‘A stirring & inquietude of Fancy’: Coleridge and the Sublimity of Landscape

Abstract

Perhaps the most striking fact about Coleridge’s evocations—mainly in prose, though occasionally in poetry—of the sublimity of landscapes is that they date almost exclusively from his twenty-third to his thirty-fourth year—that is, from the period immediately following his final departure from Cambridge in December 1794 to that of his return from Malta to England, via ltaly, in 1805–6. Relatively few of his writings from before this period have been preserved; yet the fact that almost none of his writings after 1805 should place significant emphasis on landscape as the stimulus of sublime feeling, focusing rather on metaphysical, religious, or literary sources of such emotion, is surely of considerable significance. His famous description, in Biographia Literaria, of how—after an early period of poetic creativity, as well as ‘love of nature’—he ‘sought a refuge from bodily pain and mismanaged sensibility in abstruse researches, which exercised the strength and subtlety of the understanding without awakening the feelings of the heart’ (BL [CC], 1:17), indeed, suggests the possibility of a close connection between the diminution of his activity as a poet and the transference of his attention from landscapes (as well as, of course, their revelation of a divine informing spirit) to more ‘abstruse’ metaphysical and psychological topics.