[In the following essay, Harding discusses the impact of the Old Testament on Romantic poetry, focusing specifically on “Kubla Khan” as an example.]

Coleridge's admiration for the poetry of the Old Testament is well-known. To Coleridge, the Hebrew poets possessed in exemplary form the power of Imagination, the “modifying, and co-adunating Faculty,”¹ which long before the writing of Biographia Literaria took a central place in his critical thought. Their poetry, in contrast to that of the Greeks, exhibited a profound sense of the “one Life” uniting all of nature, that sense to which Coleridge himself tried to give expression in “The Eolian Harp,” where the phrase “animated nature”² suggests a universe constantly permeated by the anima, in Hebrew rûah, or “breath of God.”

The Romantics' adoption of the Old Testament as one of their most important literary models owed much to Robert Lowth, whose De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum attempted to formulate a poetics based on Biblical, rather than on classical and neoclassical, poetic practice. Lowth defended such characteristic features of Hebrew poetry as parallelism, emotional intensity, rhythmic variation, simplicity of utterance, and the use of plain or “low” images even in passages that strove for sublimity.³

It was Johann Gottfried von Herder, however, who most effectively brought to the Romantic generation the exhilarating thought that they might actually emulate the Hebrew poets. Herder's Vom Geist der Ebräischen Poesie emphasized the human element in all Old Testament writing. Though language itself was a divine gift, and poetic language pre-eminently so, yet “whatever was given to the most godlike men, even through a higher influence, to feel and experience in themselves, was still human” (“was sie dem göttlichsten Menschen, auch durch höhere Einflüsse zu empfinden gaben, war menschlich”). Like Coleridge, Herder admired the Hebrew poets' sense of the “one Life.” For him, the particular genius of the Hebrew poets consisted in the fact that, more than any Greek or Roman poet, they responded to the one great plan of nature, and gave it human utterance. The true poet, he argued, was one who could perceive “connexion, order, benevolence and purpose” (“Zusammenhang, Ordnung, Güte, Gedanken”) in nature, and whose work embodied this perception in a true “cosmos” of its own.⁴

Herder denied, however, that any poet or prophet could have direct apprehension of what was in the mind of the Divine Being. While the Biblical characters who spoke in the name of God believed themselves to be inspired, this belief was simply part of the cultural milieu in which they lived, a natural assumption for a people to make during the “infancy” of the human race, and though this belief should not be ridiculed, neither could it be uncritically accepted by the maturer, more discriminating mind of the eighteenth-century reader.⁵ Lessing, too, was unable to accept that divine inspiration could be any more than a historically-conditioned, culturally-determined claim by certain of the scriptural writers.⁶

A modern poet who desired to emulate the Old Testament poets' achievement, therefore, could not hope to do so without sharing in some degree their exalted comprehension of nature's holy plan, her “connexion, order, benevolence and purpose.” By showing how “human” the Bible was, Herder had brought within reach, it seemed, the Romantics' goal of a universal, progressive poetry, poetry that would be “a mirror of the whole world” (“ein Spiegel der ganzen umgebenden Welt”).⁷ Yet this challenge of giving human expression to nature's unity must be undertaken without special supernatural aid. The Romantic poet was guaranteed no more assistance than any other human being who undertook a sacred task.

Coleridge, of all the English Romantics, exhibited the tensions of this ambivalent inheritance most acutely, though (despite the praise accorded to Herder in Chapter XI of Biographia Literaria) he was no unqualified admirer of Herder's work. Herder's Enlightenment scepticism about humanity's ability to transcend nature, and have direct intuition of the divine, was anathema to Coleridge, who (in his copy of the Briefe das Studium der Theologie betreffend) commented scornfully that Adam had a better source for his knowledge of the meaning of love than the rutting of the beasts he saw around him in the Garden of Eden.⁸ Yet the poetic agenda set by Herder's Vom Geist der Ebräischen Poesie and Friedrich Schlegel's Athenäum was similar both in its liberating scope and its suggestion of poetic hubris to the agenda set by Coleridge, first for himself and then for his fellow prophet of nature, Wordsworth:

Wordsworth complains, with justice, that Southey writes
too much at his ease—that he seldom “feels his burthened
breast
                                                                      Heaving beneath th' incumbent Deity.”
… I am fearful that [Southey] will begin to rely too
much on story and event in his poems, to the neglect of
those lofty imaginings, that are peculiar to, and definitive
of, the poet.

