Coleridge Critical Ideas and theory
Coleridge’s ultimate gift to human thinking lay in his capability for double perception. He had a wider thinking, a concept that one has to appreciate if they are to grasp the full nature of his continuing influence. He endorsed contemporary respect for the human will and knew from personal experience how unreliable a resource could be (Newlyn 240). Ted Hughes, a twentieth century writer, in his admiration for Coleridge’s theory states that every poet had his own ‘fountain’, which he or she needed to discover so as to release what he had to give. Hughes finds it right for the value of Coleridge’s legacy in his power to rouse in others a dance of imagination similar to his own. After all, it is the most valuable respect in which he lives on for his readers (Newlyn 242).
Imagination in poetry entailed the inspired aspects at the time of composition. The familiarity in normal life ceases to be useful the moment it loses its apparent character. The selfish solicitude is always intent on maintaining the distinction between persons and things since it is a separating or dividing force. This is contrary to social ends and to the sociability of the species. The central doctrine of Coleridge’s theory is that poetry is purely human; for all its materials are from the mind, and all its products are for the mind. It is the nature of the fine arts to express intellectual purposes, thoughts, conceptions, and sentiments, which have their origin in the human mind. The imaginative activity helps to realize this function. Coleridge had extraordinary gifts, both as a poet and as a reader. In Chapter XV of the Biographa, he comments upon the perfect sweetness of the versification in the ‘Venus and Adonis’ as a characteristic of original poetic genius remarks that “the sense of musical delight with the power of producing it is a gift of imagination’’ (Armstrong 6). Continue reading Coleridge Essay