Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The three great poems come several years before Coleridge's attempts to define the imagination theoretically, and they can seem the work of an entirely different kind of intelligence. But in fact there is a strong continuity: the predominant concerns of the later philosophical works can already be seen, and I shall try to root some out in this essay, concentrating especially on the central, twin Coleridgean concepts of imagination and unity.Unity, he writes in his notebook, is the ‘ultimate end of human Thought, and human Feeling’ (Notebooks, III: 3,247); as he transcribed into the notebook from Jeremy Taylor, ‘He to whom all things are one, who draweth all things to one, and seeth all things in one, may enjoy true peace & rest of spirit’ (ibid., I: 876). There is, he writes in the Biographia Literaria, a ‘high spiritual instinct of the human being impelling us to seek unity’ (CC Biographia, II: 72), and one expression of this fundamental instinct is ‘that gift of true Imagination, that capability of reducing a multitude into a unity of effect’, as Coleridge told his lecture audience in 1811 (CC Lectures on Literature, I: 249). In philosophy, this gift would produce Coleridge's perfect ‘system’, ‘the only attempt that I know of ever made’, as he modestly put it, ‘to reduce all knowledge's into harmony … to unite the insulated fragments of truth’ (CC Table Talk, I: 248); while ... log in or subscribe to read full text