(CL, I, 320)

The model with which Coleridge rather unfairly compared Southey's recent work here was of course Paradise Lost. In this great poem Milton had combined in one epic sweep the three kinds of poetry described in Sir Philip Sidney's Apologie: poetry that represented “what may be, and should be”; poetry that dealt with moral philosophy, natural science, or history; and—the “chiefe” kind, “both in antiquitie and excellencie”—poetry that “did imitate the inconceiuable excellencies of God,” such as the Psalms of David, the Book of Job, and the Song of Solomon.⁹ Coleridge wished to claim for the poetry of his own age the same ambitious scope, and it was for this reason that, as John Coulson has pointed out, his account of poetic language was ultimately an account of religious language.¹⁰ But it was no longer quite so clear what “religious language” truly was. The Renaissance certainties, especially concerning the unitary meaning of the Bible, had evaporated by Coleridge's time. Even Milton, in some respects, had had to construct his own understanding of the Bible's unifying principle. Now it was more than ever doubtful whether, for example, the Song of Solomon, which Sidney confidently treated as descriptive of the “inconceiuable excellencies of God,” could still be received in this sense, when the more acute historical perception of the eighteenth century had seen it as an Oriental love poem, which later tradition had reinterpreted according to different criteria of meaning.

Biblical criticism had begun to show indeed, that there may be a considerable lapse of time between the utterance or composition of a hymn, poem, or narrative and its recognition as consonant with divine truth. An utterance may be judged to have religious significance because it is ascribed to a religious leader (Moses, David, Jesus). Or, as some Biblical critics might prefer to argue, it may be that because an utterance is judged to have religious significance, it is ascribed, after the fact, to a religious leader. It may even emanate from a person with no pretentions to holiness or even to virtue. In each case, it is the attestation of later tradition that counts, not the state of mind of the speaker at the time the utterance was made. For a poet such as Coleridge, the conflict arising from this necessary suspension of judgment was acute. Since the attestation of later tradition was not immediately available, he was forced to be his own “later tradition,” and exercise judgment on his own inspired utterance. It was exactly as if the two moments of religious language—oracular utterance, followed (after some years or centuries) by the judgment that such utterance was consonant with divine truth, that “holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (II Peter 1:21)—had become telescoped into a single moment.

As M. H. Abrams has shown, Coleridge shared with Shelley and Wordsworth a particular fondness for the image of the breeze or breath as metaphor for the creative impulse. Abrams links the “correspondent breeze” awakened within these poets by the blowing of a physical, palpable breeze to the breath of life which is called anima in Latin, πνεũμα in Greek, and rûah in Hebrew.¹¹ As “The Eolian Harp” shows, the idea of inspiration as an irresistible impulse which stirs the poet's mind to give voice to sweet harmony was an attractive one for Coleridge, and it was supported by Plato's descriptions of the poet as the instrument of a greater power, moved by a mighty external force:

All good epic poets … compose all those lovely poems of theirs not by their own skill but in a state of inspiration and possession.

[W]hen a poet takes his seat on the Muse's tripod, his judgment takes leave of him. He is like a fountain which gives free course to the rush of its waters. …¹²

NeoPlatonism was an influence on some of the early Christian writers, and the Platonic term for the state of being divinely inspired, θεóπνευsτος, was taken up by the writer of II Timothy and applied to the Scriptures as a whole (II Timothy 3:16), so it might appear to have the sanction of the early Christian church as a term of approbation for inspired utterance.

The two traditions, Hebrew and Greek, did not, however, combine quite so readily as this suggests. The occurrence of “θεóπνευsτος” in II Timothy is a misleading instance. Other New Testament writers, as well as the authors of the Septuagint, studiously avoided using the term, which connoted pagan vaticination and ecstatic seizure. Mosaic prophecy, indeed, originated not in states of trance or seizure, but in a form of interior dialogue, in which the prophet remained conscious and fully himself (Exodus 33:11; Deuteronomy 5:4-5, 34:10). It is clear from several texts that for the Hebrews there was no necessary connection between being possessed or inspired and speaking truth. The word nābî, which the Septuagint translated as “προφńτης” or (when applied to a false prophet) “ψευδοπροφńτης,” meant simply an ecstatic, and it was quite as possible for an ecstatic to utter falsehood as truth (see for instance Ezekiel 13:2, 14:17, and Hosea 9:7).¹³ The term rûah, like πνεũμα, meant simply “the breath of life,” possessed by every living thing. It did not connote wisdom or insight, evidently, since animals possessed it as well as human beings; yet it was the gift of God, for every living creature drew its life-spirit from the one divine source. The Holy Spirit, which, according to Acts 1:16, Acts 3:18, II Peter 1:21 and other New Testament passages spoke “through the mouths” of David and the Prophets, belonged as a theological concept, to a much later period of Jewish history. While some commentators, it is true, were inclined to treat the whole of Scripture as if directly authored or dictated by the Holy Spirit (Philo Judaeus, for example), others very quickly became aware of the difficulties involved in such an approach. These, from Origen in the third century to Schleiermacher in the nineteenth, had to reason that, since prophets could evidently err, even when in a state of inspiration or possession, the action of the Holy Spirit must be allowed to be operative in the later tradition that judges and approves their utterances, and admits some writings to the canon while excluding others, as well as in the original speaker, his or her amanueneses and witnesses, and his or her editors.¹⁴

