Biographia Literaria

Readers may wonder why Coleridge composes such a bathetic ending to his serious work on the nature of art and reality. Shakespeare’s line “All the world’s a stage” echoes behind Coleridge’s choice of subject matter for the penultimate chapter, which offers light relief before the profundity of his conclusion. (Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. 1603.) In noting the influences of German and English drama on each other, Coleridge atones for his satire on Klopstock and documents and remarks upon his own literary influences, and those of his era. German Romanticism was hugely influential in the literary and general consciousness inhabited by Coleridge. His attentiveness to the ghosts in Don Juan and The Castle of Otranto are suggestive of what Harold Bloom would call the “anxiety of influence,” or the perennial question of the emulation of one’s literary forefathers and heritage. (Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. 1973.)

Naturally enough for Coleridge’s readers, the question of ghosts in drama would have incited associations with the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Problematic listening and inheritance are thematic in Biographia Literaria, as they are in Hamlet. The question of critical reception, to which Coleridge returns explicitly in these chapters, is in play. Coleridge writes of Bertram’s Clotilda: “she reminds us very much of those puppet heroines, for whom the showman contrives to dialogue without any skill in ventriloquism” (214).

The notion of disembodied voices, or prosopopoeia, is at the heart of Coleridge’s ideas about poetry. Imagination is what saves poetry from becoming a purely “mechanical art,” as Clotilda comically simulates. Coleridge’s discussion of the “speaking portrait” in Chapter 23 quibbles over the question of artistic representation, which is traditionally associated with the questionable faithfulness of both womankind and lovers. Coleridge has already discussed the problematic dual associations of “painted” in relation to Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale on Page 124.

In response to these anxieties about artistic representation and deceptive appearances, Coleridge introduces the idea of faith. He “zooms out” from the worldliness and folly of the penultimate chapter to an undeniably Neoplatonic contemplation of absolute reality within the universe. In his concluding paragraph Coleridge writes that religion “passes out of the ken of reason only where the eye of reason has reached its own horizon” (226). Religion is like a telescope for reason, enabling reason’s eye to penetrate further into the mysteries of the universe, just as the telescopes in Coleridge’s native London were unveiling new discoveries. In this final image of peering out into the inky night sky, Coleridge reminds his readers of London’s Greenwich Observatory, trained in Coleridge’s time on fathoming not only space but also time. The Shepherd master clock, installed there in 1852, was the first clock to make Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) visible to the public, altering the experience of time forever. Coleridge thus places his readers in the crucible of problems of perception and proffers poetry as the apparatus for the direct apprehension of reality.