РАЗРАБОТКА КОЛЬРИДЖЕМ ИДЕИ ВООБРАЖЕНИЯ

Аннотация

The thoughtful approach to Wordsworth in the second volume represents Coleridge’s understanding of poetry at its best. The importance of the organic metaphor and idea for later thinking about poetry can hardly be exaggerated. The sense of the work of art as an organism, self-germinating and self-enclosed, pervades modern writing and modern criticism. Key word: poetry, expressive language, the psychological acumen, semasiology. РАЗРАБОТКА КОЛЬРИДЖЕМ ИДЕИ ВООБРАЖЕНИЯ Аннотация. Вдумчивый подход к Вордсворту во втором томе представляет собой лучшее понимание поэзии Кольриджем. Важность органической метафоры и идеи для последующего размышления о поэзии трудно переоценить. Ощущение произведения искусства как организма, саморазвивающегося и замкнутого в себе, пронизывает современную письменность и современную критику. Ключевые слова: поэзия, выразительная речь, психологическая хватка, семасиология. The lectures of 1811-1812 on Shakespeare were influential in the general revival of interest in the Elizabethan drama. Dr. Johnson’s 1765 preface to his edition of Shakespeare’s works had defended him as the poet of nature who held up a mirror to life and manners. Against this mimetic emphasis Coleridge lay stress on Shakespeare’s expressive language and the psychological acumen associated with it: “In the plays of Shakespeare, every man sees himself, without knowing that he does so.” A more important legacy of the lectures on Shakespeare is the idea of organicism, which has deep roots in his earlier critical reflection. In lecture notes on Shakespeare, Coleridge evokes organic form in terms which mimic the contemporary German critic August Wilhelm Schlegel. The form of Shakespeare’s dramas grew out of his characters and ideas, on Coleridge’s telling; the old dramatic conventions did not impede the conception. The structural variety of his plays—the seeming irregularities of The Tempest, in particular—arose from expressive requirements. Organic form redeemed Shakespeare’s unconventional dramatic constructions. The importance of the organic metaphor and idea for later thinking about poetry can hardly be exaggerated. The sense of the work of art as an organism, self-germinating and self-enclosed, pervades modern writing and modern criticism. Coleridge’s elaboration on the idea of imagination 437 in this period owes something to the distinction of mechanic and organic form as well. His definitions of primary and secondary imagination and of fancy have become canonical; they served I. A. Richards, notably, as a theoretical basis of the “semasiology” which he proposed in 1935. This putative science of meaning was meant to shore up the foundations of English as an academic discipline and proved influential not only at Cambridge but throughout the English-speaking world, including the United States, where it provided impetus for the development of the New Criticism, as it was called. Treating Coleridge as a provincial outpost of the new German critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, English and American readers have usually abandoned the complex record of his reading and response in favor of one or two manageable ideas. The result has been general misapprehension about his orientation and commitments. Coleridge does not make sense as a model of aesthetic reading despite the efforts of Richards and others to bend him to this purpose. What sort of reader was he, then? Moral and political, certainly, but something more. On his return from Germany in 1799, Coleridge had undertaken “a metaphysical Investigation” of “the affinities of the Feelings with Words & Ideas,” to be composed “under the title of ‘Concerning Poetry & the nature of the Pleasures derived from it.’” The connection of his philosophical studies with his critical ambition is important for understanding how Coleridge imagined the critical function. He was not interested in judging writing by current standards. Conventional judgments of good or bad relied on unspoken assumptions which he was concerned to test and modify, where appropriate, by the light of reason. Adjudicating taste is the usual purview of the “man of letters.” Coleridge was trying for something more philosophical, of larger scope and bearing: “acting the arbitrator between the old School & the New School to lay down some plain, & perspicuous, tho’ not superficial Canons of Criticism respecting poetry.” In the wake of the republication of Lyrical Ballads in early 1801 (with ‘1800’ on the title page), Coleridge’s critical project became a protracted effort to come to terms with Wordsworth’s radical claims in the “Preface” for a poetry composed “in the real language of men.” This was the “New School” of “natural thoughts in natural diction”: Coleridge’s own school despite his differences with Wordsworth. His effort to make the case for the new verse in the teeth of pitched hostility on the part of reviewers culminated in his Biographia Literaria (1817), where the “Old School” is treated anecdotally in the