SOURCE: Abrams, M. H. “Romantic Analogues of Art and Mind.” In The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, pp. 47-69. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953.

[In the following excerpt, Abrams provides an overview of Romantic aesthetic theory, explaining how it differs from earlier criticism.]

‘Didn't I tell you so?’ said Flask; ‘yes, you'll soon see this right whale's head hoisted opposite that parmacetti's.’

In good time, Flask's saying proved true. As before, the Pequod steeply leaned over towards the sperm whale's head, now, by the counterpoise of both heads, she regained her even keel though sorely strained, you may well believe. So, when on one side you hoist in Locke's head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come back again; but in very poor plight.

Melville, Moby-Dick

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.' Wordsworth's metaphor, ‘overflow,’ suggests the underlying physical analogy of a container—a fountain or natural spring, perhaps—from which water brims over. This container is unmistakably the poet; the materials of a poem come from within, and they consist expressly neither of objects nor actions, but of the fluid feelings of the poet himself. A coherent theory of poetry which takes its departure from this type of analogy, instead of from imitation, will clearly favor very different emphases and criteria. The orientation is now toward the artist, the focus of attention is upon the relation of the elements of the work to his state of mind, and the suggestion, underlined by the word ‘spontaneous,’ is that the dynamics of the overflow are inherent in the poet and, perhaps, not within his deliberate control. Wordsworth himself anchored his theory to the external world by maintaining that ‘I have at all times endeavoured to look steadily at my subject,’ and declared that the emotion was recollected in tranquillity and that the spontaneity of its overflow was merely the reward of a prior process of deliberate thought. He reasoned also that since this thought has found and rendered instinctive the connection of the poet's feelings to matters really important to men, the final overflow cannot but accomplish a ‘worthy purpose’ with respect to the poet's audience. The extreme consequences latent in the central analogue to which Wordsworth gave impetus in England—the elimination, for all practical purposes, of the conditions of the given world, the requirements of the audience, and the control by conscious purpose and art as important determinants of a poem—did not appear in that country until three decades later, in such critics as Keble, Carlyle, and John Stuart Mill.

I. METAPHORS OF EXPRESSION

Repeatedly romantic predications about poetry, or about art in general, turn on a metaphor which, like ‘overflow,’ signifies the internal made external. The most frequent of these terms was ‘expression,’ used in contexts indicating a revival of the root meaning ex-pressus, from ex-premere, ‘to press out.’ As A. W. Schlegel wrote in 1801, referring to the vocal signs of feeling, ‘The word expression (Ausdruck) is very strikingly chosen for this; the inner is pressed out as though by a force alien to us.’¹ ‘Poetry,’ said John Stuart Mill, is ‘the expression or uttering forth of feeling’;² and ‘utter’ in its turn derives from the Old English word for ‘out,’ and is cognate with the German ‘aüssern.’ ‘Behold now the whole character of poetry,’ wrote as anonymous contemporary in Blackwood's Magazine; ‘it is essentially the expression of emotion.’³ In his version of the doctrine, the Reverend John Keble focusses upon the pressure in ‘expression,’ and develops a definition of poetry as personal catharsis which he opposes to Aristotle's mimesis, as this had been traditionally interpreted.

Poetry is the indirect expression in words, most appropriately in metrical words, of some overpowering emotion, or ruling taste, or feeling, the direct indulgence whereof is somehow repressed …

Aristotle, as is well known, considered the essence of poetry to be Imitation … Expression we say, rather than imitation; for the latter word clearly conveys a cold and inadequate notion, of the writer's meaning …⁴

These definitions of the 1830s agree that poetry expresses emotions, but earlier in the century there had been variety of opinion as to just what mental elements are externalized in a poem. The common definition of the fine arts, Coleridge wrote in ‘Poesy or Art’ (1818), is that they all, ‘like poetry, are to express intellectual purposes, thoughts, conceptions, sentiments that have their origin in the human mind …’⁵ ‘Poetry is the music of language,’ Hazlitt had written the year before, ‘expressing the music of the mind.’⁶ Shelley declared that ‘poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be “the expression of the imagination”’;⁷ and that same year (1821) Byron complained to Tom Moore, ‘I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion …’⁸ Finally, Leigh Hunt reconciled these differences by the simple device of a definition which, as David Masson has remarked, is ‘constructed on the principle of omitting nothing that any one would like to see included.’⁹ Poetry (to quote Hunt's definition only in part) is ‘the utterance of a passion for truth, beauty and power, embodying and illustrating its conceptions by imagination and fancy, and modulating its language on the principle of variety in uniformity.’¹⁰

Wordsworth's contemporaries were fertile inventors of other terms parallel to ‘overflow’ and ‘expression,’ and frequently the same author presents us with a variety of these alternatives. To Mill, for example (and each of these terms could be duplicated in various other critics), poetry is not only an ‘expression,’ and an ‘uttering forth,’ but ‘the exhibition of a state or states of human sensibility,’ and also, ‘the thoughts and words in which emotion spontaneously embodies itself.’¹¹ Sir Walter Scott includes this last metaphor in a description which is rare among the major critics of the time because, by characterizing art as communication, it brings the audience to a parity with the stress of the artist's own feelings as a cause of artistic production. The painter, orator, and poet each has the motive

of exciting in the reader, hearer, or spectator, a tone of feeling similar to that which existed in his own bosom, ere it was bodied forth by his pencil, tongue, or pen. It is the artist's object, in short … to communicate, as well as colours and words can do, the same sublime sensations which had dictated his own composition.¹²

Byron characteristically prefers metaphors of greater daring, dash, and grandiosity.

Thus to their extreme verge the passions brought
Dash into poetry, which is but passion …(13)

At a more titanic level still, Byron introduces a volcano as analogy; poetry ‘is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.’¹⁴ And it is also Byron who offers the interesting parallel between poetic creation and childbirth, resulting in a poetic offspring at once separable from and blended with the spirit and feelings of the father-poet (or is it the mother-poet?).

'Tis to create, and in creating live
A being more intense, that we endow
With form our fancy, gaining as we give
The life we image, even as I do now.
What am I? Nothing: but not so art thou,
Soul of my thought! with whom I traverse earth,
Invisible but gazing, as I glow
Mix'd with thy spirit, blended with thy birth,
And feeling still with thee in my crush'd feelings' dearth.(15)

Allusions to poetry as a representation or image, as well as the implied analogy of art with a mirror, survive in the criticism of the early nineteenth century, but usually with a difference. The modern poet, wrote W. J. Fox in 1833, ‘delineates the whole external world from its reflected imagery in the mirror of human thought and feeling.’¹⁶ Often the reflector is reversed and images a state of mind rather than of external nature. So Hazlitt wrote that ‘it is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feelings we have … that gives an instant “satisfaction to the thought.”¹⁷ This reoriented version of poetic representation was equally current in the criticism of the German romantic writers. ‘Poetry,’ Novalis said, ‘is representation of the spirit, of the inner world in its totality.’¹⁸ And Tieck: ‘Not these plants, not these mountains, do I wish to copy, but my spirit, my mood which governs me just at this moment …’¹⁹

The use of painting to illuminate the essential character of poetry—pictura poesis—so widespread in the eighteenth century, almost disappears in the major criticism of the romantic period; the comparisons between poetry and painting that survive are casual, or, as in the instance of the mirror show the canvas reversed in order to image the inner substance of the poet.²⁰ In place of painting, music becomes the art frequently pointed to as having a profound affinity with poetry. For if a picture seems the nearest thing to a mirror-image of the external world, music, of all the arts, is the most remote: except in the trivial echoism of programmatic passages, it does not duplicate aspects of sensible nature, nor can it be said, in any obvious sense to refer to any state of affairs outside itself. As a result music was the first of the arts to be generally regarded as non-mimetic in nature; and in the theory of German writers of the 1790's, music came to be the art most immediately expressive of spirit and emotion, constituting the very pulse and quiddity of passion made public. Music, wrote Wackenroder, ‘shows us all the movements of our spirit, disembodied.’²¹ Hence the utility of music to define and illustrate the nature of poetry, particularly of the lyric, but also of poetry in general when this came to be conceived as a mode of expression. Friedrich Schlegel was of the opinion that when Simonides, in a famous phrase, characterized poetry as a speaking picture, it was only because contemporary poetry was always accompanied by music that it appeared superfluous to him to remind us ‘that poetry was also a spiritual music.’²²

