This essay first appeared in U.S. Catholic Magazine, May 21, 2020.
When I sit down to read a poem, I am brought out of myself and into a different vision of the world. Whether through meter, rhyme, or metaphor, even just by line breaks, I am encouraged to see the world in a different light. This is the claim Samuel Taylor Coleridge makes specifically for the poetry of his friend William Wordsworth, but it applies to all poetry. He tells us that it works to awaken “the mind’s attention from lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.” The best poetry does this for us, it awakens us to reality.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on October 21, 1772. The youngest of 10 children and the son of an Anglican priest, Coleridge spent his formative years reading fairy tales. While many are perhaps most familiar with Coleridge as the author of “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” he was also something of a theologian. In 1817, Coleridge wrote an unusual book about his life. Called the Biographia Literaria, the point of the book was to detail Coleridge’s literary life, and it includes letters he wrote during his travels in Germany, and general notes on life, literature, philosophy, and faith. Central to this work is Chapter 13. In this very short chapter, Coleridge unpacks his understanding of the imagination.
Coleridge divides the imagination in two. First is the primary imagination. This, Coleridge says, is the “prime agent of all human perception.” It is the means by which we see and shape the world around us. What’s more, it is a participation in God’s creative act. Not that we are creators, making reality out of nothing, but in us is repeated a glimpse of the Creator. This then finds expression in Coleridge’s secondary imagination, whereby we create works of art. Coleridge has chiefly in mind poetry and the visual arts, but this can and must expand to all human artifice, to bread baking, baseball, and everything in between. What this means is twofold: First, we help shape the world around us. If the primary imagination is a participation in God’s creative act, then our perception of reality and the meaning we discover and give shape to in it is also real. Earlier in the book Coleridge compares the imagination as perception to caterpillars who leave room in their cocoons for the antennae which do not yet exist. How we look on the world around us matters.
This is further made important by the secondary imagination. The works of art we create are meant to support the meanings we find and shape in the world around us. The best of them work like Wordsworth’s, and Coleridge’s too, though he is too humble to say so, poetry, removing the film of familiarity and allowing us to see things as they are. This brings new meaning not only to the reading of poetry, but of our encounter with all acts of human creativity.
But it isn’t just Coleridge’s ideas or poetry that I find so moving. His life is one that speaks of grief and loss and addiction, and all the while finding his way back to Christ. Coleridge’s opium addiction began in 1794. He had some kind of emotional and physical event which left him bed ridden. At this time an abscess was discovered in one of his teeth. To help with the pain, he was prescribed opium. This began a lifelong struggle with addiction, which Coleridge would begin to see as his version of his Mariner’s shooting of the albatross and later misadventures.
There are some who see the use of drugs, psychedelic and otherwise, as beneficial to the creative act. Coleridge did not see it this way. For him it was a deadening poison, which undid the effects of the imagination. It caused blurred, not clearer vision. He wrote in a letter a prayer to God, “[G]ive me strength of Soul to make one thorough trial––if I land at Malta / spite all horrors to go through one month of us stimulated Nature––yielding to nothing by manifest Danger of Life!––O great God! Grant me grace truly to look at myself, & begin the serious work of Self-amendment––accounting to Conscience for the Hours of every Day. Let me live in Truth––manifesting that lone which is, even as it is, & striving to be that which only Reason shews to be love––that which my Imagination would delight to manifest!” Coleridge could see that the opium was deadening his senses, that he was no longer discovering the meaning of reality nor giving it shape. Rather, he was being deceived.
Coleridge tried many different ways of overcoming his addiction. One method was to take to the fells, the mountains and hills of England. All weathers would find Coleridge going at great pace, as though he were a kind of Jonah seeking to outrun not God, but the devil in the guise of opium. In the end, Coleridge had to move in with a Dr. Gillman, abandoning, though not without a thought to their wellbeing, his wife and children. He did this in 1816 and lived with the good doctor until his death in 1834. During this time, as Malcolm Guite has argued, Coleridge emerged like his Mariner, calling us all to stop and attend to the world God has made, to pray, to love “all creatures great and small.” His poetic voice may have grown quieter in the final years, but his prophetic voice grew all the louder, and we would do well to listen.
When I sit down with a poem like “Frost at Midnight” or “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” the world around me is, if I am attentive, transfigured. I can see, even if for just a moment, the traces of the lines left in the involucrum where the shape and space for the antennae exists, waiting to be filled. When I sit down to write my own poetry or essays or to bake a fresh loaf of bread, I am reminded that in so doing I am participating in the creative act of God in my own, created way. Coleridge helped me see and understand this.
Before he died, Coleridge penned his own epigraph, which is written on his tombstone. He performs, one last time, the Mariner’s task of stopping those who need to hear his message.
Stop Christian Passer-by! Stop, Child of God! And read with gentle breast. Beneath this Sod A Poet lies, or that which once seem’d He. O, lift one thought in pray for S.T.C. That he who many a year with toil of Breath Found Death in Life, may here find Life in Death! Mercy for Praise––to be forgiven for Fame He ask’d, and hoped, thro’ Christ. Do Thou the Same!