Coleridge’s Poetic Obscurity
To objections from conscience I can of course answer in no other way, than by requesting the youthful objector (as I have already done on a former occasion) to ascertain with strict self-examination, whether other influences may not be at work; whether spirits, “not of health,” and with whispers “not from heaven,” may not be walking in the twilight of his consciousness.
Coleridge, BL, 1.229-30.
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell…
Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.4.40-1.
In a chapter on ‘The Poetics of Obscurity’ in Soliciting Darkness, John Hamilton considers the construction of a positive concept of poetic obscurity in the modern critical reception of Pindar. He remarks that a positive obscurity ‘bestowed upon the poet’s work the coveted aura of genius’, but came along with the threat that ‘obscurity can all too easily be deployed as a mask for mediocrity’, and that ‘[t]he solution… consisted in a more overt reformulation of obscurity – one that elevated darkness from a merely negative function of the understanding to a wholly positive function of the passions and the soul and life’.1 This leads him to the conclusion, announced on the book’s jacket, that ‘[t]he poetics of obscurity that emerges here suggests that taking Pindar to be an incomprehensible poet may not simply be the result of an insufficient or false reading, but rather may serve as a wholly adequate judgment’. This kind of argument is certainly a sympathetic one, and places the responsibility for the construction of a positive poetics of obscurity not in the primary work of the poet, but rather in the supplementary work of the critic - as perhaps it must be in Hamilton’s study of Pindar, who does not himself provide a source of supplementary self-criticism or a philosophy of poetry. Furthermore, though he does rather ironically call attention to the professional or economic aspect of literary obscurity by quoting Paul Celan’s quotation of Pascal – ‘[d]o not blame us for a lack of clarity, since we make a profession out of it’2 – Hamilton’s analysis deliberately eschews the wider importance of obscurity by limiting his observations to aesthetic discussion, rather than, as it were, discussion of the aesthetic.
As I have shown in my earlier discussion of the expansions of the new rhetoric, the inclusion of poetry in the realm of rhetoric in eighteenth-century Britain brought it into a wider discourse of social and political influence circumscribed by theories of philosophico-political enlightenment. It is tempting to the sympathetic Romanticist to offer a similarly aesthetic reading of Romantic obscurity as an aesthetic response, for example, to the classical or the neoclassical. But although Hamilton’s is an informative and valuable addition to the study of obscurity in literature and criticism, it is more an example of a Romantic theory of obscurity than an appropriate model for a theory of Romantic obscurity. As Timothy Clark has observed, ‘[o]ne of the striking features of eighteenth-century theories of poetry is their proximity to contemporary thinking in rhetoric’,3 and Howell and Mehtonen have offered discussions of the interaction of the rhetorics of clarity and obscurity in relation to poetry which involve the importance of poetry as an instrument for the information of the public. A discussion of obscurity in Coleridge’s poetry informed by these rhetorical interests productively eschews an aesthetics of internalization which discusses the effect of poetry in the internal psychology of the individual,4 and instead allows for the inclusion of other, broader discourses and anxieties relating to the impact of poetry on the people. The rhetorical poetics of obscurity is always public, always external, even when it is representing itself under a rhetoric of internalisation.
Considering the wealth of theoretical speculation on poetry in the Romantic period, in which supplementary reflection on poetry is a crucial element of its Romantic identity, it is also tempting to engage in a philosophical discussion of a coherent philosophical poetics of Romantic obscurity. Philosophical and poetic reflexivity is indeed such a penetrating and common element of Romantic discourse that Paul Hamilton has recently introduced the term ‘metaromanticism’ to describe the importance of philosophy for ‘romantic period writing [which] is often simultaneously a position paper on its own kind of significance’.5 And as the mountains of criticism on Coleridge’s philosophy demonstrate, it is especially tempting to give a ‘straight’ philosophical account of obscurity in the case of Coleridge, who left so much critical prose on poetry behind him, and who indeed reflexively inscribed philosophical reflection into his own character through the project of The Friend. But the importance of philosophy in Coleridge’s poetics of obscurity and indeed in his work more generally is complicated precisely by the reflexivity which underwrites its Romantic character, and a straightforward philosophical cut-and-paste model of a Coleridgean poetics of obscurity would amount to a rather uncritical perpetuation of Coleridgean self-construction. Thus in his extended discussion of the Biographia in Coleridge’s Poetics, Hamilton has subjected the tendency of ‘the romantic theorists [to write] about philosophy by writing about poetry’ to a critique of Coleridge’s self-construction as a philosopher-poet, and has argued that Coleridge’s ‘lines of thought… subverted his stated intentions’.6