Correspondingly, in England, Hazlitt said of poetry: ‘It is the music of language, answering to the music of the mind … There is a near connection between music and deep-rooted passion. Mad people sing.’²³ John Keble plainly indicates the extent to which music has replaced painting as poetry's nearest relation, and the accompanying reversal of orientation from universe to artist. Music and poetry ‘it is universally allowed … are twin sisters,’ for music, of all arts, most closely approaches poetry ‘on that side of its effect which is concerned in piercing into, and drawing out to the light, the secrets of the soul …’²⁴

The passages quoted so far suggest that to poetize is a unilateral activity, involving only materials inherent in the poet. No less characteristic of romantic theory is a set of alternative analogies implying that poetry is an interaction, the joint effect of inner and outer, mind and object, passion and the perceptions of sense. Thus Shelley illustrates his initial definition of poetry as ‘the expression of the imagination’ by reference to that favorite romantic toy, the Aeolian lyre. Athanasius Kircher laid claim to having invented this instrument in 1650. In the course of the next hundred years it became a popular piece of household furniture, and its pensive moods, its insubstantial and fairy sounds, and, above all, the fact that its music could literally be attributed to nature rather than art, made it a favorite subject for poets after the mid-eighteenth century.²⁵ It is noteworthy, however, that not until the nineteenth century did the wind-harp become an analogy for the poetic mind as well as a subject for poetic description.

Man [Shelley says] is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody. But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them.²⁶

The Aeolian lyre is the poet, and the poem is the chord of music which results from the reciprocation of external and internal elements, of both the changing wind and the constitution and tension of the strings. As Shelley at once goes on to explain, when a savage ‘expresses the emotions produced in him by surrounding objects … language and gesture, together with plastic or pictorial imitation, become the image of the combined effect of those objects, and of his apprehension of them.’²⁷

Other critics used other analogies of similar properties. Hazlitt opens his most important aesthetic essay, ‘On Poetry in General’ (1818), with a definition which closely parallels Shelley's Aeolian lyre, including its implications of automatism and of a pre-established harmony between objective stimulus and poetic response.

The best general notion which I can give of poetry is, that it is the natural impression of any object or event, by its vividness exciting an involuntary movement of imagination and passion, and producing, by sympathy, a certain modulation of the voice, or sounds, expressing it.²⁸

Amid the wealth of sometimes confused imagery with which Hazlitt expands and plays upon one or another part of this theme, we find the mimetic mirror familiar in older aesthetic theory. But since a mirror, whether turned to face the poet or the world without, can only reflect what is presented from a single direction, Hazlitt complicates the analogy by combining the mirror with a lamp, in order to demonstrate that a poet reflects a world already bathed in an emotional light he has himself projected.

Neither a mere description of natural objects, nor a mere delineation of natural feelings, however distinct or forcible, constitutes the ultimate end and aim of poetry … The light of poetry is not only a direct but also a reflected light, that while it shews us the object, throws a sparkling radiance on all around it …²⁹

Coleridge's lecture ‘On Poesy or Art’ (1818) is grounded on Schelling's metaphysics of a psycho-natural parallelism, according to which the essences within nature have a kind of duplicate subsistence as ideas in the mind. This world-view provides a new set of metaphors in which to convey the romantic theme that art is a joint product of the objective and the projected Art is ‘the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation …’ ‘Poetry also is purely human; for all its materials are from the mind, and all its products are for the mind.’ Yet ‘it avails itself of the forms of nature to recall, to express, and to modify the thoughts and feelings of the mind.’ And, in what may stand as a summary for this leitmotif of romantic thought about art:

Now so to place these images [of nature] totalized, and fitted to the limits of the human mind, as to elicit from, and to superinduce upon, the forms themselves the moral reflections to which they approximate, to make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature,—this is the mystery of genius in the Fine Arts.³⁰

In these central predications about the nature of poetry, taken out of their theoretical contexts, the principal difference from earlier criticism is a difference in metaphor. But whether poets or speakers in prose, we cannot discuss the activities of mind without metaphor. In the generation of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the transformation of the key images by which critics pictured the process and product of art is a convenient index to a comprehensive revolution in the theory of poetry, and of all the arts.

II. EMOTION AND THE OBJECTS OF POETRY

The habitual reference to the emotions and processes of the poet's mind for the source of poetry altered drastically the established solutions to that basic problem of aesthetics, the discrepancy between the subject matter in poetry and the objects found in experience. According to the central tradition hitherto, poetry departs from fact principally because it reflects a nature which has been reassembled to make a composite beauty, or filtered to reveal a central form or the common denominator of a type, or in some fashion culled and ornamented for the greater delight of the reader. To the romantic critic, on the other hand, though poetry may be ideal, what marks it off from fact is, primarily, that it incorporates objects of sense which have already been acted on and transformed by the feelings of the poet.

Wordsworth said that ‘I have at all times endeavoured to look steadily at my subject.’ This statement is often taken to be no more than a recommendation for objective accuracy and particularity. Wordsworth's ‘subject,’ however, is not merely the particularized object of sense, any more than it is the neo-classic ideal.

The ability to observe with accuracy things as they are in themselves, and with fidelity to describe them, unmodified by any passion or feeling existing in the mind of the describer … though indispensable to a Poet, is one which he employs only in submission to necessity, and never for a continuance of time: as its exercise supposes all the higher qualities of the mind to be passive, and in a state of subjection to external objects.³¹

This thesis Wordsworth insisted on again and again; for example, in 1816: ‘Throughout, objects … derive their influence not from what they are actually in themselves, but from such as are bestowed upon them by the minds of those who are conversant with or affected by those objects.’³² In the same vein, Thomas De Quincey wrote, refuting Erasmus Darwin's opinion that nothing is poetic that does not present a visual image: ‘The fact is that no mere description, however visual or picturesque, is in any instance poetic per se, or except in and through the passion which presides.’³³ ‘Descriptive poetry,’ according to J. S. Mill, as opposed to the descriptions of a naturalist, ‘consists, no doubt, in description, but in description of things as they appear, not as they are.’³⁴

In eighteenth-century theory, the minor topic of the way feelings may enter into and alter objects of sense had been discussed under the heading of ‘style,’ as one of various justifying causes of certain figures of speech. In the nineteenth century, this problem moves into a position at the very center of poetic theory. Often the matter is left in terms of analogy. Feelings project a light—especially a colored light—on objects of sense, so that things, as Mill said, are ‘arranged in the colours and seen through the medium of the imagination set in action by the feelings.’³⁵ Or the metaphor is biological rather than optical; while ‘it recalls the sights and sounds that had accompanied the occasions of the original passions,’ said Coleridge, ‘poetry impregnates them with an interest not their own by means of the passions …’³⁶ At other times the descriptions are more explicit, and give examples of the way objects of sense are fused and remolded in the crucible of emotion and the passionate imagination. Hazlitt's ‘On Poetry in General’ reads as though it were itself a spontaneous overflow of feeling without logical sequence, but it incorporates in very short scope a surprising number of current aesthetic ideas. The poetic imagination, he says, represents objects ‘as they are moulded by other thoughts and feelings, into an infinite variety of shapes and combinations of power.’ Agitation, fear, love, all distort or magnify the object, and ‘things are equal to the imagination, which have the power of affecting the mind with an equal degree of terror, admiration, delight, or love.’ As an example:

When Iachimo says of Imogen,

‘—The flame o' th' taper
Bows toward her, and would under-peep her lids
To see the enclosed lights’—

this passionate interpretation of the motion of the flame to accord with the speaker's own feelings, is true poetry.³⁷

Of all his contemporaries, Coleridge was the most concerned with the problem of how the poetic mind acts to modify or transform the materials of sense without violating truth to nature. Toward its solution, as we shall see farther on, he formulated the keystone of his critical system, his theory of imagination. In this characteristic passage he considers the role of emotion in the process of such transformation:

Images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet. They become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion … or lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet's own spirit,

‘Which shoots its being through earth, sea, and air.’(38)

Coleridge's last example of the modifying action of passion, that of animating the inanimate—the transference of the life of the observer to the things he observes—was eminently the preoccupation of romantic poets and theorists. ‘Poetry puts a spirit of life and motion into the universe,’ as Hazlitt put it.³⁹ ‘What is a Poet?’ Wordsworth asks, and answers that he is a man ‘who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.’⁴⁰ To the recording and discussion of such occasions, when the impressed characters of danger and desire

                                                            did make
The surface of the universal earth
With triumph, and delight, and hope, and fear,
Work like a sea,

Wordsworth devoted a number of his best poems and the climactic passages of the Prelude. The habitual reading of passion, life, and physiognomy into the landscape is one of the few salient attributes common to most of the major romantic poets. Correspondingly, in literary criticism the valid animation of natural objects, traditionally treated as one form of the rhetorical device of prosopopoeia, or personification, now came to be a major index to the sovereign faculty of imagination, and almost in itself a sufficient criterion of the highest poetry.

In the main, therefore, romantic critics substituted the presentation of a world that is instinct with the poet's feelings for the depiction of the universal and typical as the property which distinguishes poetry from descriptive discourse. But even though the question of the ideal in poetry thus lost the special position it had held in earlier theory, romantic critics by no means ceased, in relevant contexts, and in terms adapted to their new principles, to argue the topic they had inherited from their predecessors. On this their opinions ranged from Shelley's Platonistic formulation that poetry ‘lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty’ of the world ‘which is the spirit of its forms,’⁴¹ through Blake's violent marginalia on Reynolds' Discourses that ‘to Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit,’⁴² to Hazlitt's interpretation of the ideal (resembling the German theory of the ‘characteristic’) as the quintessence of a single object. The ideal, says Hazlitt, who was especially concerned with the objective correlate of artistic subject matter, is not ‘an abstraction of general nature’ nor ‘a mean or average proportion,’ for this would be to reduce all productions of art ‘to one vague and undefined abstraction, answering to the word man.’ The true ideal is achieved ‘by singling out some one thing or leading quality of an object, and making it the pervading and regulating principle of all the rest’; for ‘a thing is not more perfect by becoming something else, but by being more itself.’⁴³ With the exceptions of Blake and Hazlitt, however, there is little tendency in the major English critics to follow the extremists of the later eighteenth century and substitute an unqualified particularity, originality, and uniqueness for the older virtues of generality and universality. Wordsworth, for example, agrees with what he has been told is Aristotle's opinion, that the object of poetry ‘is truth, not individual and local, but general and operative.’⁴⁴ Coleridge also confirms ‘the principle of Aristotle, that poetry as poetry is essentially ideal,’ and that its persons must possess ‘generic attributes.’ He repeats as well the common eighteenth-century formula that poetry represents a just mean between the extremes of the general and familiar and the individual and novel, but restates it according to his own characteristic logic of the fusion and reconciliation of opposites. What is required is ‘an involution of the universal in the individual’; the imagination acts by reconciling the opposites of ‘the general, with the concrete … the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects’; and, he says, ‘that just proportion, that union and interpenetration of the universal and the particular … must ever pervade all works of decided genius and true science.’⁴⁵

III. CHANGING METAPHORS OF MIND

The change from imitation to expression, and from the mirror to the fountain, the lamp, and related analogues, was not an isolated phenomenon. It was an integral part of a corresponding change in popular epistemology—that is, in the concept of the role played by the mind in perception which was current among romantic poets and critics. And the movement from eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century schemes of the mind and its place in nature is indicated by a mutation of metaphors almost exactly parallel to that in contemporary discussions of the nature of art.

The various physical analogues which make up the ground plans or conceptual schemes for those ‘modes of inmost being,’ as Coleridge called them, which ‘can not be conveyed save in symbols of time and space,’⁴⁶ are sometimes explicitly formulated. At other times they merely intimate their existence by the structure of the metaphors with which men refer to the mental processes. To elucidate the nature of sense-perception, memory, and thought, Plato, for example, appealed to the reflection of images in a mirror, as well as to paintings, the writing of characters in the pages of a book, and the stamping of impressions into a wax plate.⁴⁷ Aristotle also said that the receptions of sense ‘must be conceived of as taking place in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold.’⁴⁸ Thus John Locke—who more than any philosopher established the stereotype for the popular view of the mind in the eighteenth century—was able to levy upon a long tradition of ready-made parallels in giving definition to his view of the mind in perception as a passive receiver for images presented ready-formed from without. The mind in Locke's Essay is said to resemble a mirror which fixes the objects it reflects.⁴⁹ Or (suggesting the ut pictura poesis of the aesthetics of that period) it is a tabula rasa on which sensations write or paint themselves.⁵⁰ Or (employing the analogy of the camera obscura, in which the light, entering through a small aperture, throws an image of the external scene on the wall) external and internal senses are said to be ‘the windows by which light is let into this dark room.’

For, methinks, the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas of things without: would the pictures coming into such a dark room but stay there, and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion, it would very much resemble the understanding of a man, in reference to all objects of sight, and the ideas of them.⁵¹

Alternatively, the mind is a ‘waxed tablet’ into which sensations, like seals, impress themselves.⁵²

The analogies for the mind in the writings of both Wordsworth and Coleridge show a radical transformation. Varied as these are, they usually agree in picturing the mind in perception as active rather than inertly receptive, and as contributing to the world in the very process of perceiving the world. Wordsworth's Prelude, as completed in 1805, provides us with an anthology of mental schema whose properties are in accord with the initial plan of that poem, which, as Coleridge said more than three decades later, was, ‘I believe, partly suggested by me … He was to treat man as man—a subject of eye, ear, touch, and taste, in contact with external nature, and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out of the senses.’⁵³ The thirteenth book of that poem ends, in fact, with the manifestation of ‘a new world,’ ruled by laws

Which do both give it being and maintain
A balance, an ennobling interchange
Of action from without and from within;
The excellence, pure function, and best power
Both of the object seen, and eye that sees.

The Copernican revolution in epistemology—if we do not restrict this to Kant's specific doctrine that the mind imposes the forms of time, space, and the categories on the ‘sensuous manifold,’ but apply it to the general concept that the perceiving mind discovers what it has itself partly made—was effected in England by poets and critics before it manifested itself in academic philosophy. Thus generally defined, the revolution was a revolution by reaction. In their early poetic expositions of the mind fashioning its own experience, for example, Coleridge and Wordsworth do not employ Kant's abstract formulae. They revert, instead, to metaphors of mind which had largely fallen into disuse in the eighteenth century, but had earlier been current in seventeenth-century philosophers outside of, or specifically opposed to, the sensational tradition of Hobbes and Locke. Behind these philosophers was Plotinus' basic figure of creation as emanation, in which the One and the Good are habitually analogized to such objects as an overflowing fountain, or a radiating sun, or (in a combination of the two images) to an overflowing fountain of light. ‘Were one writing a book on the philosophic significance and use of similes,’ B. A. G. Fuller has said, ‘I am not sure but that one would have to count this first, both in point of its aptness, and of its central place and controlling function in thought.’⁵⁴ If Plato was the main source of the philosophical archetype of the reflector, Plotinus was the chief begetter of the archetype of the projector; and both the romantic theory of knowledge and the romantic theory of poetry can be accounted the remote descendants of this root-image of Plotinian philosophy.

