Coleridge

Anyone familiar with them will liken this book to the great achievements of 19th C. scholarship, a complete and accurate treatment of its subject. And Holmes seems closer to his subject here than for Shelley, where he appears baffled by that poet's "Hell's Angel" behavior in setting his female cousins in a line and feeling them up. Representing fifteen years work, if one may infer from the book's afterword, this biography is a necessary adjunct to reading Coleridge's poetry. But, as with Shelley, Holmes's professional objectivity gets in the way of insights that are accessible mainly through inspiration. For example, he fails to give central importance to symbols in Coleridge's vision, even though Coleridge repairs to symbols even more than Yeats. Symbols are not merely "objective correlatives" to Coleridge, but instruments for making the universe and personal experience intelligible and spiritually covalent. To Coleridge, the "cinque spotted spider," making its way upstream by fits and starts, is not merely a comment on the intermittent nature of creativity, imagination, or spiritual progress, but the journey and destination of his life. The spider's five legs represent the central problem that Coleridge lived to resolve, the conflict between Aristotelian logic and Christian philosophy. Two legs of the spider represent the "me-not me" of thesis and antithesis, the idea that a thing can not be itself and its opposite simultaneously, the basis of the clockwork Newtonian world view that Coleridge rejected. The remaining three legs--exothesis, mesothesis and synthesis or the Holy trinity--represent the idea that things can diverge without being contradictory. Taken together, the five legs--with synthesis in the center, form the Holy Cross of Ramist logic. The cinque-spotted spider is the emblem of holism, the quest and substance of Coleridge's thought and spiritual life. Holmes gives it half a line. In short, this biography is limited somewhat by the author's refusal to indulge imagination, ironic in view of his subject and doubly so given his choice of subjects, for no one spends fifteen years examining an exemplar of imagination unimaginitively. Nevertheless, this and the antecedent volume are books that one must read to correlate Coleridge's life with his work, a necessary task for understanding any Romantic's poetry. To paraphrase Coleridge, What is poetry is so much a matter of what is a poet that one cannot understand the one without understanding the other. In his own case, imagination is central to both.