Coleridge, Samuel Taylor - Warren Stevenson (essay date 1989)
Warren Stevenson (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: "Coleridge's Divine Duplicity: Being a Concatenation of His Surrogates, Succedaneums, and Doppelgängers," in The Wordsworth Circle, Vol. XX, No. 2, Spring, 1989, pp. 74-8.
[In the following essay, Stevenson explores the theme of superimposed identity, or the "double" in several of Coleridge's poems.]
The name "Samuel" means "name of God," and is thus a substitute for the unsayable. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who believed that an idea can be presented only by a symbol, saw art and hence language as a sweet succedaneum for ultimate reality. As the Canadian poet Irving Layton has observed in Waiting for the Messiah (1986), it is not an accident that "lyre" and "liar" are homonyms. From this it follows that any direct assault upon the fortress of truth is doomed to failure, and that one must "tell the truth, but tell it slant," as the bard of Amherst so adeptly intimated. In the case of...
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