In discussing the human perception of the divine overflow, Plotinus explicitly rejected the concept of sensations as ‘imprints’ or ‘seal-impressions’ made on a passive mind, and substituted the view of the mind as an act and a power which ‘gives a radiance out of its own store’ to the objects of sense.⁵⁵ Similar metaphors of mind were particularly prevalent in the philosophy of the ‘Cambridge Platonists’ (more Plotinists, actually, than Platonists), whom Wordsworth had read, and Coleridge had studied intensively. In these writers, the familiar figure of the spirit of man as a candle of the Lord easily lent itself to envisioning the act of perception as that little candle throwing its beams into the external world. I shall cite excerpts from one chapter of Nathanael Culverwel's An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature, because it serves as a convenient inventory of analogies for the mind as receptor or projector—as mirror or lamp. The Discourse was written before general knowledge of the full implications of Hobbes's major works had sharpened the point at issue, and Culverwel sets out to represent ‘unto you, as indifferently as I can, the state of this great Controversie.’ In this dispute he takes Plato and Aristotle to have been the chief protagonists.

‘Now the Spirit of man is the Candle of the Lord,’ he says, for the Creator, himself ‘the fountain of Light,’ furnished and beautified this ‘lower part of the World with Intellectual Lamps, that should shine forth to the praise and honour of his Name …’

This makes the Platonists look upon the Spirit of Man as the Candle of the Lord for illuminating and irradiating of objects, and darting more light upon them, than it receives from them … And, truely, he might as well phansie such implanted Ideas, such seeds of Light in his external Eye, as such seminal Principles in the Eye of the mind … (Aristotle) did not antedate his own Knowledge … but plainly profess'd, that his Understanding came naked into the World. He shews you … an abrasa tabula … This makes him set open the windows of sense, to welcome and entertain the first dawnings, the early glimmerings of morning light … As he could perceive no connate Colours, no Pictures, or Portraictures in his external Eye: so neither could he find any signatures in his Mind, till some outward Objects had made some impression upon … his soft and pliable Understanding, impartially prepared for every Seal.

Culverwel's own hesitant conclusion (for he has some inclination to the opinion that this is ‘a Question which cannot be determined in this Life’) is that we may look upon the understanding as a glass ‘nakedly receiving, and faithfully returning all such colours, as fall upon it. Yet the Platonists in this were commendable, that look'd upon the Spirit of a Man as the Candle of the Lord; though they were deceiv'd in the time when 'twas lighted.’⁵⁶ For an unqualified commitment to an absolute idealism, expressed in the image of the spirit of man as an outflowing fountain, we may turn to this passage from an essay by the Platonizing Puritan, Peter Sterry:

Thus is the Soule, or Spirit of every man all the World to Him. The world with all Varietie of things in it, his owne body with all it's parts, & changes are himselfe, his owne Soule, or Spirit springing up from it's own ffountaine within itselfe into all those fformes, & Images of things, which it seeth, heareth, smelleth, tasts, feeles, imagineth, or understandeth … The Soule often looking upon this, like Narcissus upon his owne fface in the ffountaine, forgets it to be itselfe, forgets that itselfe is the fface, the shadow, & the ffountaine, so it falls into a fond Love of itselfe in it's owne shadowie ffigure of itselfe.⁵⁷

As in the English Platonists, so in the romantic writers, the favorite analogy for the activity of the perceiving mind is that of a lamp projecting light. Wordsworth, describing in the Prelude his boyish communings with nature, affirms in a sequence of metaphors, ‘I still retain'd My first creative sensibility.’ ‘A plastic power Abode with me, a forming hand,’ and then:

                                        An auxiliar light
Came from my mind which on the setting sun
Bestow'd new splendor …(58)

Coleridge, on first hearing the Prelude read aloud, adopted Wordsworth's favorite image of radiance to describe its theme—although he combined the figure of the lamp of the mind with the figure of external nature as mirror: ‘Theme hard as high!’

                              … of moments awful,
Now in thy inner life, and now abroad,
When power streamed from thee, and thy soul received
The light reflected, as a light bestowed …(59)

Nor is the formulation confined to these two friends; the effusive Christopher North, for example, employs the lamp to support the proposition that ‘we create nine-tenths at least of what appears to exist externally …’ They who ponder on the pages of ‘the living Book of Nature … behold in full the beauty and the sublimity, which their own immortal spirits create, reflected back on them who are its authors.’⁶⁰

The familiar Neoplatonic figure of the soul as a fountain, or an outflowing stream, is also frequent in romantic poetry, although this too is usually reformed to imply a bilateral transaction, a give-and-take, between mind and external object. Wordsworth, who spoke of poetry as an ‘overflow of feeling,’ also spoke of whatever he ‘saw, or heard, or felt’ on his visit to the Alps as

                                        but a stream
That flowed into a kindred stream; a gale
Confederate with the current of the soul …(61)

This image of confluent streams, like that of the lamp, Coleridge reiterated in the poem he wrote in response to the Prelude.⁶² We must also take special note of the image of the wind-harp, which both Wordsworth and Shelley used as a construct for the mind in perception as well as for the poetic mind in composition.⁶³ (It is a curious twist of intellectual history that Athanasius Kircher, who claimed the invention of the Aeolian lyre, also perfected the camera obscura which had been employed as a mind-scheme by John Locke,⁶⁴ so that the same man was in part responsible for the artifacts used to give structure to antipodal views of the human mind.) As early as 1795 Coleridge had suggested the harp as an analogue for the thinking mind:

And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic harps diversely fram'd,
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each and God of all?

—a proposal no sooner made than recanted, for the sake both of his fiancée and ‘The Incomprehensible,’ as mere bubbles ‘on vain Philosophy's aye-babbling spring.’⁶⁵ Even at that stage in his thinking, Coleridge was apparently troubled by the necessitarian implications which emerged clearly in Shelley's later use of the same image. ‘There is a Power by which we are surrounded,’ Shelley says, ‘like the atmosphere in which some motionless lyre is suspended, which visits with its breath our silent chords at will.’ Even the ‘most imperial and stupendous qualities,’ though active ‘relatively to inferior portions of its mechanism,’ are nevertheless ‘the passive slaves of some higher and more omnipotent Power. This Power is God’; and those who have ‘been harmonized by their own will … give forth divinest melody, when the breath of universal being sweeps over their frame.’⁶⁶

A number of romantic writers then, whether in verse or prose, habitually pictured the mind in perception, as well as the mind in composition, by sometimes identical analogies of projection into, or of reciprocity with, elements from without. Usually, in these metaphors of the perceiving mind, the boundary between what is given and what bestowed is a sliding one, to be established as best one can from the individual context. Sometimes, as in Coleridge's formulation of the ‘coalescence of subject and object’ in the act of knowing, there is not, nor can there be, any attempt to differentiate the mental addition from that which is given, for as in the philosophy of Schelling from which Coleridge borrowed these terms, we are confined to a knowledge of the product, as against the raw materials, of the perceptual amalgam. In other instances—as in Wordsworth's expression of his state of mind at Cambridge,

I had a world about me; 'twas my own,
I made it; for it only liv'd to me,
And to the God who look'd into my mind—(67)

the suggestion is of a kind of Fichtean absoluteness, in which all objects resolve into a product of the Ego. But in most passages the implication is that the content of perception is the joint product of external data and of mind; and we are sometimes enabled, very roughly, to make out various positions of the line between inner and outer as, in different poetic contexts, it advances and retreats:

(1) In Wordsworth's early passage from ‘Tintern Abbey,’

