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Symbolism in Coleridge
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
After The Tempest, The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan are now the happiest hunting-ground for the symbolist. Mr. Wilson Knight's interpretation of both poems, but particularly of the latter, in The Starlit Dome (1941), is, to say the least, extraordinary; still more so than the similar one of Mr. Robert Graves in The Meaning of Dreams (1924), though not so entangled with inaccurate biography and irrelevant psychoanalysis. “We may imagine a sexual union,” says Mr. Knight, between life, the masculine, and death, the feminine. Then our “romantic chasm” and “cedarn cover,” the savage and enchanted yet holy place with its “half intermitted burst” may be, in spite of our former reading, vaguely related to the functioning of man's creative organs and their physical setting and, too, to all principles of manly and adventurous action; while the caverns that engulf the sacred river will be correspondingly feminine with a dark passivity and infinite peace. The pleasure-dome we may fancy as the pleasure of a sexual union in which birth and death are the great contesting partners, with human existence as the life-stream, the blood-stream, of a mighty coition [p. 95].
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1948
References
1 Once it was a matter of some satisfaction to know or be related to a poet; but now' under the eye-glass of the new criticism and psychology, wives, parents, even friends and teachers non reqniescunt, and as another genius appears, the family and whole neighborhood have reason to tremble.
2 Quoted from the New Republic in the Book Review Digest.
3 The Ancient Manner, with an essay by Robert Penn Warren (1946).
4 Mod. Lang. Rev., January, 1946, a reply to Mr. Brooks on Macbeth.
6 Warren, pp. 87-88. A little more in keeping with the text, perhaps, Mr. Burke (p. 24) has it that the Mariner suffered his punishments under the aegis of the Sun, and that his cure was effected under the aegis of the Moon; but out of this “meaningfulness” there is little indeed to choose, whether for philosophy or poetry. By psychological allegory the light of both sun and moon is darkened.
6 Biographia Literaria, Chap, xiv, last sentence; Wordsworth (1899) Preface, p. 852. And Coleridge's Table-Talk : “Poetry is certainly more than good sense; but it must be good sense, at all events; just as a palace is more than a house; but it must be a house, at least.”
7 Abercrombie, Theory of Poetry (1926), p. 97.
8 The Road to Xanadu (1927), p. 298; Biog. Lit., Chap. i.
9 Which is not far from what a more recent critic and poet has said: “What inspires his poem is not a particular way of thinking but a sense of the power of thinking, a flaming exultation in the undaunted courage of man's mind, facing its inscrutable fate and determined not to be overborne.” L. Abercrombie, Theory of Poetry (1926), p. 65.
10 The Road to Xanadu, p. 244.
11 Xanadu, p. 132.
12 Granville-Barker, On Dramatic Method (1931), p. 157.
13 Xanadu, pp. 566–567.
14 Ibid., p. 297.
15 Survey, 1780–1830 (1912), ii, 108.
16 Mr. Burke, like some other modernist critics, is much more openminded in theory than in practice; and in the second chapter of Counter-Statement (1931) he finely appreciates the importance of the poet's not “losing sight of his audience.” Also, like most critics of any sort, better at finding fault with other criticism than in producing his own, he complains of “modern criticism and psychoanalysis in particular” as “too prone to define the essence of art in terms of the artist's weaknesses.” The Philosophy of Literary Form is dated, however, 1941.
17 Reproduced in the Question of Henry James, edited by F. W. Dupee (1945).
18 Cf. my From Shakespeare to Joyce, pp. 340–350. 19 The Arts (November 1924), pp. 245 ff.
20 For this naïve biographical treatment of characters in fiction see my Shakespeare Studies (1927), pp. 87–89, 117–214, chap, viii (on Falstaff) passim. The credit of killing the little dragon, as I there indicate, should go to the late A. B. Walkley, in Drama and Life; but—so many who write criticism do not much read it—several of them lately, I notice, have been killing it anew.
21 C. A. Whitmore, The Supernatural in Tragedy (1915); my Shakespeare Studies (1927), pp. 211–217.
22 Mr. Wilson makes capital of the fact that this story, in the definitive edition was not grouped with the other ghost stories; but “goblins, imps, demons” aren't hallucinations, either. Even Mr. Yvor Winters (In Defense of Reason [1947], p. 317), also thinking the lady “insane,” is similarly impressed by the method of publication; but, p. 318, he finds in The Sacred Fount the same “state of mind,” and yet strangely adduces, as if it were evidence, the fact that in the definitive edition this story was not even included.
23 From Shakespeare to Joyce, pp. 347–348.
24 Wheel of Fire (1930), p. 7; Spectator, Sept. 27, 1930.
25 She may be, though, by critics come to the rescue; and what by some of them has been done may by others be undone. In the London Sunday Times of November 2, 1947, Mr. Desmond MacCarthy, whom Chesterton once called “the finest and most fastidious critic in England,” praising Mr. Robert Liddell's quite recent Treatise on the Novel, speaks of his “unanswerable refutation of the hallucination theory of Henry James's ‘The Turn of the Screw,‘ fathered by Edmund Wilson. It is a prime example of the kind of cleverness which leads to false conclusions,” etc., as Mr. Liddell's kind, apparently, does not.