Coleridge's philosophy of composition: An overview of a romantic rhetorician

Abstract

Coleridge criticism has a stormy quality about it, as if what we know about Coleridge is something we see only by flashes of lightning over some dark landscape. In Experience Into Thought, Kathleen Coburn says that Coleridge is irritating to certain tempers, perhaps especially to the curriculum-making academic mind(67). Her statement is ironic. Coleridge was always working on curriculum. His rage for a system that included the irrational and lucky graces forced him into whole courses about thinking and language, whole encyclopedias of knowledge. Still, the plan in most academic circles seems to have been to place Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the canon as a fragment of history and forget him. After long years of reading criticism about Samuel Taylor Coleridge rather than reading his works, it is time to see if there is a Coleridge worth claiming for rhetoric and composition. One problem in validating a Coleridge for our time is reading him. It seems that we have lost the habit of reading his kind of discourse. Perhaps because of his translations and readings of the German Transcendentalists, Coleridge's prose wanders and speculates, opposes its central premises, comments on itself incessantly. Composition scholars see him as an antithesis of the kind of style recommended in our classrooms and in our journals. Also, as composition studies attempt to establish territory in departmental turf wars, Coleridge becomes an easy target for those who would use him to demonstrate how literary concerns should not be included in composition pedagogy. As much as some might want Coleridge to go away, he will not. Linda Flower argues that Coleridge's inspirational model for composition is a threat to the teaching of composition (Problem-Solving). Ross Winterowd asserts that Coleridge is a primary reason for the devaluation of the literature of fact because his theory of composition or rhetoric lacks purpose (64). In both cases, eminent scholars and researchers in the field of composition are reacting to a stereotypical view of Coleridge and his works, as if the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan represent Coleridge's philosophy and theory of composition. But there is more to Coleridge's philosophy of composition than his poems, his theory of imagination in Biographia Literaria, or his criticism suggest. Kenneth