When Coleridge interrupted his visionary outpourings in “The Eolian Harp,” then, and (in the person of the “heart-honour'd Maid”) interpreted them as “shapings of the unregenerate mind” (PW, I, 102), he was imitating, in a highly condensed form, the centuries-old pattern of inspired utterance followed by the devout sifting of the results to determine whether what they contained was true doctrine, or specious. The poem makes most critics uneasy, of course, because it is unusual to come across a poet who decides to be in such an overt manner his own interpreter or hermeneut. But the tension made explicit here between θεoπνευs[b.tau ]íα and the normative tradition of Christianity provides a key to his life's search for a Christian poetic. The frequent use of images of possession and inspiration in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan” suggests that, as Coleridge came to doubt the truth of the claim he made so often in the conversation poems—that it was possible to “read” divine love in the appearances of nature—he was more and more attracted to the idea of supernatural inspiration. In the 1795 “Lectures on Revealed Religion” he had asserted, contrary to the view of Enlightenment thinkers such as Lessing and Herder, that divine truth could be imparted directly to the minds of human beings.¹⁵ Yet, as we have seen, inspiration itself was not immune from the historicist outlook. In Coleridge, the two attitudes—belief in the possibility that divine truth may be imparted to human minds, and acceptance of the important proviso that the normative tradition must be the judge of any inspired or oracular utterance—were in constant tension. This tension itself, I shall argue, rather than inspiration in its pure and ideal form, was Coleridge's real subject in “Kubla Khan.”

The Ancient Mariner, of course, is the victim of a kind of possession: “Forthwith this frame of mine was renched / With a woful agony” (PW, I, 208). It is plain, however, that the Wedding-Guest is given no assurance that the Mariner's tale is divinely sanctioned. It is left to the interpreter (the Wedding-Guest, in the first instance, and then the reader) to decide whether the Mariner's words are prompted by a good or an evil daemon, much as it is left to Hamlet to decide whether the spirit that appears to him in his father's form is an angelic spirit or a goblin damn'd.

Some critics have said that an experience which asks to be recognized as authentically religious does lie at the center of the Mariner's tale. Edward E. Bostetter and John Beer both argue that the Mariner's experience as he blesses the water-snakes, the welling-up within him of divine love, reflects the imagery of religious conversion in, for instance, The Pilgrim's Progress.¹⁶ On the other hand, the dice game, the cruel and arbitrary liquidation of four times fifty living men, and the haunted state of the Mariner as he passes, like night, from land to land, suggest the dislocated worlds of Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Sartre rather than the world of Bunyan and the Quaker John Woolman, in which true repentance is followed by release from the burden of sin and assurance of heavenly reward. This conclusion remains essentially the same, whether or not we regard the dice game and the death of the crew as having “really happened”; whether the world of the Polar Spirit and the troop of spirits blest is discovered by the Mariner, or constructed by him as an explanation for the psychic changes that have taken place within him.

If the Mariner begins as the representative of a prescientific age, untouched by the self-knowledge which his mythologizing capacities can bring him, he ends as the representative of an age very like our own. His condition is, in important respects, post-mythological. He has experienced the terror of a world without God, almost (in the 1798 and 1800 versions of the poem) without Christ. When, at the end of the poem, the Mariner affirms that “the dear God who loveth us, / He made and loveth all” (PW, I, 209), most critics who do not find this statement utterly absurd agree that it expresses at best a highly precarious faith, not in any sense a triumphant “Q.E.D.” rounding off a theological “proof.” Despite his state of possession, the Mariner's world remains one of doubts and mysteries, his narrative uncorroborated.

