"A Rationality Larger than the Material Universe"

Paul Hamilton's book would do better as the subject of a seminar than of a review. It assumes a fresh reading, plus total recall, of European philosophy at least from Kant to Kierkegaard, as well as of all the relevant literary texts. It does not stoop to summary or explanation. In a word, it is not a book for the intellectually timid. One had better care deeply about the issues that it raises, because it places great demands on a reader.

The abstract printed on the back cover of the book states a large part of Hamilton's argument more clearly than the text itself does: "Coleridge's infectious attachment to German (post-Kantian) philosophy was due to its symmetries with the structure of his Christian belief . . . Its comprehensiveness, however, rendered redundant further theological description, undermining the faith it had seemed to support." It may be because of Coleridge's devotion to German thought that his attachment to Christianity, although obviously central to his life and work in one sense, seems at times in another sense only ancillary: an outrigger running in tandem with his philosophy. Despite his commitment to German philosophy, though, when Coleridge rebels against its all-inclusive style, he does seem to be craving an alternative that offers something more than either quasi-religion or mere talk about religion. This alternative emerges (perhaps somewhat arbitrarily) as institutional theism, a real and conceptual structure that Coleridge builds up gradually alongside his preoccupation with Continental philosophy. The growth of Coleridge's need for religion in this almost tangible sense is documented in the recent work by Donald M. Craig, Robert Southey and Romantic Apostasy, which has a substantial amount of material on Coleridge.

Coleridge's rebellion against the sense of constriction created by the German philosophical frame may also be detected, according to Hamilton, in what he calls the "mystery poems," "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "Kubla Khan," and "Christabel," all of which flirt with a major transgression. Perhaps in these poems divinity itself has assumed a transgressive form (56). Whether or not Coleridge later repudiated this element in the poems (52), their resolutely unfinished—or, one might say, unfinishable—quality clearly does keep them outside any hermetic philosophic system. (Whether they are much more compatible with orthodox Christianity than with German philosophy is another question.) In his conclusion, in fact, Hamilton follows Coleridge in arguing against any closed, terminable, self-sufficient poetry.

Hamilton's last chapter, "Spelling the World," is a tour de force. It opens with a section titled "The Mammaloschen," or "mother tongue." In Yiddish, the word "mammeloschen" refers to Yiddish itself. Here it serves to introduce an astonishing passage in Coleridge about a child's emergence into consciousness, into language, and into an awareness of God, through its interaction with its mother. The child literally spells its world into being as it begins to identify its mother (121).

One of the respects in which Coleridge found systematic German philosophy inadequate was in its failure to acknowledge the centrality of personal affect. Once more, the infant-mother relationship is the touchstone, and the model, again, is language. The sounds of a word are liable to fall apart; the word can lose its meaning, even vanish, until we can "touch" it again; so a child in the dark will sometimes cry, "I am not here, touch me, mother, that I may be here!" (128). Human touch is a prerequisite for reality, meaning, and identity.

In the end, though, Hamilton does call on a different aspect of German philosophy to support another Coleridgean view—namely, that the aesthetic cannot be a final value. (If I understand him correctly, Hamilton imputes the opposite view to Wordsworth.) This is an important point, since one can often feel that Coleridge is an almost-failed poet, or a poet malgré lui; alternatively, that his poetry sits...