                              All the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive,

the elements created in the act of perception may well be nothing more than Locke's secondary sense-qualities. Wordsworth himself draws attention in a note to the source of this passage in Young's Night Thoughts. Our senses, Young had said,

Give taste to fruits; and harmony to groves;
Their radiant beams to gold, and gold's bright fire …
Our senses, as our reason, are divine
And half create the wondrous world they see.
But for the magic organ's powerful charm
Earth were a rude, uncolour'd chaos still.
Objects are th' occasion; ours th' exploit …
Man makes the matchless image, man admires. …(68)

The reference to the secondary qualities as constituting the mind's addition to perception is here unmistakable, and brings to the fore an interesting aspect of the Lockean tradition. For though Locke had said that in acquiring the simple ideas of sense the mind, like a mirror, is passively receptive, he had gone on to make a further distinction. Some simple ideas are ‘resemblances’ of primary qualities which ‘are in the things themselves’; but the simple ideas of secondary qualities, such as colors, sounds, smells, tastes, have no counterpart in any external body. In Locke's dualism, then, we have the view that our perception of the sensible world consists partly of elements reflecting things as they are, and partly of elements which are merely ‘ideas in the mind’ without ‘likeness of something existing without.’⁶⁹ Locke, therefore, implicitly gave the mind a partnership in sense-perception; what Young did was to convert this into an active partnership of ‘giving,’ ‘making,’ and ‘creation.’ In this simple metaphoric substitution, we find Locke's sensationalism in the process of converting itself into what is often considered its epistemological opposite.

(2) A number of passages imply that objects, possessed of their full complement of primary and secondary sense-qualities, are given from without, and that the observer contributes to perception feeling-tones and aesthetic qualities—or at any rate, any especially rich, intense, or profound sense of beauty or significance in the visible scene. ‘The auxiliar light’ which came from Wordsworth's mind ‘on the setting sun Bestow'd new splendor,’ and heightened the song of birds and the murmur of fountains.⁷⁰ In the familiar text on the ‘spots of time,’ when Wordsworth revisited a scene ‘in the blessed time of early love,’ there fell upon it

The spirit of pleasure and youth's golden gleam;
And think ye not with radiance more divine
From these remembrances, and from the power
They left behind?
                                        … this I feel,
That from thyself it is that thou must give
Else never canst receive.(71)

The image of the mind as projective of aesthetic or other emotional quality had been anticipated by certain English writers of the eighteenth century, and was another part of the indigenous tendency toward the concept of creative perception which developed within the confines of the English empirical tradition. Thus Hume compared vice and virtue ‘to sounds, colours, heat and cold, which according to modern philosophy, are not qualities in objects, but perceptions in the mind …’⁷² So also with beauty, which is not (in the example of a geometrical figure) ‘a quality of the circle … It is only the effect, which that figure produces upon the mind.’ And then Hume slips over into the alternative figures of a projective lamp, of production, and even of creation:

Thus the distinct boundaries and offices of reason and of taste are easily ascertained … The one discovers objects, as they really stand in nature, without addition or diminution: The other has a productive faculty, and gilding or staining all natural objects with the colours, borrowed from internal sentiment, raises, in a manner, a new creation.⁷³

Formulations of the mind as projective of aesthetic qualities are particularly common among those eighteenth-century theorists who infused their Locke with a tincture of Neoplatonism. Thus Akenside cried, echoing Plotinus' favorite metaphor,

Mind, mind, alone, (bear witness, earth and heaven!)
The living fountains in itself contains
Of beauteous and sublime—

though, in a later edition of the Pleasures of the Imagination, he prudently substituted ‘He, God most high’ for ‘Mind, mind, alone’ as the well-spring of the aesthetic fountains.⁷⁴

(3) Most frequently, however, the mind is imaged by romantic poets as projecting life, physiognomy, and passion into the universe. The mere postulation of an animate universe was no novelty; Isaac Newton's ubiquitous God, constituting duration and space and sustaining by his presence the laws of motion and gravitation, and the World-Soul of the ancient Stoics and Platonists, are often to be found dwelling amicably together in the nature poetry of the eighteenth century. What is distinctive in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge is not the attribution of a life and soul to nature, but the repeated formulation of this outer life as a contribution of, or else as in constant reciprocation with, the life and soul of man the observer. This same topic was also central in the literary theory of these writers, where it turns up repeatedly in their discussions of the subject matter of poetry, their analyses of the imaginative process, and their debates on poetic diction and the legitimacy of personification and allied figures of speech.

The reason for this common concern of the early nineteenth-century philosophy of nature and of art is not hard to find. It was an essential part of the attempt to revitalize the material and mechanical universe which had emerged from the philosophy of Descartes and Hobbes, and which had been recently dramatized by the theories of Hartley and the French mechanists of the latter eighteenth century. It was at the same time an attempt to overcome the sense of man's alienation from the world by healing the cleavage between subject and object, between the vital, purposeful, value-full world of private experience and the dead postulated world of extension, quantity, and motion. To establish that man shares his own life with nature was to reanimate the dead universe of the materialists, and at the same time most effectively to tie man back into his milieu.

The persistent objective of Coleridge's formal philosophy was to substitute ‘life and intelligence … for the philosophy of mechanism, which, in everything that is most worthy of the human intellect, strikes Death.’ And the life transfused into the mechanical motion of the universe is one with the life in man: in nature, he wrote in 1802, ‘everything has a life of its own, and … we are all One Life.’⁷⁵ A similar idea constitutes the leitmotif of Wordsworth's Prelude. In a crucial passage, for example, Wordsworth describes how the infant in his mother's arms, seeing a world ‘irradiated’ by a sense of her love, comes to feel at home in the universe.

No outcast he, bewildered and depressed:
Along his infant veins are interfused
The gravitation and the filial bond
Of nature that connect him with the world.

But more is achieved than the mere linkage of feeling; the child becomes integral with the external world by the strongest of all bonds, through participating in its very creation and so sharing with it attributes of his own being. Through the faculties of sense, the mind creates—

Creator and receiver both,
Working but in alliance with the works
Which it beholds.(76)

The culmination of this process of domiciliation came in his seventeenth year when, by a process he opposes to ‘analytic industry,’ he found not only his senses and feelings but his life allied to an all-pervasive life in nature, and with bliss ineffable,

… felt the sentiment of Being spread
O'er all that moves and all that seemeth still.

This experience of the one life within us and abroad cancels the division between animate and inanimate, between subject and object—ultimately, even between object and object, in that climactic All is one of the mystical trance-state,

                    then, when the fleshly ear,
O'ercome by humblest prelude of that strain,
Forgot her functions, and slept undisturbed.(77)

Wordsworth here refers to his relation with nature in terms of ‘filial bonds’; we must add the remarkable passage from the conclusion to the first book of The Recluse in which he replaces the familial by conjugal metaphors. That great undertaking, the intended crown of his poetic career, he announces in unmistakable terms, is to be a ‘spousal verse’—a prodigious prothalamion celebrating the marriage of mind and nature, the consummation of the marriage, and the consequent creation (or procreation?) of a living perceptual world. ‘Paradise, groves Elysian, Fortunate Fields—’

                    the discerning intellect of Man,
When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these
A simple produce of the common day.
—I, long before the blissful hour arrives,
Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse
Of this great consummation:—, and, by words
Which speak of nothing more than what we are,
Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep
Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain
To noble raptures; while my voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual Mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted:—and how exquisitely, too—
Theme this but little heard of among men—
The external World is fitted to the Mind;
And the creation (by no lower name
Can it be called) which they with blended might
Accomplish:—this is our high argument.(78)

Two of the greatest and most representative poems of the early nineteenth century, Wordsworth's ‘Intimations of Immortality’ and Coleridge's ‘Dejection,’ turn on the distinction between data and addenda in sense experience. In both poems, the theme concerns an apparent change in the objects of sense, and is developed in terms of mental schemes which analogize the mind to something which is at once projective and capable of receiving back the fused product of what it gives and what is given to it. Wordsworth's ‘Ode’ employs, with dazzling success, the familiar optical metaphors of light and of radiant objects—lamps and stars. His problem is one of a loss of ‘celestial light’ and ‘glory’ from meadow, grove, and stream. The solution inheres in the figure (not uncommon, as we know, in Neo-platonic theologians) of the soul as ‘our life's star,’ ‘trailing clouds of glory’ at its rising, but gradually, in the westward course of life, fading ‘into the light of common day,’ though leaving behind recollections which ‘Are yet the fountain-light of all our day.’⁷⁹ But if maturity has its loss of ‘splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower,’ it has its compensating gains, and the mind, though altered, retains its power of radiant give-and-take with the external world:

The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober coloring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality.

