Coleridge's Conversation Poems: Thinking the Thinker

Although Coleridge himself identified only 'The Nightingale' as 'A Conversation Poem', the assumption that it possessed certain generic or thematic characteristics in common with other poems has prompted critics for the past eighty years to group them together. 'The Æolian Harp', 'Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement', 'This Lime-Tree Bower', 'Frost at Midnight', 'The Nightingale', 'Dejection: An Ode', 'To William Wordsworth' were the seven poems said to share basic features.¹ The first to set forth these shared characteristics, George Harper emphasised a structure which began in a pleasant sanctuary, launched a metaphorical flight of fancy, then returned with altered perspective to the sanctuary.² Richard Fogle noted recurrent image patterns in the seven poems.³ M. H. Abrams called attention to the poetic expression of Coleridge's key metaphysical ideas.⁴ Other critics saw the poems as meditations and religious reflections inspired by a revelatory experience or harmony in nature.⁵ With a focus on the presumed interlocutor in the 'Conversation', critics have also made a case for the conjured presence in these poems of Sara Fricker Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Hartley Coleridge, Sara Hutchinson, and William and Dorothy Wordsworth.⁶ Others have examined the stylistic presumptions of conversational language.⁷ Still other critics have attended to political concerns, perhaps most prominent in 'Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement', but also lurking in 'Frost at Midnight' and some of the other 'Conversations.'⁸ Many critics have observed strong dialectical tensions: aesthetics vs. ethics, idealism vs. materialism, isolation vs. engagement, idleness vs. industry, loss vs. desire, indolence vs. creativity.⁹ My own reading of the 'Conversation Poems' is also concerned with dialectical tensions, those derived from Coleridge's effort to reconcile subject and object, thinker and thing perceived.

In his distinction between the Primary and the Secondary Imagination, Coleridge addressed the mental act necessary to apperception and the volitional act necessary to creative expression.¹⁰ The peculiarity of Coleridge's definition is that he has divided the Imagination into two modes, a receptive phase of perception followed by an expressive phase of recreation. The Primary is 'the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception [. . . ] a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am'. The Secondary is 'an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with former in the kind of its agency, and different only in degree, and in the mode of its operation' (BL, i. 304). There is a parallel in the two phases that Wordsworth attributes to the generation of poetry: 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings' and 'emotions recollected in tranquillity'. It is in the latter phase, Wordsworth explains, that 'successful composition generally begins.'¹¹ For Wordsworth the inspirational moment is emotional, for Coleridge it is an epiphany of perception. In spite of the differences, these descriptions of the creative process are similar in positing two distinct stages: the first based in response, the second involving the active work of composition. 'Co-existing with conscious will', the second phase for Coleridge 'dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate'. Wordsworth does not make an act of will decisive for the transition from the first phase to the second; he merely observes that if the 'passions [. . . ] are voluntarily described, the mind will, upon the whole, be in a state of enjoyment.'

Wordsworth, in 'Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey', described a dreamlike state in which

     we are laid asleepIn body, and become a living soul:While with an eye made quiet by the powerOf harmony, and the deep power of joy,We see into the life of things

(lines 45–49)

In his gloss on these lines in March 1801, Coleridge cited Fichte in elucidating his own sense of how inspired perception depends on perception as apperception. To see 'into the Life of things', Coleridge asserted, we must see into ourselves, that is, we must recognise ourselves as 'the thinking Being' in the act of beholding.¹² This act of double consciousness, thinking the thinker, provides a crucial turn in the Conversation poems...