Cornford, Plato's Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato translated with a running commentary (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1937), pp. 33—39, 165 —henceforth: Cornford. In Sophist Plato explicitly compares the divine with the human craftsman (265e—266d).
65. Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, p. 430.
66. Ennead 5.8.1, trans, by A. H. Armstrong, 7 vols (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Heinemann, V, 237-41 (p. 239).
67. Timaeus 37c; Cornford, p. 99.
68. Ennead 5.8.1.
69. Existentialists and Mystics, p. 392.
70. Existentialists and Mystics, p. 388; cf. p. 15: 'I cannot accept these "Ideas", even as offering a metaphor of how the artist works'.
71. CIIIhi, 3952. The word 'hinder' (?) 'is practically an indecipherable scribble' (Perry, Notebooks, p.244).
72. 49a; Cornford, p. 181; Michael J. B. Allen, The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 32.
73. More, A Platonick Song of the Soul, ed. by Alexander Jacob (London: Associated University Presses, 1998), p. 617; cf. p. 558.
74. e.g. CN v, 5813 f.35.
75. 48a; Cornford, p. 176.
76. The exactly contemporaneous work by Joseph Harpur, An Essay on the Principles of Philosophical Criticism, applied to Poetry (London, 1810), likewise sees in poetry a necessary opposition between υλή and εἶδος (pp. 24—26). Although Harpur stresses the Aristotelian εἶδος against the Platonic ἰδεα, his quotation of Ammonius and Porphyry reflects the Neoplatonic tendency to harmonize Platonic with Aristotelian doctrine.
77. Timaeus 29s, 41b; BL I, 31.
78. Italics mine. I am indebted to Perry's note (Notebooks, p. 244).
79. CN II, 2355.
80. CM IV, 161-62.
81. E.g. SWF I, 794—95. Anthony Harding describes how Coleridge in his Highgate years rewrote Naturphilosophie in a Trinitarian frame: 'Coleridge, the Afterlife, and the Meaning of Hades', Studies in Philology, 96 (Spring 1999), 204—23.
82. F. W. J. Schelling: Texte zur Philosophie der Kunst, ed. Werner Beierwaltes (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982), p. 74; discussed pp. 9—10, 39—40 (n. 22). (henceforth: Schelling).
83. Michael Bullock translates this lecture as 'Concerning the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature': appendix to Herbert Read, The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry (London: Faber, 1968), pp. 321—64.
84. Schelling, pp. 56-57, 65.
85. Vorlesungen uber die Methode des akademischen Studiums (1803), lecture 14, in Schelling, p. 127.
86. Schelling, p. 58.
87. '[Der Künstler] muB sich also vom Produkt oder vom Gescöopf entfernen, aber nur um sich zu der schaffenden Kraft zu erheben und diese geistig zu ergreifen' (Schelling, p. 64).
88. CN III, 4397, f.50. Foakes (LL II, 217—25) takes his text for the lecture from this Notebook entry.
89. 'Die Wissenschaft, durch welche die Natur wirkt, ist freilich keine der menschlichen gleiche, die mit der Reflexion ihrer selbst verknüpft wäre' (Schelling, p. 62). Affinities between Schelling and Cudworth are to be expected given Schelling's own study of the latter: see Douglas Hedley, 'Cudworth, Coleridge and Schelling', Coleridge Bulletin, 16 (Winter 2000), 63—70.
90. Cudworth, 1, 156, 172.
91. Frederick Burwick, Mimesis and its Romantic Reflections (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania University Press, 2001), pp. 105—06. See pp. 89—106 for a detailed comparison of Coleridge's essay with that of Schelling.
92. CN III, 4397 f. 53, italics Coleridge's; Schelling, p. 66. Burwick notes this example (Mimesis, p. 106).
93. Frederick Burwick, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania University Press, 1996), pp. 36—77; Ina Lipkowitz, 'Inspiration and the Poetic Imagination: Samuel Taylor Coleridge', Studies in Romanticism, 30 (1991), 605—31; Elinor Shaffer, 'Kubla Khan' and the Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770—18oo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 62—95.
94. Timothy Clark, The Theory of Inspiration: Composition as a Crisis of Subjectivity in Romantic and Post-Romantic Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) likewise begins from Ion (pp. 40—60), but has only minimal discussion of Coleridge.
95. Murray, p. 8.
96. Ion 533d.
97. Ion 534b.
98. Ion 535e.
99. Ion 542a—b.
100. Goethe, 'Plato als Mitgenosse einer christlichen Offenbarung: im Jahre 1796 durch eine Uebersetzung veranlaBt', reprinted in Ion, ed. by Helmut Flashar (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1988), p. 51.
101. 535a; TTS XIII, 450.
102. Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I991), P. 31
103. 534e; Murray, p. 121.
104. 245a; 248e.
105. W. J. Verdenius, 'Der Begriff der Mania in Platons Phaidros', Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 44 (1962), 132-50 (p. 134).
106. Verdenius, 'Der Begriff der Mania', p. 136.
107. Phaedrus 265a.
108. CN II, 3216. Coburn notes that Coleridge is adapting Chapman's 'Epistle Dedicatorie' to Homer.
109. 682a, trans, by Trevor T. Saunders, in Plato, Complete Works, pp. 1370—71.
110. Laws 719c.
111. 24Ie.
112. BL I, 114.
113. See E. N. Tigerstedt, Plato's Idea of Poetical Inspiration (Helsinki: n. pub., 1969), p. 52 — henceforth: Tigerstedt, Inspiration.
114. Allen, The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino, pp. 42—43, 62—63.
115. See Verdenius, 'Der Begriff der Mania in Platons Phaidros', p. 149.
116. Quoted in Tigerstedt, Inspiration, p. 51.
117. 263d.
118. 265b.