Coleridge's ‘Dejection,’ on the other hand, memorializes not merely an alteration but the utter loss of the reciprocating power of the mind, leaving it a death-in-life as a passive receptor of the inanimate visible scene. In the short third and fourth stanzas, in which Coleridge five times iterates the dependence of nature's life on the inner life of man, he strikes the full diapason of metaphors for the active and contributive mind, some familiar, others seemingly of his own invention. The mind is a fountain, a source of light, the generator of a cloud that conveys life-giving rain, a musical voice like that of a wind-harp whose echo mingles with the sounds of outer origin; there is even the suggestion of a Wordsworthian marriage with nature. And the fifth stanza, proposing ‘joy’ as the indispensable inner condition for the ‘effluence’ and return of life, most subtly recapitulates all these figures, optical, acoustical, meteorological, and marital:

Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power,
Which, wedding Nature to us, gives in dower
          A new Earth and new Heaven,
Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud—
Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud—
          We in ourselves rejoice!
And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,
          All melodies the echoes of that voice,
All colours a suffusion from that light.

But it is not until the resolution in the closing stanza, when Coleridge prays that the Lady to whom the poem is addressed may retain the power he has lost, that we come upon the crowning metaphor of an eddy. The figure implies a ceaseless and circular interchange of life between soul and nature in which it is impossible to distinguish what is given from what received:

To her may all things live, from pole to pole,
Their life the eddying of her living soul!

This version of the perceptual mind as projecting life and passion into the world it apprehends is the one which most approximates the concurrent formulations of the mind active in the highest poetic composition—as Coleridge implies when he says, in ‘Dejection,’ that the failure of his power to project ‘the passion and the life’ marks the failure also of his ‘genial spirits’ and his ‘shaping spirit of imagination.’ We may say, then, by way of summary, that in the theory of Coleridge (partly though not consistently paralleled by that of Wordsworth) the primary and already creative act of perception yields the ‘inanimate cold world’ of the ever-anxious crowd. This coincides roughly with the inert world of both empirical philosophy and of common sense, which is perceived only in so far as it serves our practical interests and aims. This world includes Peter Bell's yellow primrose, but nothing more; daffodils set moving by the breeze, but neither gleeful nor dancing; the moon radiant in a bare sky—with the proviso that it is not the moon but the poet who ‘doth with delight look round him when the heavens are bare.’ The subsequent and higher act of re-creation, among its other functions, by projecting its own passion and life, transforms the cold inanimate world into a warm world united with the life of man, and by that same act, converts matter-of-fact into matter-of-poetry—and according to Coleridge's conception, into the highest poetry, because it is the product of the ‘secondary imagination.’

We must not leave the subject of the romantic analogues of mind without citing one that was Coleridge's favorite, and destined to alter more drastically the conceptions of mind, art, and the universe than all the apparatus of lamps, fountains, and wind-harps we have come upon thus far. This was the archetype (potentially present in the Platonist's figure of the ‘seeds of light’ in the mind) representing the mind not as a physical object or artifact, but as a living plant, growing out into its perception. To mental mechanism, Coleridge often and explicitly opposes the concept of life and growth. In a central passage of The Statesman's Manual, Coleridge discovers ‘correspondences and symbols’ of the highest faculty of man in the growth of a plant and its power to assimilate outer elements to which its respiration has already made contribution. Looking at a plant in a flowery meadow, he says, ‘I feel an awe, as if there were before my eyes the same power as that of the reason—the same power in a lower dignity, and therefore a symbol established in the truth of things.’

Lo!—with the rising sun it commences its outward life and enters into open communion with all the elements, at once assimilating them to itself and to each other. At the same moment it strikes its roots and unfolds its leaves, absorbs and respires, steams forth its cooling vapour and finer fragrance, and breathes a repairing spirit, at once the food and tone of the atmosphere, into the atmosphere that feeds it. Lo!—at the touch of light how it returns an air akin to light, and yet with the same pulse effectuates its own secret growth, still contracting to fix what expanding it had refined.⁸⁰

In any period, the theory of mind and the theory of art tend to be integrally related and to turn upon similar analogues, explicit or submerged. To put the matter schematically: for the representative eighteenth-century critic, the perceiving mind was a reflector of the external world; the inventive process consisted in a reassembly of ‘ideas’ which were literally images, or replicas of sensations; and the resulting art work was itself comparable to a mirror presenting a selected and ordered image of life. By substituting a projective and creative mind and, consonantly, an expressive and creative theory of art, various romantic critics reversed the basic orientation of all aesthetic philosophy. Consider now the further innovative possibilities in Coleridge's archetypal plant. Through this perspective, Coleridge saw the mind as growing into its percepts, conceived of the activity of the poetic imagination as differing from this vital, self-determining, assimilative process in degree rather than kind, and thus was able to envision the product of artistic genius as exhibiting the mode of development and the internal relations of an organic whole. But that is a subject for a later chapter.

Notes

1. A. W. Schlegel, Vorlesungen über schöne Literatur und Kunst (1801-4), Deutsche Litteraturdenkmale des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1883), xvii, 91. In classical Latin, when expremere was used with reference to speech, the metaphor had already faded and taken the sense of ‘signify’ or ‘stand for.’ See J. C. La Drière, ‘Expression,’ Dictionary of World Literature, ed. J. T. Shipley (New York, 1943), pp. 225-7.

2. ‘What Is Poetry?’ (1833), Early Essays [by John Stuart Milled. J. W. M. Gibbs (London, 1897).], p. 208.

3. ‘The Philosophy of Poetry,’ Blackwood's Magazine, xxxviii (1835), p. 833. For the identity of the author, see p. 149.

4. Review of Lockhart's Life of Scott (1838), in Occasional Papers and Reviews (Oxford and London, 1877), pp. 6, 8.

5. Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), p. 207.

6. Review of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, in Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, xvi, 136.

7. Shelley's Literary and Philosophical Criticism, ed. John Shawcross (Oxford, 1909), p. 121.

8. Works of Lord Byron, ed. E. H. Coleridge and R. E. Prothero (London and New York, 1898-1904); Letters and Journals, v, 318.

9. Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Other Essays (London, 1874), p. 202.

10. ‘An Answer to the Question What is Poetry?’ Imagination and Fancy (New York, 1848), p. 1.

11. ‘What is Poetry?’ Early Essays, pp. 208, 203, 223 (my italics).

12. ‘Essay on the Drama’ (1819), The Prose Works (Edinburgh and London, 1834-36), vi, 310.

13. Don Juan, iv, cvi.

14. Letter to Miss Milbanke, 10 Nov. 1813, Works, Letters and Journals, iii, 405. Similar analogies were used by more sedate critics also. The Rev. W. J. Fox, reviewing the verse of Ebenezer Elliott, the ‘Corn Law Rhymer,’ spoke of ‘humanity in poverty, pouring forth its own emotions,’ and called Elliott's verse ‘intense flashes of liquid lava from that central fire, which must have vent …’ As quoted by F. E. Mineka, The Dissidence of Dissent (Chapel Hill, 1944), pp. 301, 303.

15. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, iii, vi.

16. Monthly Repository, 2d series, vii (1833), p. 33; quoted by Mineka, op. cit. p. 307.

17. ‘On Poetry in General,’ Complete Works, v, 7.

18. Romantische Welt: Die Fragmente, ed. Otto Mann (Leipzig, 1939), p. 313.

19. Sternbald, in Deutsche National-Litteratur, cxlv, p. 300.

20. E.g., Hazlitt declares that in his Excursion Wordsworth ‘paints the outgoings of his own heart, the shapings of his own fancy’ (Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe, London and Toronto, 1930-34, xix, 10). And see Coleridge, Miscellaneous Criticism, p. 207.

21. Phantasien über die Kunst (1799), in Deutsche National-Litteratur, cxlv, p. 58.

22. Prosaische Jugendschriften, ed. J. Minor (Wien, 1882), ii, 257-8.

23. ‘On Poetry in General’ (1818), Complete Works, v, 12. Cf. ibid. xvi, 136.

24. Lectures on Poetry (1832-41), trans. E. K. Francis (Oxford, 1912), i, 47-8.

25. For the history of the wind-harp and of allusions to it by poets, see Erika von Erhardt-Siebold, ‘Some Inventions of the Pre-Romantic Period and their Influence upon Literature,’ Englische Studien, lxvi (1931-2), 347-63. Robert Bloomfield, the farmer-poet, published an anthology of literature concerning the wind-harp in 1808; see Nature's Music, in The Remains of Robert Bloomfield (London, 1824), i, 93-143.

26. ‘Defence of Poetry,’ Shelley's Literary and Philosophical Criticism, ed. John Shawcross (Oxford, 1909), p. 121. In the opening passages of The Prelude, Wordsworth had spoken in like terms of his attempt to poetize (1805 version, i, 101ff.); ‘It was a splendid evening; and my soul Did once again make trial of the strength Restored to her afresh; nor did she want Eolian visitations; but the harp Was soon defrauded.’

27. ‘Defence of Poetry,’ ibid. p. 121.

28. Complete Works, v, 1.

29. Ibid. p. 3. Compare Goethe, in Eckermann's Gespräche, 29 Jan. 1826: ‘Just so with the poet. So long as he only speaks out his few subjective feelings, he deserves not the name; but as soon as he knows how to appropriate to himself and express the world, he is a poet.’

30. As reprinted from Coleridge's Literary Remains, in Biographia Literaria, ed. Shawcross ii, 253-4, 258. Another and shorter version from one of Coleridge's note-books is published in Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, pp. 205-13.

31. Preface to Poems (1815), in Wordsworth's Literary Criticism, [ed. N. C. Smith (London, 1905).] p. 150. See also pp. 18, 165, 185.

32. Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, ed. E. de Selincourt (Oxford, 1937), ii, 705; 18 Jan. 1816.

33. Notes to a partial translation of Lessing's Laocoön, in Collected Writings, ed. David Masson (Edinburgh, 1889-90), xi, 206.

34. ‘What is Poetry?’ Early Essays, p. 207. For an anticipation of such statements, see J. U. [James Usher], Clio: or, a Discourse on Taste (2d ed.; London, 1769), p. 140: ‘You imagine [the man of sensibility] paints objects and actions, while he in reality paints passion, and affects us by the image of his own imagination.’ See also J. Moir, Gleanings, [(London, 1785).] i, 97-8.

35. Early Essays, p. 207. Keble: Poetry ‘paints all things in the hues which the mind itself desires …’ (Lectures on Poetry, [(1832-41) trans. E. K. Franeis (Oxford, 1912).] i, 22). W. J. Fox: ‘The changing moods of mind diversify a landscape with far more variety than cloud or sunshine in all their combinations; and those moods are in themselves subjects of description …’ (Monthly Repository, lxiii, 1833, p. 33).

36. ‘On Poesy or Art,’ Biographia Literaria, ii, 254. See also Hazlitt: Poetry, ‘the high-wrought enthusiasm of fancy and feeling,’ in ‘describing natural objects … impregnates sensible impressions with the forms of fancy …’ (‘On Poetry in General,’ Complete Works, v, 4-5).

37. ‘On Poetry in General,’ Complete Works, v, 4. See also his analysis of Shakespeare's: ‘Violets dim / But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes / Or Cytherea's breath,’ as ‘the intenseness of passion … moulding the impressions of natural objects according to the impulses of imagination …’ (Preface to Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, ibid. iv, 176-7. Cf. Wordsworth, Excursion, i, 475ff.).

38. Biographia, ii, 16. Cf. ibid. i, 59.

39. ‘On Poetry in General,’ Complete Works, v, 3.

40. Preface to Lyrical Ballads (added in 1802), in Wordsworth's Literary Criticism, p. 23.

41. ‘Defence of Poetry,’ Shelley's Literary Criticism, p. 155.

42. Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London and New York, 1939), p. 777. For an extreme view on the need for descriptive circumstantiality in a poem, couched still in the idiom of eighteenth-century criticism, see the review of Scott's Lady of the Lake, in Quarterly Review, iii (1810), 512-13: Scott most strikingly exemplifies ‘the analogy between poetry and painting … Whatever he represents has a character of individuality, and is drawn with an accuracy and minuteness of discrimination …’ Much of this is the result of his genius, a natural ‘intensity and keenness of observation’ by which he is able ‘to discover characteristic differences where the eye of dullness sees nothing but uniformity …’ Cf. the passages from Moir's Gleanings in the preceding chapter.

43. ‘The Ideal,’ Complete Works, xx, 303-4. See also his essays ‘Originality’ and ‘On Certain Inconsistencies in Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses.’ On the related discussion of ‘concreteness’ in poetry, see Chap. xi, sect. iii.

44. Wordsworth's Literary Criticism, p. 25.

45. Biographia, ii, 33n, 12; The Friend, in The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Shedd (New York, 1858), ii, 416.

46. Biographia, ii, 120.

47. E.g. Thaeatetus 191-5, 206; Philebus 38-40; Timaeus 71-2.

48. De anima ii. ii. 424^a.

49. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. A. C. Fraser (Oxford, 1894), i, 142-3 (ii, i, 25): ‘In this part the understanding is merely passive … These simple ideas, when offered to the mind, the understanding can no more refuse to have, nor alter when they are imprinted, nor blot them out and make new ones itself, than a mirror can refuse, alter, or obliterate the images or ideas which the objects set before it do therein produce.’ The comparison of the mind, or at least the ‘phantasy,’ to a mirror had been common in the Renaissance; see, e.g., George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. G. Smith (Oxford, 1904), ii, 20; and Bacon's discussion of this analogue in his passage on the Idols of the mind, De Augmentis, v, iv.

50. Essay Concerning Human Understanding, i, 121 (ii, i, 2): ‘Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas.’ See Locke's earlier draft, An Essay Concerning the Understanding, ed. Benjamin Rand (Cambridge, Mass., 1931), p. 61: The soul ‘at first is perfectly rasa tabula, quite void …’

51. Ibid. pp. 211-12 (ii, xi, 17).

52. Ibid. i, 48n, and 49. Cf. D. F. Bond, ‘Neo-Classic Theory of the Imagination,’ ELH, iv (1937), p. 248.

53. Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford, 1917), p. 188; 21 July 1832. Cf. ibid. p. 361 (1812): ‘The mind makes the sense, far more than the senses make the mind.’

54. B. A. G. Fuller, The Problem of Evil in Plotinus (Cambridge, 1912), p. 70.

55. Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (London, 1924), iv. vi. 1-3.

