Coleridge and the Uses of Division

Coleridge repeatedly announced the merits of unity, while experiencing the truth of division. A visionary drawn to the numinous, he was also a spontaneous connoisseur of the sensory life; a metaphysician inclined to idealism, his thought was permanently way-laid by a tenacious realism. Such double-mindedness frustrated his ambitions for system, and has often been criticised as a sort of incapacity; but the capability of entertaining equally necessary or valuablekinds of perception, which yet prove ultimately incompatible, might alternatively be thought a kind of virtue - even, perhaps, the secret of his paradoxical, self-defeating genius. The study examines Coleridge's formative double-vision as it manifests itself in his profound self-analysis, his philosophy of mind, his reflections on love and ethics, his descriptions of imagination, and his literary criticism. The focus of many of these mixed feelings is the ambiguous figure of Wordsworth: his momentous and often troubled partnership with Coleridge is examined in detail. Throughout, close attention is paid to Coleridge the writer, the metaphor-maker and stylist, exhibitedacross the wide range of his oeuvre, in public and private works, prose and poetry. A coda offers a reading of The Ancient Mariner, tracing back the central threads of the study to Coleridges early and surprising masterpiece.

'magnificent . . . Perry's discussion of Wordsworth has a special power and poignancy in it. . . . the end of Perry's discussion, the ultimate nature of the dilemma facing Coleridge is set forth with a clarity the reader can only marvel at. . . .The book concludes with a very persuasive reading of The Ancient Mariner as a poem about the value of having things both ways. Perry's account is too complex to summarize, but offers powerful vindication of the interpretative value of his book's argument. It would be hard to do justice to the stylistic verve of the book, its patient and dazzlingly elegant elucidation of complex problems. What can be said is that it takes its place among the very best of books on Coleridge and that no university or college library should be without it.', the genius of one of the greatest and strangest Romantics is explored by Perry with the unreductive sympathy it deserves, For all its careful scholarship, Perry's book forms a spirited addition to performance criticism of Romantic literature, A supple, intelligent study... Perry writes with a capacious nimbleness that allows him to keep pace with and track of 'the windings of [Coleridge's] writings', and do justice to their brilliant 'zigzaggery'... his book permits us to eavesdrop with newly attuned ears on an endlessly fascinating 'dialogue of two voices, both Coleridge's'.