“Kubla Khan” likewise takes us from myth to modernity. The first thirty-six lines of the poem encapsulate the mythic constructs of the Orient. After Elinor Shaffer's lucid demonstration of the syncretistic ferment that lay behind “Kubla Khan,”¹⁷ it should no longer be possible to take seriously explanations of the poem based on pathology or associative psychology; nor should we continue to refer to Coleridge's mind as consisting of a pagan half which possessed all the creativity and a Christian half which acted as his “orthodox censor.”¹⁸ As a Christian in an age which already stood outside mythology, which looked back on it as on a road previously travelled, Coleridge understood that the poet's task must now be to survey mythology from above: to claim it as a dynamic heritage, not the exhausted fictions derided by Voltaire. “Coleridge's transcendental enterprise was to lay bare the source of mythology, the sense for a God in the human race.”¹⁹

While Shaffer is surely right to summarize in this way the impulse from which “Kubla Khan” sprang, we have to recognize that her work has raised in acute form all the problems associated with “demythologization” and its close relative in literary criticism, “secularization.” Modern humanistic scholarship sometimes tends to overlook the fact that at the very center of Christian tradition lies the most potent of all images for the overthrow of hieratic religion and the release of the sacred into common experience: the rending of the veil of the temple. For the Christian poet there are grounds for believing that any barriers which once existed between the sacred and the profane have been thrown down. Yet such a statement at once involves the recollection of a historical event—and therefore of the poet's own position in historical time, his fallibility and his finitude. A disturbing infiltration of the anagogical into the historical is an undeniable feature of “Kubla Khan,” as it is of the thirteenth chapter of Biographia Literaria, in which the primary Imagination is held to be a repetition, in the finite mind, of the eternal, divine act of creation, and is echoed by the secondary Imagination or poetic power, which co-exists with the conscious will.

“Kubla Khan” reaffirms the sense for the divine in the human race, but does not subsume or “secularize” it, if by that we mean that the sense for the divine is emptied of its content. Coleridge's seer recollects an historical event (Kubla's decree). He recognizes its symbolic value, as representing humankind's memory of a lost paradise, and hope for its future restoration. Yet, as a self-conscious, time-bound individual, he is not himself a partaker of the consummation he foresees. As Shaffer observes, the already highly syncretic geography of Xanadu is transmuted by the seer into a “sacred geometry,” an emblem of paradise that is liberated from the trammels of spatiality;²⁰ it realizes the cabbalists' dream of the aleph, a place that is all places simultaneously. And Max Schulz, relating Kubla's artificial Eden of hortus conclusus to other Edenic images in Coleridge's work, and to the Renaissance and classical traditions of the earthly paradise, sees “Kubla Khan” as the supreme instance of Romanticism's search for an “extended Eden,” including not only the whole earth, but the cosmos itself.²¹ Like the cosmos of “The Rime,” however, the cosmos of “Kubla Khan” is hard to “read.” Images of nature's beneficence, seen in the sacred river and the fertile ground where Kubla plants his gardens, are countered by images of death and sterility (lifeless ocean, icy cavern). The chasm itself is both life-giving—it is the source of the fountain—and terrifying, a “savage place” (PW, I, 297). Kubla's tenancy of this ambiguous microcosm seems to be destined to be brief, his “decree” merely a momentary stay against confusion.

Unlike the Mariner, though, the seer of “Kubla Khan” has been granted, in the vision of the Abyssinian maid, an interpreter, a Beatrice who appears to promise divine guidance to the poet in his ascent to Paradise, or a moon-goddess, a Queen Isis, promising redemption and wholeness to the bard Osiris-Coleridge, and bringing ancient wisdom from the dark caves in which it had been hidden.²² Through the inspiration which she imparts, the seer would be able to realize in his own imagination Kubla's paradise, and even communicate this inspiration to others:

Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
                              To such a deep delight 'twould win me
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there. …

(PW, I, 298)

The external world would be made internal, the seer and his audience become inheritors of many thousands of years of history in a single moment of vision. The apocalyptic language of Jewish tradition was first applied to the experiences of an individual life by Paul and other Apostles (Hebrews 12:18-29; II Peter 3:10-15), but Enlightenment thought had carried still further the liberating idea that it was possible for one person's life to recapitulate the whole of human history.

The enthusiast often casts true glances into the future, but for this future he cannot wait. He wishes this future accelerated, and accelerated through him. That for which Nature takes thousands of years is to mature itself in the moment of his existence. For what possession has he in it if that which he recognizes as the Best does not become the best in his life time?

