Nicholas
Reid, Coleridge, Form and Symbol: Or the Ascertaining
Vision (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate 2006),
ix + 189pp. ISBN 0-7546-5327-7; £45 / $89.95.
The aim of Ashgate’s Nineteenth Century
Series ‘is to reflect, develop and extend the great
burgeoning interest in the nineteenth century […] as
a locus for our understanding not only of the past but of
the contours of our modernity’ (p. x). In Coleridge,
Form and Symbol: Or the Ascertaining Vision, Nicholas
Reid engages with the dual articulation of Ashgate’s
locus through an intriguing examination of Coleridge’s
metaphysics and his theories of the imagination, symbol, and
form. What is especially refreshing about Reid’s study
is how it situates the relevance of Coleridgean concepts and
thought within contemporary critical theory. Rather than solely
reading Coleridge through the lens of critical theory,
Reid frames an interchangeable dialogue between Coleridgean
concepts and theory, which reciprocally inform and enlighten
one another.
In Part I,
for example, Reid draws on twentieth-century aesthetics to
show that ‘a Coleridgean phenomenology, far from being
mere folk psychology, is well-grounded by the evidence. I
hope that readers will recognise in this an attempt to revalue
those centrally Coleridgean concepts, form and imagination,
and will also see the relevance of this part for contemporary
critical theory’ (p. vi). Reid does not approach Coleridge
as a case-history whose system of thought belongs to the nineteenth-century
past. Rather, he posits Coleridgean thought as a valuable
contribution to current discussions: ‘I do […]
think that Coleridge’s thought is of interest in its
own right. And to refuse to consider the major preoccupations
of so major a figure as Coleridge, is to settle for a limited
and partial view’ (p. vii). Reid’s balanced discussion
accomplishes this convincingly throughout the volume.
The book is
divided into three parts. Part I, ‘Image and Form’,
explores the relationship between thought and image, and how
that relation is embodied in the concept of form. Drawing
on the works of Susanne Langer and Louis Arnaud Reid (incidentally,
the author’s grandfather to whom the volume is dedicated)
these two chapters elucidate ‘a somewhat polemical defence
of Coler¬idge’s intuitions about the connection
between form and imagination’ (p. 5). Yet, this self-termed
‘defence’ is forward-looking in embracing the
contexts of the Artificial Intelligence debate to demonstrate
how writers such as Alan Richardson, Antonio Damasio, Ralph
Ellis, and George Lakoff ‘have moved back towards what
is in some ways a Coleridgean view of the place of imaging
(or imagination) at the heart of cognition’ (p. 11).
Reid’s discussion of ‘image’ as a mental
construct, ‘an object-directed, mental act’
(p. 13, Reid’s emphasis) in which ‘imaging is
the ground of meaning’ (p. 22) and of ‘Coleridge’s
view of form […] the single most important concept in
Coleridge’s thinking’ (p. 30) present the contemporary
resonance of Coleridge’s thought and the foundational
scope for developing the significance of symbol in Part II.
The three chapters
in the second section, ‘Coleridge’s Poetry’,
look at Coleridge’s views more closely through an examination
of his poems ‘in which Coleridge first worked out the
basis of his later theories of symbol and form’ (p.
43). Chapter 3 reads the symbolic method in ‘The Ancient
Mariner’ as an intertextual commentary on ‘the
process of interpretation’ (p. 49). Specifically, Reid
argues that ‘the poem directs attention to its own function
as myth, and to the function of the reader in participating
in the interpretation of divine symbols’ (p. 53). The
‘emphasis on textuality and readership’ in this
reading ‘reflects Coleridge’s own hermeneutics’
and supports Reid’s premise that Coleridgean thought
on form, symbol and imagination develop in, as well as from,
his poems (p. 57). This is further developed in Chapter 4’s
examination of a ‘pattern of absence and presence’
in the conversational poems—specifically, ‘This
Lime-tree Bower My Prison’, ‘Frost at Midnight’,
and ‘Dejection’—where Reid explores ‘a
phenomenology of vision, the correlative of form’ (p.
