Coleridge and the Pleasures of Verse
2001; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/25601531
ISSN2330-118X
Autores Tópico(s)Literary Theory and Cultural Hermeneutics
ResumoIN THE CONTEXT OF A RECENT REVIVAL OF INTEREST IN ROMANTIC LITERARY form, (1) this essay hopes to demonstrate that Samuel Taylor Coleridge is among most purposeful practitioners of verse as verse in his era. The essay suggests that, along with his deep engagement with shifting political scene and with philosophical and religious disputes, he cherished particulars of willed poetic craftsmanship, and was quick to criticize in his own work and in that of others lapses in sound, whether from haste to express opinions however true or false, from lack of training, from a natively faulty sense of rhythm or weight of vowels, or from erroneous views about equivalence of poetry and prose. Amid his many ardent defenses--of sanctity of human soul, of trinity, of clerisy, and of method--his defense of ancient art of musical perfection in words was similarly ardent and his insistence on its purpose--pleasure--decisive throughout his life. Mellifluous and varied metrics was his darling study. (2) New volumes of The Collected Coleridge have revealed more and more contexts in which Coleridge expressed his thoughts about value of meter, demonstrated his practical expertise in meter, criticized meters of other poets, and admonished fellow poets not to forget meter in excitement of disputation. Coleridge's preoccupation with meter occupies many pages of Collected Notebooks, Collected Letters, Biographia Literaria, Lectures 1808-1818, Table Talk, Marginalia, and Shorter Works and Fragments. (3) He was interested not only in meter as a topic in itself but also as a discipline that touches many of his other interests. Meter, for him, is chief vehicle for achieving aim of poetry, which is pleasure; it quickens passions; it demands technical skill and knowledge of other and older languages. Meter pulls Coleridge back from chasm of idealism to vivacious body that his spirit filled. Meter draws its power from both disciplined will and body's rhythmical energy; it spans intersection of mind and body and reconciles head and heart, specifically heart-beat. Coleridge's contemporaries recognized his passion for prosody; his own criticism of other people's verse harps on meter and errors of meter as politely as possible, given his fear that a crucial skill risked being lost to poetic tradition; his definitions of poetry stress energy and movement rather than belabored distinctions between primary and secondary imagination; and his practice as a poet at its best fulfills his own requirements for verse, promoting this purpose, for instance, in Christabel. Throughout, he demonstrated in his own acts and in his praise or detraction of others a belief in carefully weighted sound as true measure of poetic excellence. In 1832, trying to capture as much of essence of his failing father-in-law as possible, Coleridge's nephew described Coleridge's unusually intense passion for versification: Mr. Coleridge has almost from commencement of his poetic life looked upon versification as constituting in and by itself a much more important branch of art poetic than most of his eminent contemporaries appear to have done. And this more careful study shows itself in him in no technical peculiarities or fantastic whims, against which genius of our language revolts; but in a more exact adaptation of movement to feeling, and in a finer selection of particular words with reference to their local fitness for sense and sound. (Table Talk 1.564) Merging his own impressions with his uncle's remarks in a conversation on 31 March 1832, Henry Nelson Coleridge goes on to describe Coleridge as a musical poet rather than a pictorial one, for the whole man is made up of music; and yet Mr. Coleridge has no ear for music, as it is technically called. He compares exquisite versification of conclusion to Kubla Khan to an outburst or crash of harps in still air of autumn. …
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