Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The Enigma of the Blind
- 2 The Celtic Bard in Ireland and Britain: Blindness and Second Sight
- 3 Blake: Removing the Curse by Printing for the Blind
- 4 Edifying Tales
- 5 Wordsworth's Transitions
- 6 Coleridge, Keats and a Full Perception
- 7 Byron and Shelley: The Blindness of Reason
- 8 Mary Shelley: Blind Fathers and the Magnetic Globe: Frankenstein with Valperga and The Last Man
- 9 Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Coleridge, Keats and a Full Perception
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The Enigma of the Blind
- 2 The Celtic Bard in Ireland and Britain: Blindness and Second Sight
- 3 Blake: Removing the Curse by Printing for the Blind
- 4 Edifying Tales
- 5 Wordsworth's Transitions
- 6 Coleridge, Keats and a Full Perception
- 7 Byron and Shelley: The Blindness of Reason
- 8 Mary Shelley: Blind Fathers and the Magnetic Globe: Frankenstein with Valperga and The Last Man
- 9 Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The lines about aged blindness added to ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ by 1800 evoke the idea of egotistical blindness. The full perception ultimately attained by the speaker transcends, however, the ‘despotism’ of the eye and comprehends responses of hearing, and even touch. Even before 1800, then, Coleridge is attempting to adumbrate a unified creative power – granted that, in this period, the Platonic overtones cannot be separated from the continued influence of empiricism. Nevertheless, the purport of this poem is broadly consonant with that of the later ‘Limbo’, in which I shall claim (contrary to some readers) that the blind man possesses a creative joy which precedes the experience of the senses. This creative joy, which finds expression through all the senses, is only found under historically determined modes: in the 1790s the small community in which it may be nurtured is a kind of recovered Eden, but it incorporates the recognition of its own modernity and makes a virtue out of the loss of the society of the ancient bard.
In ‘Epistle to J. H. Reynolds’, Keats's ‘material sublime’ goes beyond ‘purgatory blind’ (a negative blindness, unable to integrate reality and imaginative ardour) in such a way that one finds the ‘triple sight in blindness keen’ (from ‘To Homer’); a fruitful point where the ardour of imagination encounters the real. This fruitful point is suggested by a reading of Lamia, The Eve of St Agnes (the unseeing sleep of Madeline is taken as a strong playing on the trope of blindness), and ‘Ode on Melancholy’, and is the origin of and prompt to the richly evocative use of words in Keats.
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- The Blind and Blindness in Literature of the Romantic Period , pp. 141 - 171Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007