47 pages • 1 hour read
Samuel Taylor ColeridgeBiographia Literaria
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1817A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary
Coleridge breaks off his philosophical cogitations to return to the subject of imagination, or “plastic power” (51). He once wrote for a publication called The Friend, which was devoted to metaphysical speculation. This prompts a digression into advice to young authors seeking publication. Coleridge tells an anecdote of an old clergyman whose self-published volumes failed to sell and confesses that he had similar problems at the beginning of his literary career. Upon leaving Jesus College, Cambridge, he contributed to a periodical entitled The Watchman. Coleridge smoked tobacco mixed with Oronooko with a potential patron, causing him to swoon in the presence of a minister and his friends later that evening. Coleridge returned to London with over a thousand subscribers, but lost half of them when his first publication was late, and narrowly avoided jail.
Coleridge vehemently opposed the first revolutionary war and moved to Stowey, where he devoted himself to poetry. He compares the writings of Edmund Burke at the outset of the American war with the rhetoric of the French Revolution. Coleridge found Cowper’s famous poem The Task awkward and was inspired to write an unfinished poem entitled “The Brook,” intending to dedicate it playfully to the Public Safety Committee. He critiques fanaticism in general: “little more than a century was sufficient to obliterate all effective memory of [the Peasants’ War of Germany],” and he praises the church as “our best and only bulwark of toleration” (63).
Upon moving to a cottage in Somerset, Coleridge read Critique of Pure Reason and was saved from despondency. In Somerset, Coleridge wrestled with the question of an “infinite self-conscious creator” (67). Subsequently Coleridge finished his education in Germany, where he read Martin Luther in high German and became familiar with a variety of German poets. Coleridge continued his political involvement, writing for The Morning Post and The Courier. Coleridge takes comfort that not all his political writing was in vain: Some of his writing on the war with America was adopted in the Massachusetts state papers.
Chapter 11 Summary
Resuming his advice for writers, Coleridge agrees with Mr. Whitbread that “no man does anything from a single motive” (74). Coleridge claims that “money, and immediate reputation form only an arbitrary and accidental end of literary labour” (74). He reflects on the importance of choosing a profession and praises Protestant Britain. It is important for “a man to live in sympathy with the world in which he lives” (76). Temperance is the mark of manhood, yet literature affords just as many temptations as do other professions, argues Coleridge.
Chapter 12 Summary
This chapter reflects on the one to follow (Chapter 13) and prevails upon the reader not to take it out of context. Not everyone must be a philosopher, since not everyone possesses “the philosophic imagination, the secret power of self intuition” (81). A true philosopher copes with “imperfect light,” though all people are conscious of freedom in their souls (82). Geometry “supplies philosophy with the example of a primary intuition” (83). Philosophy meanwhile pertains to a “inner sense” or consciousness, which varies between people (83). Coleridge distinguishes between the objective (or nature) and the self (or intelligence). He debates which of these is primary, pursuing “the true and original realism” (87).
To this end, Coleridge sets out 10 theses, promising “the results will be applied to the deduction of the imagination and with it the principles of production and of genial criticism in the fine arts” (88):
1. Truth implies reality.
2. Absolute truth may be distinguished from relative.
3. The absolute truth must be sought.
4. There can be just one such absolute principle.
5. This principle cannot be an object.
6. This principle manifests itself in the spirit, in which being and knowing are identical.
7. There is no predicate of self except self-consciousness.
8. The spirit is neither finite nor infinite, but the reconciliation of the two.
9. Science entails the mediation of this first principle.
10. Thus, Coleridge arrives at the conclusion that self-knowledge is the “ultimate ground of our knowledge” (91).
English metaphysicians faced numerous challenges, including religious principles and an overfamiliarity with the “insufficient” metaphysics of France and Britain since the Revolution. With this, Coleridge returns to a discussion of the imagination and contends with Wordsworth’s critique that Coleridge’s definition is “too general,” retorting that Wordsworth has conflated imagination with fancy, a subject he further explores in the next chapter (92).
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
From his lofty contemplation of the absolute nature of reality, Coleridge grounds his readers with a description of the difficulties he has faced in his literary and political career. Divulging less than complimentary biographical details, Coleridge curbs potential accusations of hubris, describing how a maid once used his political writing as kindling. For Coleridge, poetry is intimately connected with politics and philosophy, and he remarks in Chapter 8 on “the close connection of poetic genius with the love of liberty and of genuine reformation” (68). Steering a mean through conservative ideas about war and recommending temperance (77), Coleridge locates the era’s urge for reformation in the aesthetic. Great poets are blessed with a capacity for “self intuition, who within themselves can interpret and understand the symbol, that the wings of the air slyph are forming within the skin of the caterpillar” (79). This conception of poetic transformation is reminiscent of Christ’s resurrection.
Coleridge’s orientation toward the inner world reveals much about his political and his religious malaise. Coleridge’s theses in Chapter 12 may be modelled on those of Martin Luther, who also sought to refute the outward sign of spirituality (indulgences) in favor of an inner justification for sin, or “justification by faith alone.” (Luther, Martin. Ninety-five Theses. 1517.) Just as Luther discredited the selling of indulgences, so Coleridge concludes Chapter 13, “sensation itself is but vision nascent, not the cause of intelligence.” (92) Coleridge breaks with Wordsworth’s emphasis on the natural world of the senses, just as Luther did with the Catholic Church.
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By Samuel Taylor Coleridge