(Der Schwärmer tut oft sehr richtige Blicke in die Zukunft: aber er kann diese Zukunft nur nicht erwarten. Er wünscht diese Zukunft beschleuniget und wünscht, dass sie durch ihn beschleuniget werde. Wozu sich die Natur Jahrtausende Zeit nimmt, soll in dem Augenblicke seines Daseins reifen. Denn was hat er davon, wenn das, was er für das Bessere erkennt, nicht noch bei seinen Lebzeiten das Bessere wird?)²³

Though Lessing was writing of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Christian mystics, there are few better summaries of the tragedy of the Romantic poet's position. For Coleridge's seer evidently desires this telescoping of time, the realization in the present moment of a paradise that is both past and to come. He transcends Schiller's distinction between the naive (or objective) poet and the sentimental (or subjective) poet, since he imitates the “outward” world solely as a step towards the transformation of the “inner” world.²⁴ He is also, however, conscious of a past and a present: “In a vision once I saw.” Inevitably, therefore, the inspiration represented by the Abyssinian maid is time-conditioned—not, perhaps, in the sense that the seer had a vision of her and some hours, days or years later recalls it, but in the sense that, for the modern, self-conscious mind, any event registered by the consciousness already belongs to a historical past. The significance of the past tense in line 38 of the poem is not to be confused with the Wordsworthian recollection of past years—“The things which I have seen I now can see no more”—nor even with Shelley's principle that “when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline.”²⁵ The difference of time represented by that small word “once” is not a matter of chronological time, but rather of two wholly different orders of time: the realm of the Abyssinian maid, and that of the reflecting, self-conscious poet, whose aspiration towards the condition of θεĩoς ̧ͣνńρ is perpetually doomed to frustration. We do not even give whole-hearted assent to our dreams, Coleridge observes, much less to any experience of our waking minds:

even in dreams of Sleep the Soul never is, because it either cannot or dare not be, any <One= Thing; but lives in approaches—touched by the outgoing pre-existent Ghosts of many feelings—²⁶

Having brought the whole sweep of humankind's history into one brilliant image, therefore, Coleridge, in the second “moment” of “Kubla Khan,” bravely makes the transition into the condition of post-mythological humanity. It is not that the modern Christian poet enjoys some promising visions which are brutally blotted out by an “orthodox censor” jangling his keys in some dark dungeon of the mind: the truth is very far from either the farce or the pathos suggested by that reductive explanation. It is rather that the humanist and Enlightenment drive to bring ever more areas of human experience under the hegemony of our matured consciousness—an endeavor in which Coleridge himself was fully engaged²⁷—interposed the thinnest but most impenetrable of veils between one area of mental activity and another, and in place of childlike impulse put the “outgoing pre-existent Ghosts of many feelings.”

The fact that many Romantic poets felt themselves to be the successors of David and Isaiah, as well as of Homer and Pindar, could not seal them from the spiritual climate of their time, least of all in that most sensitive battleground of psychic tensions, the sense of self. The seer of “Kubla Khan” lost his power to revive within him the maid's symphony and song at the very instant when he recognized the maid as distinct from himself, when he became, that is, conscious of her. The truly possessed or inspired conjuror of a daemon has no notion, while he is in his trance, that the daemon is not himself. The Abyssinian maid withdraws into silence, the instant she is recognized by the seer's conscious mind (just as Christabel, confronted with an imperious alter ego who usurps her dead mother's place in her mind and bed, is bewitched into spell-bound silence). This experience of loss, the withdrawal of the Beatrice-figure, the mediator between full knowledge and the conscious, history-bound, verbalizing mind of the poet, is surely the true subject of “Kubla Khan,” rather than “inspiration in its ideal, least restricted, most disembarrassed and most disembodied form” (C. M. Bowra's phrase).²⁸ Coleridge creates a seer who precisely exemplifies the “loneliness and fixedness” of the postmythological poet, one who in emulation of the Biblical prophets courts the “state of inspiration and possession,” but finds that he cannot transcend his time-bound self. As with John Keats's momentary glimpses of the region he calls “heaven's bourne,” it is not the vision that fails the poet, but the other way round. Remaining conscious of time and of mortality, the poet-surrogate betrays his vision by reasserting his own humanity.

