¹ Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor (1930), i, 224.

² Modern Philology (May 1948).

³ Sewanee Review (Autumn 1948).

⁴ The relationship to Schlegel was noted by Sara Coleridge and evidenced by generous quotations (see her note in The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, New York, 1860, iv, 461). It is very clearly expounded by Herbert Read in his lecture, “Coleridge as Critic”, which was reprinted in the Sewanee Review (Autumn 1948). By a more direct route than my own Mr. Read has come to recognize that Coleridge's organic doctrine of poetry is inseparable from some such monistic philosophy as the early philosophy of Schelling, and that Coleridge's ultimate renunciation of monism therefore involves a renunciation of the organic theory of art. So far I agree with Mr. Read completely. But Mr. Read believes that Coleridge and Schelling were perhaps wrong to turn back from their early quests for the perfect monistic metaphysics. Here I disagree. In short, I agree with Mr. Read's statement of the historical connection between Coleridge's aesthetics and his philosophy, but I disagree with his philosophical opinions. Yet Mr. Read's statement of the historic fact is so important to a clear comprehension of this whole aesthetic problem that my own article would have a reason for being even if it did not differ in a single conclusion from Mr. Read's. For I wish to offer a greater mass of historical material than would have been suitable to Mr. Read's lecture; and, when some of our best scholars have refused even to consider that much of Coleridge's criticism might be an outgrowth of his philosophy, Mr. Read's statement of the case is not so likely to carry the day single-handed that further concurring evidence must be deemed gratuitous.

⁵ Margaret Sherwood, Coleridge's Imaginative Conception of the Imagination (Wellesley, 1937).

⁶ Gordon McKenzie, Organic Unity in Coleridge (Univ. of California Publications in English, vii, no. 1, pp. 1–108). Mr. McKenzie's monograph, the fullest discussion of Coleridge's notions of artistic unity, collects and examines almost all the relevant passages from Coleridge's writings. It acknowledges the relationship to Schelling and Kant, but unlike my own paper disregards the writings of Schlegel—perhaps on the grounds that Schlegel's was not an original mind, a widespread but I think not quite accurate impression.

⁷ Shakespearean Criticism, 11, 164; i, 224.

⁸ A. W. Schlegel, Vorlesungen über sch'one Litleralur una Kunst (Stuttgart, 1884), i, 102. The German writers who have written upon Schlegel and organic unity seem to have slighted Moritz.

⁹ Letter to Herder, written 6 Sept. 1787.

¹⁰ Herder, Gott, dialogue 5, particularly Theophron's eighth speech in this dialogue and following.

¹¹ Complete Works, ed. Shedd, vi, 312.

¹² Shakespearean Criticism, I, 224. Or, to quote Black's translation of Schlegel's 22nd Vienna lecture: “Organical form, again, is innate; it unfolds itself from within, and acquires its determination contemporaneously with the perfect development of its germ.” I myself prefer Schlegel's more cautious “contemporaneously” to Coleridge's bolder and more monistic “one and the same.”

¹³ Coleridge's “disillusionment” with Schelling's early philosophy is discussed by J. H. Muirhead, Coleridge as Philosopher (New York, 1930), p. 55.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 31.

¹⁶ Biographie, Literaria, ed. Shawcross, i, 4. Coleridge has, I believe, expressed the same opinion elsewhere.

¹⁶ Shakespearean Criticism, i, 4–5.

¹⁷ In Spectator No. 160.

¹⁸ Shakespearean Criticism, i, 223–224.

¹⁹ Goethe's Sâmmtliche Werke, Jubiläumsausgabe (Stuttgart & Berlin, 1902–07), xxx, 9. Oskar Walzel wrote an interesting essay upon what he regarded as the “deepening” of the comparison between the poet and God: Dos Prometheussymhol von Shaftesbury zu Goethe, 2nd ed. rev. (Munich, 1932). The same matter receives much attention in an old and thorough work, Richard Sommer's Grundzüge einer Geschichte der Deutschen Psychologie und Aesthelik von Wolf-Baumgarten bis Kant-Schiller (Wttrzburg, 1852). Both men regard the “pantheizing” of comparison of the poet to God as marking a great step forward in German aesthetic thought, chiefly because it eliminates the idea of any external plan or intent from the consideration of art. Walzel attributes this “pantheizing” to the effects of both Spinoza and Leibniz. Sommer's book stresses most heavily the effect of Leibniz, and it notes (pp. 321–336) the strong Leibnizian quality of Moritz's thoughts.

²⁰ Ibid., xxx, 7.

²¹ SdmmUiche Werke, ed. Gunther und Witkowski (Leipzig, 1910–11), xvii, 499.

²² Biographia Literaria, i, 202.

²³ See the Biographia Literaria, ii, 12, for another statement of this point, that the poetic imagination (of the critic, one might say, as well as of the poet) is not to be regarded as a distinct operation of the human soul, but as its most comprehensive and well-balanced operation: “The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination.” This general opinion of Coleridge's had been widely anticipated in German writings on aesthetics in the latter half of the eighteenth century. See also Dacier: Oeuvres d'Horace, ed. & trans. Dacier, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1709), i, xcv. This same general opinion must surely have been maintained in England, at least implicitly.

²⁴ M. W. Steinke, Edward Young's “Conjectures on Original Genius” in England and Germany, with a text (New York, 1907), pp. 45–46. The whole question of the organic metaphor in criticism, more especially in the late eighteenth century and in the works of Coleridge, is interestingly discussed by M. H. Abrams in “Archetypal Analogies in the Language of Criticism”, Univ. of Toronto Quarterly, xvii, no. 4 (1949), 313–327.

²⁵ Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Keynes (London, 1935), p. 980.

²⁶ Sonnet beginning: “A Poet! He hath put his heart to school.”

²⁷ Shakespearean Criticism, ii, 170.

²⁸ Vorlesungen über scfione Litteratttr und Kunsl, i, 98.

²⁹ K. P. Moritz, Ueber die bildende Nachahmung des Sch'onen (1888). The passages of greatest interest, including those quoted by Schlegel, are on pages 15–18.

³⁰ Vorlesungen über schone Litteratur und Kunst, i,102. See also i, 89–90, where Schlegel states that Kant's aesthetic was unsatisfactory because it stopped short of Schelling's complete Transcendental Idealism.

³¹ See Schelling's Sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart & Augsburg, 1856–58), i, 11, 69–70; and his reference to “Ideen oder Monaden”, i, 11, 64. Kant himself was accused in his own lifetime of having merely restated and elaborated the doctrines of Leibniz, but the accusation missed the point of what he was trying to do.

³² See Sara Coleridge's note to the passage in the Shedd edition of the Works, iii, 363.

³³ Modem Philology, xlv (May 1948), 233.

³⁴ Such is the case, for instance, in Sect. 64 of the Monadology.

³⁵ Lettre á Remond (1714). Quoted by Latta: Leibniz, The Monadology and other Philosophical Writings, trans. Latta (1898), p. 107, note 2.

³⁶ The Monadology, Sect. 64.

³⁷ Biographia Literaria, ii, 109.

³⁸ See end of opening paragraph, Kant's Preface to his Critique of Judgment