Anglican Inheritances of Coleridge's Poetics: New Perspectives on the Concept of Imagination

Abstract

Coleridge's first major poetry is significant for it serves to indicate his slow but firm transition towards the epistemological ideas of Plato and Platonic philosophers. Coleridge's readings in these years reflect his appreciation for seventeenth-century English Platonists like Ralph Cudworth, especially for his prose work the True Intellectual System of the Universe for many of its ideas on the forms of the phenomenal world- which combine Platonic and Aristotelian cosmology- are echoed in Coleridge's poetry of these years 1 . Besides the definitive Platonism of Cudworth and also of the works of the late Berkeley we cannot fail to notice elements of an important literary-philosophical genre that runs into the poetry of the period. Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained impressed Coleridge and remained a sort of life-long fascination for him. Milton gave him a notion of the degree to which the poetic symbol could be expressive of a certain category of theological truth. Secondly, another major work of the eighteenth century seems to have left a strong impress on his poetry as well as the development of his epistemological ideas on the imagination.