Biographia Literaria

Coleridge now takes up the subject of Lyrical Ballads and the friendship between he and his collaborator William Wordsworth. Coleridge devotes himself to poetry relating to the supernatural, Wordsworth to the wonders of the everyday. To this end, Coleridge wrote “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and other unfinished works, different in kind from Wordsworth’s profusion of great poems. Some readers were outraged by Wordsworth’s preface, but soon his admirers grew numerous. Explaining his differences with Wordsworth, Coleridge firstly defines a poem and then poetry. Poetry and prose contain the same elements, but with a different objective. The object of poetry is “the communication of a truth,” which produces pleasure (102). Poetry cannot be distinguished from “poetic genius itself” (102). Ideally, the poet “brings the whole soul of man into activity [and] diffuses the tone and the spirit of unity” (102). He does so using the “power” of imagination, which is “itself the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities” (102).

Coleridge illustrates these theoretical precepts with a critical analysis of Shakespeare’s poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Their first success is versification, the second Shakespeare’s choice of subject. Revelatory of the dramatist within the poet, Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis are vivid, their individual characteristic transcended by the poet’s own feelings. However beautiful Shakespeare’s images, they do not characterize their author but serve “a predominant passion” (106). Finally, Shakespeare’s “meteoric power […] is depth and energy of thought” (106). Lucrece allows Shakespeare to express “the deeper passions” (106) and a “yet wider range of knowledge and reflection” (107).

From his examination of Shakespeare’s poems, Coleridge discourses more widely on the disparity between 18th-century poetry and that of the 15th and 16th centuries. In contemporary poetry, as in landscape painting, the focus is on the background. Coleridge contrasts this with the Italian and Flemish Masters, whose works focus on foreground. Renaissance painting focused on traditional subjects and was judged by its treatment of these. Coleridge claims that the greatest Renaissance poetry is characterized by “perfect simplicity” (111). New meters were borrowed from German, in contrast with the Greek and Roman influences on Coleridge’s peers. Only a contemporary poetic genius could “recall the high finish, the appropriateness, the facility, the delicate proportion, and above all, the pervasive and omnipresent grace, which have preserved, as in a shrine of precious amber,” certain Renaissance poems (112).