“We Must Bewilder Ourselves, Whenever We Would Pierce into the Adyta of Causation”: The Primary Causes of Things in Coleridge’s Early Poetry
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TexteLangue : français Détails de publication : 2011.
Ressources en ligne : Abrégé : Coleridge’s early poetical ambitions owed much to contemporary speculations in natural philosophy and metaphysics. Hartley’s vibratiuncles, Priestley’s dynamic monism, and Erasmus Darwin’s pantheistic poetry all seemed to converge into a central vision of organizing “myriads” providentially at work within the universe. Yet Coleridge soon distanced himself from “materialistic” science, for both philosophical and poetical reasons: he saw the will to see and imagine the primary causes of things as a species of idolatry, leading to poetry of an artificial kind. His subsequent dismissal of “allegorical machinery” was an important moment in the “divorce” between science and poetry that would later be associated with Romanticism.
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Coleridge’s early poetical ambitions owed much to contemporary speculations in natural philosophy and metaphysics. Hartley’s vibratiuncles, Priestley’s dynamic monism, and Erasmus Darwin’s pantheistic poetry all seemed to converge into a central vision of organizing “myriads” providentially at work within the universe. Yet Coleridge soon distanced himself from “materialistic” science, for both philosophical and poetical reasons: he saw the will to see and imagine the primary causes of things as a species of idolatry, leading to poetry of an artificial kind. His subsequent dismissal of “allegorical machinery” was an important moment in the “divorce” between science and poetry that would later be associated with Romanticism.
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