Samuel Taylor Coleridge

As they do.

What was it all about? So I had a little look and it's attributed to a poet called Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Yes.

And it's part of a verse that he wrote of a poem that's called Work Without Hope and that refers to the birds and the bees.

Many men who had the air of setting the world on fire have left at least a reasonable discussion about what set them on fire.

Men like Coleridge or Carlyle had certainly kindled their first torches from the flambeau of equally fantastic German mystics or Platonic speculators.

They had gone through furnaces of culture where even less creative people might have been inflamed to creation.

Jane Austen was not inflamed or inspired or even moved to be a genius.

Reactions in Philosophy Vicissitudes of Idealism At the beginning of the last chapter we noticed the early collapse of idealism in Germany, but the prophets of Romanticism, when they were no longer honored at home, found a hospitable reception elsewhere, and especially in England.

Indeed, even before the prestige of idealism had begun to decline in Germany, Englishmen had been introduced to it by the writings and translations of S. T. Coleridge, 1772-1834, and Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1881. these two popular rousers of german ideas were litterateurs rather than professional philosophers but for that very reason their vogue and influence were the wider coleridge coleridge was in spirit a genuine romanticist being as were some of the most notable of the german school e g goethe and schiller a poet as well as a philosopher in his biographia literaria he has left behind the story of his intellectual and spiritual development he acknowledges his debt to kant to the romanticists and in particular to schelling whose intuitionism was naturally congenial to him Coleridge was never able to embody his philosophical creed in any single work.

He does not seem to have possessed the necessary power of application.

He was unfortunate in being a man of weak character, and his ineffectiveness struck his contemporaries.

His ideas, though vague, were calculated to awaken the speculative habit, and, introduced as they were to a wide circle, were fruitful and stimulating.

English theology had been, in the eighteenth century, of an arid kind, and the English philosophical tradition lacked, for the most part, appreciation of those deeper aspects of reality which had appealed to German thinkers.

Coleridge, by introducing German speculation to his countrymen, was able to free theology of some of its narrowness, and to deepen and enlarge the spiritual outlook of his age.

Thomas Carlyle.

It's so incredibly well plotted.

Yeah, it's, there was Coleridge who said that Tom Jones, the three greatest plots in literature were Oedipus the King, Ben Johnson's play The Alchemist, And Tom Jones.

The plot is just amazing.

The surprises are just amazing.

Malcolm Guite is a poet, scholar, and life fellow of Girton College, Cambridge.

He has published five collections of poetry and many other books, including Mariner, a voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

In 2023, he was awarded the Lefranc Medal for Education and Scholarship by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

He lives in Norfolk and travels extensively to give poetry readings and lectures, and also has a popular YouTube channel he calls A Spell in the Library.

Let us call them the rationalist and the empiricist types of mind.

A saying of Coleridge's is often quoted, to the effect that everyone is born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian.

By Aristotelian he means empiricist, and by Platonist he means rationalist.

but although the contrast between the two greek philosophers exists in the sense in which coleridge meant it both of them were rationalists as compared with the kind of empiricism which democritus and protagoras developed and coleridge had better have taken either of those names instead of aristotle as his empiricist example Rationalists are the men of principles, empiricists the men of facts.

And then it's from that boom that we get into the 19th century and we start getting Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein.

We start getting Coleridge doing whatever the fuck he was doing with Christabel.

It's the old meeting the new.

It's the age of rationality meeting the age of gauze.

It's the summer capital of the Yuan dynasty ruled by Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan.

A metaphor for opulence or an idyllic place based off of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's description of Shangdu and his 1816 poem Kublai Khan.

I don't know how long that is, but it'd be interesting to find the passage about that.

But it's exactly right.