Wordsworth
was wrong and self-contradictory without doubt; but Coleridge was
equally wrong and self-contradictory in arguing that metre
_necessitated_ a language essentially different from that of prose.
So it is that the philosophic part of the specifically literary
criticism of the _Biographia_ takes us nowhere in particular. The
valuable part is contained in his critical appreciation of Wordsworth's
poetry and that amazing chapter--a little forlorn, as most of
Coleridge's fine chapters are--on 'the specific symptoms of poetic power
elucidated in a critical analysis of Shakespeare's _Venus and Adonis_.
In these few pages Coleridge is at the summit of his powers as a critic.
So long as his attention could be fixed on a particular object, so long
as he was engaged in deducing his general principles immediately from
particular instances of the highest kind of poetic excellence, he was a
critic indeed. Every one of the four points characteristic of early
poetic genius which he formulates deserves to be called back to the mind
again and again:--
'The delight in richness and sweetness of sound, even to a faulty
excess, if it be evidently original and not the result of an easily
imitable mechanism, I regard as a highly favourable promise in the
compositions of a young man.
Pages:
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260