119. Tigerstedt, Inspiration, p. 57.
120. Paul Plass, 'Philosophic Anonymity and Irony in the Platonic Dialogues', American Journal of Philology, 85 (1964), 254—78, p. 271, quoted in Tigerstedt, Inspiration, p. 58. This view has also been taken more recently by Elias, Plato's Defence of Poetry, p. 32.
121. Cf. P. Woodruff, 'What Could Go Wrong with Inspiration? Why Plato's Poets Fail', in Plato on Beauty, Wisdom and the Arts (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1982), pp. 137—50.
122. Tigerstedt, Inspiration, p. 58.
123. Tigerstedt, Inspiration, p. 55.
124. Timaeus 7Ie—72b.
125. CL II, 714 (to Godwin, 25 March 1801).
126. BL II, 156.
127. BL I, 232 (Hierocles was an expositor of Pythagoras), 251.
128. Burwick, Poetic Madness, p. 38.
129. A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1, 7—8. Although these lines were 'cardinal' for the long eighteenth century (Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. II), I have encountered only one — anecdotal — reference to them in Coleridge's criticism (Friend, I, 471; no record of his lecture on the play has survived, LL I, 372). If an argument may be drawn from an absence, this may reflect Coleridge's resistance to presentations of Shakespeare as an irrational warbler of native wood-notes wild, and implicitly to Wordsworth's use of the lines to characterize Imagination in his 1815 'Preface to Poems'. Nevertheless, images of inspiration abound in Coleridge's early poems, and Dorothy Wordsworth saw in Coleridge 'more of "the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling" than I ever witnessed' (Coleridge: Interviews, p. 45).
130. BL II, 26—27.
131. LL I, 80 (italics Coleridge's).
132. SWF II, 1166.
133. Harding, Coleridge and the Inspired Word (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1985), p. 18.
134. Ibid.
135. CM cI, 560; The Works of Jacob Behmen, the Teutonic Theosopher. To which is prefixed, the life of the author. With figures, illustrating his principles, left by the Reverend William Law, M. A., 4 vols, ed. by G. Ward and T. Langcake, trans, by John Sparrow (London, 1764, 1772, 1781), 1, p. xv. Coleridge's copy was a gift from De Quincey. Böhme's letter is to Caspar Lindern, usually known as letter 12.
136. CN III, 4287, but following Perry's reading 'Aye?' (Perry, Notebooks, p. 127) instead of Coburn's 'Aye!'.
137. See Laura M. White, 'The Person from Porlock in "Kubla Khan" and Later Texts: Inspiration, Agency, and Interruption', Connotations 16.1—3 (2006—07), 172—93.
138. Bate, Coleridge, p. 78.
139. Perry, Division, p. 201, citing George Watson, Coleridge the Poet (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 128.
140. Lines 49—50, in Browning, Poetical Works 1833—1864, ed. by Ian Jack (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 810.
141. This pronunciation rhymes 'Khan' with 'ran' in line three. For evidence see Robert F. Fleissner, Sources, Meaning and Influence of Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' (New York: Mellen, 2000), p. 6. Coleridge's Devonshire accent would have made it a long sound ('Caan').
142. BL I, 304.
143. Perry, Division, p. 202; cf. John Beer, Coleridge the Visionary (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959), pp. 232-33.
144. Humphry House, Coleridge (London: Rupert Hart Davis, 1967), p. 121.
145. Lines 31—32.
146. Coleridge alludes to this myth in 'The Destiny of Nations', lines 20—26.
147. 'The Night-Scene: A Dramatic Fragment', lines 82—83.
148. Beer, Coleridge the Visionary, 226.
149. The spherical shape of the heavens and each planet is described in Timaeus 40a, 58a.
150. Mount Abora is 'Mount Amara' in the Crewe Manuscript, the latter being Milton's false paradise, Paradise Lost IV 281—82.
151. It is sometimes claimed (e.g. by House, pp. 115—16) that interpretation depends on whether 'Could' or 'I' is stressed; but it seems to me metrically possible to stress either or both words. If so, the stress would reflect rather than determine a reader's interpretation of the lines.
152. Beer, 'The Languages of "Kubla Khan" ', in Coleridge's Imagination: Essays in Memory of Pete Laver, ed. by Richard Gravil and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 220—62. On Akenside, see pp. 227—29.
153. The Poems of Mark Akenside (London: J. Dodsley, 1772), Book 1, lines 475—81 (pp. 146—47).
154. Elizabeth Schneider, Coleridge, Opium, and 'Kubla Khan' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). P. 245.
155.Ion 534a—b (italics added).
156. Richard Gerber, 'Keys to "Kubla Khan"', English Studies, 44 (1963), 321—41; Murray, p. 115.
157. TTS XIII, 449, translating Bacchae, v, 707.
158. Noted by Murray along with further such references (p. 116).
159. Watson, p. 123.
160. For Coleridge on Bacchus, see CN 111, 3263 and n.
161. Laws 66oe.
162. 669a—670a.
163. 67Ic-d.
164. Harding, Coleridge and the Inspired Word, p. 56.
165. Harding, Coleridge and the Inspired Word, pp. 56—57.
166. OED gives no other instance of this word.
167. Cudworth, 1, 155.
168. Cf. David Perkins, 'The Imaginative Vision of Kubla Khan: On Coleridge's Introductory Note', in Coleridge, Keats, and the Imagination: Romanticism and Adam's Dream, ed. by J. Robert Barth, SJ, and John L. Mahoney (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), pp. 97—108 (p. 99); and Wheeler's thorough analysis of the interactions between Preface and 'epilogue' in The Creative Mind in Coleridge's Poetry, pp. 24—30.
169. CL I, 260, discussed in Chapter 1.
170. Phil. Lects. 1, 183.