Enduring Coleridge: 'The functions of comparison, judgement, and interpretation'

Abstract

As a prelude to a consideration of poetry shaping the soul – a purpose of which Coleridge was consistently mindful – it is necessary to consider Socrates’ figure of ‘the soul of the lyric poet’ as a bee in Plato’s Ion. The visible tip of Plato’s paradox and its implications for necessity and creative free will emerges in ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’. In my essay, the crucial ambivalence I identify in that poem, mindful of the passage from Ion, turns on the extent to which an inspired soul has more freedom over the poetic process of creation than a bee has in its instinctive gathering of nectar. A further issue for the figuring of the lyric poet as a ‘bee’ emerges if one considers Von Frisch’s theory of the waggle dance of the bee and its implications for speaker competence in relation to grammar. The question is whether or not the rules of generative grammar need to be understood or merely respected at some level by a competent speaker. Are the rules, or principles, governing poetic method accessible to propositional formulation, or are they more like know-how than know-what? This raises the analogous question of whether the lyric poet is competent in the rules governing composition, in the sense of being cognisant and able to articulate them, or whether he or she is inspired and versifying beyond free will? Is verse produced by a rigidly determined adherence to rules of which the poet is unaware and which he or she is unable to articulate? My essay is an inquiry into whether knowledge of the rules of poetic composition is commensurate with the articulation of propositional knowledge. Given this, the emphasis in the treatment of ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ is on the operation of Coleridge’s theorised methodological principles at the level of structure and poetic form. What distinguishes Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a lyric poet from a dancing bee, or even a run-of-the-mill linguistically competent speaker, is his capacity to theorise the structural principles of his own lyric performance. Show more