Like Jerome Christensen’s analysis of Coleridge’s method in the book-Friend, this reading of Coleridge’s philosophy calls his own pronouncements into question and, indeed, makes the nature and motive of Coleridge’s philosophy into the primary subject of his philosophy. As Christensen has said recently of the figure of the friend, which he represents through the formula of the chiasmus of the philosopher-poet, and the poet-philosopher,
to project that figure here [in the Biographia] has the effect of prematurely closing off the question of motive by detaching it from the historical actors and relocating it in Coleridge’s style, as a type of a relatively unchanging psychological disposition and set of social habits. That is, Coleridge’s tropology becomes a kind of psychology – and willy-nilly invokes a novelistic mode of explanation that wards off historicity, the uncertain novice of change.7
In order to develop an understanding of its importance and its relation to public and political interests, a discussion of obscurity in Coleridge’s poetry must therefore consider the philosophical poetics of obscurity with such criticisms in mind. To offer a coherentist account of Coleridge’s poetics of obscurity as a timeless, unified, conscious theory or endeavour which is informed by his reflexive philosophical poetics and which applies uniformly across his poetical corpus would amount, in other words, to a reproduction of the Coleridgean idiom. As Perry has claimed, ‘[a]nyone writing about Coleridge must make a decision about coherence’,8 and in the terms of my discussion Coleridge’s obscurity is not only shifting and incoherent, but also historical and political, and the philosophical aesthetics of his poetics functions rather as a retrospective, ‘novelistic’ narrative constructed for the simultaneous containment of his work and his life.
As Christensen has put it, ‘[t]hat the personal is the political for Coleridge goes without saying’: as a figure of poetico-philosophical and philosophico-poetic obscurity, Coleridge was simultaneously a figure of political obscurity.9 Obscurity therefore operates in his poetry on various simultaneous and not necessarily reconcilable levels, and is constantly related to self-reformation and a defence against the charge of obscurity, rather than a spontaneous philosophical or otherwise pre-existing aesthetic program. In the case of Coleridge, it is not exactly true that the Romantic aesthetic ‘reveals the arts by which power and vested interests had used it to disguise their purposes’.10 Rather than revealing these arts, Coleridge metarhetorically reproduces them in an often paradoxical defence of his own obscurity. Coleridge’s poetics of obscurity was reactionary.
But as Paul Magnuson has remarked in relation to a criticism of obscurity in Coleridge’s poetry, ‘[t]hat which was rhapsody, or obscure, or unintelligible, or extravagant in the 1790s is highly suspicious and dangerous to the civil peace’, and though Coleridge’s poetics of obscurity was certainly ‘reactionary’ it was not straightforwardly so in any simple counterrevolutionary or ‘conservative’ sense.11 Likewise, Thomas Weiskel has remarked that in this period ‘[i]n poetry and in theory the sublime becomes associated not with the clear and the distinct but with the vague and the obscure; hence it wears the aspect of a radical alternative to the visual emphasis of Lockean psychology and to the decorous precision of neoclassical diction’.12 In this chapter I will discuss various interrelated aspects of obscurity in the development of Coleridge’s poetic career in relation to a rhetorical or metarhetorical context of reciprocal figuration and a critical reaction to the charge of obscurity. Because the discourses of Romantic obscurity are historically interpenetrating, however, it is impossible to determine a strict genealogy of chronologically distinct modes in which Coleridge engaged with them in his poems. My aim in this chapter, therefore, is to isolate the various discourses of obscurity in Coleridge’s poetic context, and the different strategies of obscurity in his reflexive, retrospective poetic methodology.
In the first section, I will discuss various aspects of a ‘poetics of clarity’ in Coleridge’s early poems, where his youthful political optimism and participation in radical debate is reflected in his figuration of political and intellectual figures and ideals of the 1790s. I will then discuss a counter-movement in Coleridge’s poetry of the same period, in which obscurity is inversively transvalued into a positive philosophical and political figure which registers Coleridge’s changing political commitments, and which functions as a publicised figuration of refuge for the sake of private and political security. In the following section I discuss Coleridge’s reaction in prose to the charge of obscurity in poetry through an overview of his letters, the preface to the 1797 Poems on Various Subjects, and finally the Biographia. Having established the reactionary nature of Coleridge’s positive poetics of obscurity, in the final section I will trace the interpenetrating types of obscurity in the ‘mystery’ poems, with a particular focus on the obscurity of the foreign in relation to the ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, the indeterminately divine and demonic origins of the prophetic voice in ‘Kubla Khan’, and the feminised figures of obscurity in ‘Christabel’ and other works.