Biographia Literaria

Coleridge enters into the philosophical phase of Biographia Literaria. His thoughts about literary theory are couched in an argument about the nature of reality itself. Coleridge claims that science avoids addressing the center of reality and thus aligns his theory of poetry with philosophy. Still, poetry is better able to penetrate reality than philosophy, since philosophy pursues knowledge and not being itself. Kant’s Noumenon, or “thing in itself,” influenced Coleridge. (Kant, Immanuel. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. 1783.) Kant’s 1781 Critique of Pure Reason also furnished Coleridge with his ideas about what Kant called intellectual “intuition.” While Coleridge’s contemporaries debated what Kant meant by “transcendental idealism,” Coleridge himself disagrees with Kant’s claim that the “transcendental object cannot even be separated from the sensible data, for then nothing would remain through which it would be thought” (Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. 1781.) For Coleridge, the ultimate nature of reality is transmittable via the plastic power of the Imagination.

In his exposition of philosophical ideas about the nature of reality and perception, Coleridge envisions the thinking mind as a “water insect” skipping back and forth as it makes its way upstream (99). This Heraclitan metaphor positions the mind outside time. Contemporaneity is “the common condition of all the laws of association” (38), while consciousness is “time considered in its essence” (39). Thus the greatest poetry is not only timeless but capable of provoking a certain kind of meditation that transports the reader outside of time and “into the life of things.” (Wordsworth, William. “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.” 1798.) Rather than functioning as a form of memorialization as in Wordsworth, poetry for Coleridge ideally transports us into the eternal.