Coleridge’s Criticism of Life

Abstract

MY PAPER IS ABOUT AN EXPERIENCE that Coleridge puts at the origin and at the heart of aesthetic response. This is a state for which Coleridge provides a phenomenological record of extraordinary precision and sensitivity; and Coleridge is as extraordinary—with Keats, perhaps, the best—phenomenologist of such experiences as we have. The experience features prominently in the poem “Dejection: an Ode,” and Coleridge elaborates on it in his first sustained piece of aesthetic criticism, the periodical “Essays on the Principles of Genial Criticism” of 1814—citing “Dejection” in that same text. These two very different texts are I’ll argue both primarily concerned with an experience of the beautiful, more particularly a manner of relation to the beautiful, that can be characterized as a state of “blank attachment.” This is a form of interest without interest, attachment without (as Coleridge says) the “intervenience of charm or emotion”—a “blank” and vacant form of perception in which one is conscious of attachment to the beautiful object without taking any pleasure in it whatsoever. I call this state of attachment “blank” in the sense that it is without character, and in a corollary sense in which its character is still to be filled in. The speaker in such moments accepts this open-ended arrangement, remaining committed to the object for as long as is required to see some change (whether in or outside of himself). His commitment to the object is without pleasure and without prospect, beyond this prospect of change.