Coleridge and the Inspired Word by Anthony John Harding (review)

HUMANITIES 117 most famous line of The Task, 'I was a stricken deer that left the herd' (m.108), as ' .. . the stricken deer ... ' (pp 92, 150), which muddles Cowper's metre - and possibly also suspends his poetic licence. (o.L. MACDONALD) Anthony John Harding. Coleridge and the Inspired Word McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas 8. McGill-Queen's University Press 1985.187. $27.50 This book's introduction suggests a theme of potentially great scope and significance, the role of hermeneutics in the development of Coleridge's thought. But its six chapters gradually whittle away and undermine the interest of the suggested theme, bathing it in the susurration of received ideas skilfully netted from familiar sources. Harding writes with grace and tact, however, and his often persuasive readings of poems arise without forcing from his presentation; and it is of not a little interest to consider what the 'received ideas' on Coleridge now are, in a period which has seen so much attention paid to him and confirmed his importance for our time as for his own. It is also of interest for the future of Coleridge studies, as the author is to act as editor of the final volume of Coleridge's Notebooks, and will thus be in a position to leave a mark on the public reception of the work of the last years of the poet's life, which have yet to receive their due. 'My argument,' he states, 'is that the new sense of the Bible propagated by historical scholarship, and the significant Romantic reaction to historicism , contributed in a major way to the Romantic poetics of inspiration, and that Coleridge was a central figure in the spread of this new sense of biblical inspiration in the English-speaking world' (p 8). The position from which he writes is that of a supporter of the historicist hermeneutics ofE.D. Hirsch, that is, in defence of the attempt to read from the vantage pOint of the period in which the text was written, and, further, in defence of the notion of 'authorial intention' as indispensable to the process of interpretation. This position Harding explicitly opposes to 'structuralist and poststructuralist' views, and to the importation of anachronistic critical frameworks like that of psychoanalysis (p 20). The first chapter, 'Beyond Mythology:Coleridge and the Legacy of the Enlightenment,' rehearses the now familiar story of Coleridge's early knowledge of German Biblical criticism, taking as its focus 'Confessions ofan Inquiring Spirit,' or 'Letters on the Inspiration of the Scriptures.' The view that inspiration is not of the Holy Spirit or, as Coleridge put it, the 'superhuman ... Ventriloquist: but resides in the human source, the reader's capacity to respond to the human experience of inspiration, and in the religiOUS community's continued affirmation of the inspired nature 118 LETTERS IN CANADA 1986 of the experience is now, as Harding himself points out, 'virtually a commonplace of the pulpit and the classroom' (p 92). Coleridge's subtle espousal of 'German infidelity' won the field, in the long run; what Harding misses, in his bland, approving reinstatement of Coleridge as a pillar of the Church of England, is the anguish, the intensity of conflict, the intellectual striving over a lifetime as a marginal figure dependent on others' charity, the despairing fear that inspiration was closed to his age and to him, which Coleridge had to endure for the sake of his vision of a viable future for a religion redefining 'inspiration' in the terms of a Romantic poetics. It is an irony, albeit one that Coleridge would be the first to appreciate, that his long deferred success should make of him a guardian of an institution which until the end of the nineteenth century regarded the views he represented as a major threat to its existence. Harding's hermeneutic imagination fails him: he does not 'situate' Coleridge in his true historical moment. Even more worrying is the tendency of 'received opinions' to be derived from secondary sources. The now inescapable weight of detailed documentation of Coleridge's 'borrowings from the German' has made it impossible any longer to deny or ignore his deep immersion in the German intellectual...