Abstract
Coleridgean studies have taken a new direction within the last five years. Recent critics, such as Samantha Harvey in Transatlantic Transcendentalism: Coleridge, Emerson, and Nature (2013) and David Greenham in Emerson's Transatlantic Romanticism (2012), discuss the transatlantic connections between Coleridge and his continental counterparts (chiefly Emerson)—both in Europe and America. Andrea Timar continues in this tradition but with a twist. Her study examines Coleridgean thought as a paradigmatic catalyst for not only transatlantic romanticism, but indeed modernity itself.
In her new monograph, A Modern Coleridge: Cultivation, Addiction, Habits, Timar provides a comprehensive yet thoroughly modern take on Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ideology—winding religion, pragmatics, politics, and literary criticism together into a revolving gyre of superbly researched critique. Cultivation, addiction, and habits comprise three equal parts of a complex paradigm—one which, as Timar patiently shows, informs much of the Coleridgean canon, in both prose and poetry. Ingeniously fusing New Historicist methodology with age-old Platonic and German Idealistic philosophical influences, Timar breaks new ground, reconceiving Coleridge not only as a supremely talented writer, but also as a deeply conservative cultural and religious thinker and early modernist. Timar refers to everyone from Raymond Williams, through Ralph Waldo Emerson and Samuel Beckett, to contemporary British political and religious thinkers, to show that Coleridge has a modern legacy and that his work resonates in a series of different eras, including the twenty-first century.
Accounts of Coleridge's life may appear in biographies, but Timar does not repeat similar critical methods. Instead, she interprets Coleridge's literary correspondences, seeking to map not just a personal and idiosyncratic ideological-cultural continuum, but one that is all-encompassing—borrowing from the best impulses of the man himself to find the concrete universal, the naturally symbolic—that is, the tautegorical symbol that applies to society writ large. From German Idealist to Tory to religious apologist to cultural determinist, Coleridge's intellectual movements set the stage for modern ways of viewing the world. Cross-categorical references to The Statesman's Manual, Biographia Literaria, and Aids to Reflection create the context and provide the evidence for this transformative power. Modern voices, often of varying political and religious affiliation, offer commentary on Coleridge and help the reader and Timar interpret Coleridge's work.
Equally important to the modern scholar, there are only a few minor shortcomings to Timar's text. The introduction is somewhat overly detailed, and sometimes includes an overabundance of evidence to qualify claims, occasionally mediating from one warrant to the next with only a rudimentary connection to her initial paradigms. The reading experience of this at times obstructs the ultimate scholarly purpose of the text—namely, to elucidate theories about Coleridge. Timar begins with a sweeping and scholarly outline of the entire German tradition of philosophy and its relation to her topic. The text's theory is likewise more limited to the work of Schelling, Kant, and Schiller, and Timar could have pared down some of this material. Again, these are minor shortcomings indeed, and for the most part, a subject as complex as this has been written about with dignity and valor.
Timar presents the notion of cultivation in primarily religious terms, preferring to emphasize Coleridge's ideas about the creation of a clerisy. She mentions that Schiller's notion of aesthetic education or Bildung exerted the greatest influence on Coleridge's notion of cultivation. Schiller emphasized the importance of refining the mind in the realm of traditions of morality and religion and ‘the will’ in order to establish the proper character of the individual. First and foremost, as Timar patiently explains, Coleridge proceeded from the work of these German Idealists, primarily Schelling and Kant, and supplemented it with his own religious philosophy. Timar makes relevant reference to Christian virtues at every turn, emphasizing the cultivation of tradition as it relates to what Russell Kirk calls “the permanent things.”
The idea of addiction is not limited in any way to Coleridge's use of opium, which, in fact, Timar barely mentions. Instead, she chooses to focus on Coleridge's addiction to certain intellectual patterns of thinking. Coleridgean addiction has been turned on its head, becoming a vital linkage in understanding the so-called “Coleridgean turn” after the French Revolution and most importantly of all, contextualizing his religious vibrancy. Timar often notes that prominent modern intellectuals like Raymond Williams praise Coleridge for contributing something profound to public discourse, and thus the public good. Case in point—the term cultivation itself. According to Williams, Coleridge came up with the definition of a habit of mind, applying the usual agricultural context of the term. When one cultivates the mind, he is able to love God with more alacrity and see life with new freshness, new optimism, and new hope. This is not accomplished overnight or for the faint of heart, as Timar suggests. In fact, Coleridge had as a larger societal goal, according to Timar's paraphrase of Williams, the “ambition to develop in an undetermined and unimpeded way all aspects of [every British person's] personality” (25). Coleridge's addiction to reform, then, spearheads a larger continental intellectual shift into more modern ways of thinking, serving to truly actualize the intents of the Enlightenment. Providing a concrete example of Enlightenment thinking, and cultural metamorphosis, Timar's concluding chapter on “The Eolian Harp” dramatizes Coleridge's addiction to cultural values and serves as a poignant concluding chapter. The inward development of this poem's narrative voice blends the aesthetic with the cultural, and the natural with the religious, affirming Coleridge's fidelity to the ideal. Important Romantic critics like Jack Stillinger and Seamus Perry interpret the poem alongside Timar, cutting through wayward theories to arrive at a multidimensional analysis.
Conceptually, the unity of Bildung also serves to bring the final term of Timar's analysis—habits—into play. Bildung—the German tradition of self-cultivation, education, and formation (etymologically, this refers to the words creation, image, shape)—was a term picked up by Coleridge in his famous 1798 trip to Germany. Timar has so eloquently brought Coleridge into the very root of such a diverse but influential subject as the philosophy of education. In Germany, ‘the creation, image, and the shape’ all figure into what Barthes calls the connotative signifier. Timar's analysis here is all-encompassing, especially for readers who hunger for a deep dose of synthesis at virtually every turn. Timar, in the absolute pinnacle of her text, conveys that Coleridge hungered to appropriate the intellectual rigor of the Germans and sought to maintain, through his lectures and other subsequent public speaking engagements, the best of England's cultural habits, thereby warding off the deeply disillusioning and horribly misplaced barbarism and transformation of burgeoning Napoleonic French society and culture.
The reader is treated to a groundbreaking and thoroughly modern account of Coleridge's mind's inner workings. Sometimes, attempts to approximate an author's intentions are obscured by conjecture and rely on weak assumptions, but this study is truly different. Using painstakingly accurate methods and research, Timar recreates Coleridge's patterns of thought and shows unmistakable unity and synthesis between such disparate topics as philosophy, religion, etymology, politics, and the national interest. Timar shows that Coleridge transcends his place and time, making movements that can and should be seen as precursors to the modern. Indeed, Timar's book is dense, but only because each claim that is made is thoroughly corroborated with research.