This work disputes the standard argument that Coleridge declined from poet to religious philosopher and shows how the circumstances contributing to his addictive personality shaped his journey toward faith.
In 'Novalis's, first published in the Foreign Review, Thoams Carlyle tests out the possibility of such a future. Novalis was no 'mystic', he says, in the sense that he is impossible to understand. He lived and wrote in the spirit of Fichte and of 'Kantism, or German metaphysics generally', which sought to overthrow the empiricists' naive faith in the self-subsistence of matter. German metaphysics is no 'mere intellectual card-castle, or logical hocus-pocus', Carlyle insists, 'with no bearing on the practical interests of men'. Carlyle distances himself from these mixed consequences of German metaphysics under the figure of Novalis, who in this respect anticipates the fictional Teufelsdrockh of Sartor Resartus. Novalis represents the German effort to head off the relativism of the Understanding by positioning Reason's confident knowledge of the immaterial over against it. Carlyle simultaneously respects the visible world and finds it soulless.
THE Eolian Harp has long been praised for the distinctive structure it shares with Coleridge's other conversation poems and, according to of its readers, with Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey.1 Critics still admire the poem's structure, but they find its theme riddled with inconsistencies which, although very pious, are intellectually intolerable. The poem's conclusion has been damned as reverently prosaic, disastrously self-contradictory, and distinctly anti-climactic, because in it the poet supposedly re treats into a form of medieval fideism which contradicts the exciting discoveries about the one Life made by his reason and imagination in lines 26-33 and 44-48.2 My suggestion is that Coleridge, who had a settled conviction that in Christianity alone the understanding cul minates in faith, which is at once its light and its remuneration,3 would probably have denied, though he might well have under stood, the force of such an objection. Despite the obvious weakness in its diction, the conclusion ought rather to be read as another in stance of Coleridge's lifelong habit of subjecting his philosophic and aesthetic insights to the critical test of their conformity to his own unique experience. To Coleridge the experience of personal communion with God