Coleridge's seer even pictures himself as a spectator, as it were, ab extra, of what would have been his own exorcism, had he really achieved the state of daemonic possession: “Weave a circle round him thrice. …” (PW, I, 298). As is surely sufficiently clear, if we give proper attention to the mood of the verbs (“Could I revive …,” “And all should cry …”), these lines are not spoken in the character of the possessed bard, but, more subtly, in that of the bard who knows what it is to be possessed, and knows too that this inspired state has escaped him. The most notable virtue of Coleridge's poem, after its dense mythological allusiveness and its hypnotic cadences, may be, unexpectedly, its startling honesty.

Notes

1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols. (1956-1971), II (1956), 866. Hereafter cited in text as “CL.”

2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Complete Poetical Works, ed. E. H. Coleridge, 2 vols. (1912), I, 102. Hereafter cited in text as “PW.”

3. See Murray Roston, Prophet and Poet: The Bible and the Growth of Romanticism (1965), pp. 18-26.

4. Johann Gottfried von Herder, The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, trans. James Marsh, 2 vols. in 1 (1833; rpt. 1971), II, 6; I, 97. German text: J. G. von Herder, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. B. Suphan, 33 vols. (1877-1913), XII (1880), 6; XI (1879), 296.

5. Herder, The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, II, 51; Werke, XII, 47.

6. See Lessing's “Über den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft,” quoted by Elinor Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Fall of Jerusalem (1975), p. 45.

7. Friedrich Schlegel, Charakteristiken und Kritiken, I, ed. Hans Eichner, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe (1959- ), II (1967), 182 (Athenäum, no. 116).

8. See G. A. Wells, “Man and Nature: an Elucidation of Coleridge's Rejection of Herder's Thought,” JEGP [Journal of English and Germanic Philology], 51 (1952), 321.

9. Sir Philip Sidney, Apologie for Poetrie, ed. J. Churton Collins (1907), p. 10.

10. John Coulson, Newman and the Common Tradition (1970), p. 22.

11. M. H. Abrams, “The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor,” English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism (1960, rpt. 1971), p. 44.

12. Plato, Ion, trans. Michael Oakley, in Symposium and Other Dialogues, introd. John Warrington (1964), p. 68; The Laws, trans. A. E. Taylor (1934), p. 103.

13. Fr. Bruce Vawter, Biblical Inspiration (1972), pp. 8-12.

14. Vawter, pp. 14, 26.

15. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1795 On Politics and Religion, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann, Bollingen Series LXXV, vol. I (1971), pp. 149-150, 200.

16. Edward E. Bostetter, “The Nightmare World of the Ancient Mariner,” SiR [Studies in Romanticism], 1 (1961-1962), 243-244; John Beer, Coleridge's Poetic Intelligence (1977), pp. 158, 160.

17. Shaffer, chs. 1-4 passim.

18. Of the lines added to “The Eolian Harp” in the “Errata” to Sibylline Leaves, beginning “O! the one Life within us and abroad” (PW, I, 101), Harold Bloom says that they “sneaked past his orthodox censor”: “Coleridge: The Anxiety of Influence,” in Geoffrey H. Hartman, ed., New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth, English Institute papers 1970-1971 (1972), p. 261. For the opposite view, see Douglas Brownlow Wilson, “Two Modes of Apprehending Nature: A Gloss on the Coleridgean Symbol,” PMLA, 87 (1972), 42-52.

19. Shaffer, p. 144.

20. Shaffer, p. 165.

21. Max F. Schulz, “Coleridge and the Enchantments of Earthly Paradise,” in W. B. Crawford, ed., Reading Coleridge: Approaches and Applications (1979), p. 119. Thomas McFarland also finds the poem's imagery Edenic (and its symbolism anagogic): “The Origin and Significance of Coleridge's Theory of Secondary Imagination,” in Hartman, ed., New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth, p. 203.

22. Schulz, p. 151; John Beer, Coleridge the Visionary (1959, rpt. 1970), pp. 255, 262.

23. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, The Education of the Human Race, trans. F. W. Robertson (1896), p. 73. German text: Lessings Werke, ed. G. Witkowski, 7 vols. (1911), VII, 449.

24. Shaffer, p. 77.

25. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Complete Works, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, 10 vols. (1926-1930), VII, 135.

26. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notebooks, ed. Kathleen Coburn, Bollingen Series L (1957- ), II (1961), Part 1 (Text), entry no. 3215.

27. A point made by Kathleen Coburn in her Experience Into Thought (1979), pp. 18-19.

28. C. M. Bowra, Inspiration and Poetry (1955), p. 8.