61). Having always been very partial to Coleridge’s
conversational poems, Reid’s lively discussion makes
this chapter my favourite in the book. The last chapter in
this section traces the influence of Mark Akenside’s
The Pleasures of Imagination (1744) as a contextual
source ‘in which Coleridge’s views on symbol and
form arose’ (p. 83). A self-confessed ‘critical
experiment’, Reid’s reading in this chapter examines
‘Akenside from […] the Coleridgean perspective;
and in fact … engage[s] in the project of reading Coleridge
through Akenside’ (p. 83, Reid’s emphasis).
The chapters
in Part III, entitled ‘Coleridgean Metaphysics’,
shift the focus to a discussion of the philosophical system
of the later Coleridge. Chapter 6 traces the process of how
the initial influence of F. W. J. Schelling’s System
of Transcendental Idealism (1800) develops into Coleridge’s
critique of ‘Schelling’s failure to derive the
categories of thought and logic which underlie his system’
(p. 116). This chapter’s sections on ‘Coleridge’s
Marginal Critique’ and ‘The Trinity’ (pp.
116, 120) show how Coleridge’s logic is fundamentally
different from Schelling’s System—specifically
through Coleridge’s development ‘in the dynamic
act of the Trinity […] an act which eschews the subject-object
categories of the finite Understanding’ (p. 125). In
the last ten years of his life, Coleridge continued to engage
with ‘Schelling’s transcendental deduction’
and while ‘the broader picture’ and ‘the
essential logic of the system’ did not change, Coleridge
did ‘modify […] [his] views of nature and the
imagination’ (p. 137). Chapter 7 focuses specifically
on the imagination, and aims to affirm ‘[Anthony] Harding’s
sense that evil plays a fundamental role metaphysically in
the later Coleridgean imagination—and that the kind
of absence or via negativa which we have seen in Coleridge’s
earlier conversation poems reflects, phenomenologically, the
role later seen for darkness in Coleridge’s thought’
(p. 138). Chapter 8 discusses Coleridge’s theory of
language. Reid aligns Coleridge ‘akin to the views of
Susanne Langer’ about the human mind’s use of
two kinds of symbols—‘the conventional symbols
of language’ and the symbol as ‘perceptual image’
(p. 152)—rather than pursing the ‘desire to find
in Coleridge a linguistic nominalism or anti-realism of the
sort which was common in theoretical circles until the later
1990s’ (p. 151). A discussion about Coleridge’s
‘On Poesy or Art’ and the ‘Essay on Method’
in Chapter 9 concludes the volume.
Throughout
Reid writes in a clear and direct style that highlights his
vast knowledge of Coleridge and contemporary critical theory.
The topical rubrics in the chapters are both a practical and
informative aid for the reader. Occasionally, the reader may
find the development of the book’s overall argument
slightly discursive—perhaps a result of the fact that
most of the volume is a collection of previous publications.
Aside from the concluding chapter, earlier versions of all
chapters, in whole or in part, have appeared in: Romanticism
on the Net (Chapters 1, 2, and 8), AUMLA (Chapters
3 and 5), The Charles Lamb Bulletin (Chapter 4), and
Studies in Romanticism (Chapters 6 and 7). At times,
this may have a disjointed effect upon the reader in completely
connecting the full impact of the overall argument between
individual chapters. Having said that, insightful discussions
on the conversational poems, nature, and the Trinity—to
name but a few—are interwoven throughout the sections
in the text and it might be this reader’s desire to
encase these insightful and provoking thoughts more fully
in their own chapters that fuelled the reservations noted
above. The scope of this intriguing book is ambitious, and
Reid convincingly argues, challenges, and raises the reader’s
awareness of Coleridgean metaphysics, critical theory, and
the history of ideas, in a manner sure to stimulate future
debate.