56. The Cambridge Platonists, ed. E. T. Campagnac (Oxford, 1901), pp. 283-4, 286-7, 292-3.

57. ‘Of the Nature of a Spirit,’ in V. de Sola Pinto, Peter Sterry, Platonist and Puritan (Cambridge, 1934), pp. 161-2. Similar analogies are to be found in many writers in the Neoplatonic tradition. For example, see Boehme, in Newton P. Stallknecht, Strange Seas of Thought (Durham, N. C., 1945), p. 52. A. O. Lovejoy, in an early essay on ‘Kant and the English Platonists,’ cited many parallels between Kant's ‘transcendental idealism’ and the writings—more abstract and less riotously metaphorical than Culverwel's or Sterry's—of such English Platonists as Cudworth, More, Burthogge, and Arthur Collier (Essays Philosophical and Psychological in Honor of William James, New York, 1908, pp. 265-302). This essay, by the way, lends greater credibility than many students have granted to Coleridge's reiterated claim that through his early reading in Platonists and mystics, he had acquired the essentials of his idealism prior to his first knowledge of German philosophy.

58. The Prelude (1805), ii, 378ff. See also ibid. xiii, 40ff., for the lovely passage is which Wordsworth finds in the naked moon shedding its glory over Snowdon, ‘The perfect image of a mighty Mind.’

59. ‘To a Gentleman,’ ll. 12ff.

60. ‘Tennyson's Poems’ (May 1832), Works of Professor Wilson, ed. Ferrier (Edinburgh and London, 1856), vi, 109-10. We may add, as representative images out of the stream of post-Kantian German philosophy, these passages from Schleiermacher's Monologen (1800), ed. F. M. Schiele and Hermann Mulert (2d ed.; Leipzig, 1914), p. 9: ‘Auch die äussere Welt … strahlt in tausend zarten und erhabenen Allegorien, wie ein magischer Spiegel, das Höchste und Innerste unsers Wesens auf uns zurük.’ And pp. 15-16: ‘Mir ist der Geist das erste und das einzige: denn was ich als Welt erkenne, ist sein schönstes Werk, sein selbstgeschaffener Spiegel.’

61. The Prelude (1850 ed.), vi, 743-5.

62. The theme is ‘Of tides obedient to external force, And currents self-determined, as might seem, Or by some inner Power’ (‘To a Gentleman,’ ll. 15ff.). Cf. the initial stanza of ‘Mont Blanc,’ in which Shelley likens the being-given and the given forth to the interchange and indistinguishable union of water with water; set also ll. 34-40.

63. To Wordsworth's ‘Aeolian visitations’ of poetry (Prelude, 1805, i, 104), cf. his description of his perceptual commerce with the moods of nature (ibid. iii, 136ff.): ‘In a kindred sense Of passion [I] was obedient as a lute That waits upon the touches of the wind,’ as a result of which ‘I had a world about me; 'twas my own, I made it …’

64. On the history of the camera obscura, see Erika von Erhardt-Siebold, ‘Some Inventions of the Pre-Romantic Period,’ Englische Studien, lxvi (1931-2), pp. 347ff.

65. ‘The Eolian Harp,’ ll. 44ff. On Coleridge's intention to render Berkeley's subjective idealism in this passage, see his Philosophical Lectures, ed. Kathleen Coburn (New York, 1949), p. 371; also Letters, ed. E. H. Coleridge, i, 211.

66. ‘Essay on Christianity’ (1815), Shelley's Literary and Philosophical Criticism, pp. 90-91. Later, in his marginalia on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Coleridge was to declare, ‘The mind does not resemble an Aeolian harp … but rather as far as objects are concerned a violin or other instrument of few strings yet vast compass, played on by a musician of Genius’ (Henri Nideker, ‘Notes Marginales de S. T. Coleridge,’ Revue de litterature comparée, vii, 1927, 529). See also Biographia, i, 81.

67. The Prelude (1805), iii, 142ff. The extremity of subjectivism, offered as a philosophical doctrine, is common enough among German followers of Fichte. Thus Tieck writes, in William Lovell (1795): ‘Freilich kann alles, was ich ausser mir wahrzunehmen glaube, nur in mir selbst existieren.’ ‘Die Wesen sind, weil wir sie dachten.’ ‘Das Licht aus mir fällt in die finstre Nacht, Die Tugend ist nur, weil ich sie gedacht.’ See Jenisch, Entfaltung des Subjektivismus, pp. 119-21.

68. ‘Night VI’ (1744), ll. 423ff.

69. Essay Concerning Human Understanding, i, 168-79 (ii, viii, 7, 15, 23). See Addison's Spectator No. 413 (a kind of half-way house between the formulation of Locke and of Young); Akenside, Pleasures of Imagination (1744 ed.), ii, 458-61, 489-514; and the quotations in Marjorie Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse (Princeton, 1946), 144-64.

70. The Prelude (1805), ii, 362ff.

71. Ibid. xi, 323-34.

72. Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1896), p. 469 (iii, i, i).

73. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, ii, 263-5. Cf. David Hartley, Observations on Man (6th ed.; London, 1834), pp. 231-2 (iii, iii, Prop. lxxxix).

74. (1744 ed.), i, 481ff.; (1757 ed.), i, 563ff. William Duff, Essay on Original Genius, p. 67, describes ‘the transforming power of Imagination, whose rays illuminate the objects we contemplate … The Imagination, enraptured with the contemplation of them, becomes enamoured of its own creation.’ Archibald Alison, in a work written in 1790 to demonstrate that ‘the qualities of matter are in themselves incapable of producing emotion,’ but are perceived as beautiful or sublime through a process of association, thinks that his doctrine nevertheless coincides with ‘a doctrine that appears very early to have distinguished the platonic school … that matter is not beautiful in itself, but derives its beauty from the expression of mind’ (Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, Boston, 1812, pp. 106, 417-18).

75. To Wordsworth, 30 May 1815, Letters, ii, 648-9; to W. Sotheby, 10 Sept. 1802, ibid. i, 403-4.

76. The Prelude (1850 ed.), ii, 232-60.

77. Ibid. ll. 382-418. Cf. ibid. (1805 ed.), viii, 623-30; and see Stallknecht, Strange Seas of Thought, Chap. iii. It is relevant to consider here the extraordinary weight that other romantic poets, as well as Coleridge and Wordsworth, placed on the experience of Einfühlung, or loss of distinction between self and external scene. E.g., Shelley, ‘On Life,’ Literary and Philosophical Criticism, [ed. John Shawcross (London, 1909)] p. 56: ‘Those who are subject to the state called reverie, feel as if their nature were dissolved into the surrounding universe, or as if the surrounding universe were absorbed into their being. They are conscious of no distinction.’ And Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, iii, lxxii: ‘I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me’; ‘the soul can flee, And with the sky, the peak, and the heaving plain Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain.’ And ibid. iv, clxxviii: ‘I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe.’ Keats was exceptional, in that he felt an identification rather with individual things, such as sparrows and people, than with the total landscape; see the familiar passages in his Letters, ed. M. B. Forman (3d ed.; Oxford, 1948), pp. 69, 227-8, 241.

78. Included in the Preface to The Excursion (1814), ll. 47-71. The barely submerged analogy in this passage, by the way, presents an interesting parallel to cabalistic and other esoteric theories of the sexual generation of the world.

79. Culverwel, e.g., joins the familiar concept of the first-order stars as angelic existences with the figure of the fountain of light: The Creator ‘fill'd the highest part of the World with those Stars of the first Magnitude, I mean those Orient and Angelic Beings, that dwell so near the fountain of Light, and continually drink in the Beams of Glory …’ (The Cambridge Platonists, ed. Campagnac, p. 283).

80. Lay Sermons, ed. Derwent Coleridge (3d ed.; London, 1852), pp. 75-7. Coleridge added in a note that this passage ‘might properly form the conclusion of a disquisition on the spirit … without reference to any theological dogma …’