The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten
of language, is a moment of condensation that makes meaning out of an ever expanding world of representations. Such a moment of balance or tension, between the radical openness of language and the normative condensation of poetry, tends to come undone when we consider the shape of Coleridge’s (poetic and critical) work itself, a disjunct practice that was never identical to the normative ideals of his practical criticism.25 This is in part due to the paradoxical fact that the activity of making poetry, as well as the critical practice of determining its value, involves a restriction of the possibilities of meaning by virtue of the nature of poetic form. Paul Hamilton, in his historicizing account of Coleridge’s poetics, cites the latter’s acknowledgment of the necessary restrictions of poetic form as compared to prose: “Poetry demands a severer keeping — it admits nothing that Prose may not often admit, but it oftener rejects.”26 In mysteriously “presupposing a more continuous state of Passion” but not simply expressing it, poetry for Coleridge sorts out meanings both by creating new ones and disallowing discrepant ones: “Poetry justifies, as Poetry independent of any other Passion, some new combination of Language, & commands the omission of many others allowable in other compositions” (137). While such a dissociation of form from expression is evident as well in Robinson’s Dolch Stanzas, Coleridge balances the possibility of poetry’s “new combination of Language” with the authoritarian “command” of its “severer keeping,” which restricts new meaning to that which is justified by the consistency of poetic form. Coleridge’s restrictions on language are the historical origin of Mac Low’s question to Eliot about the admissibility of the word Coronamatic to poetry.
Such a simultaneous creation and restriction of new meaning is not simply expressive but rather formally constructed, and it is here that Coleridge’s poetics confirm as they try to regulate the famous negative capability John Keats later claimed Coleridge lacked in his rage for poetic order: “I mean Negative Capability, when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason — Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge.”27 But poetic form, for Coleridge, produces distinctions that catch such “fine isolated verisimilitude[s]” at that same time that it remains “incapable of remaining content with half knowledge”; more simply put, poetry’s centripetal tendencies (poetic form) are ideally in balance with its centrifugal ones (new meaning). Poetry’s stabilization of new meaning (seen, for example, in the restricted vocabulary of Robinson’s poem) may at the same time be an exemplary moment of, it turns out, romantic negative capability, as in the openness of the restricted vocabulary given by the Dolch words to semantic change. While such a paradox depends on a dissociation of language from expression, the fact that Keats could only hypostatize a perverse authority in Coleridge’s “irritable reaching after fact & reason” identifies a problem for poetry in its reception. Keats turns Coleridge into an irritable tormentor rather than an organic genius, revealing a negative investment in authority on Keats’s part that subtends Coleridge reception as author.28
Hamilton’s historicizing approach to Coleridge’s poetics gives alternative terms for the legacy of organic form and expressive immanence at the origins of twentieth-century American verse culture (typified by the lyric poetry celebrated by New Critics). Another line of poetic development to be derived from a reading of Coleridge, then, begins by seeing his poetics as a response to a historical period of expanded meaning and thus relevant to many of our more recent concerns with a cultural poetics. In pursuing this line, Hamilton motivates Coleridge’s investment in poetic form not only in its reflection, as it were, of the transcendental “I am” but in its relation to “customary and habitual principles” derived from British commonsense philosophy (and everyday life). As evidence of this tension, Hamilton constructs a countermovement to the buildup to the missing transcendental deduction of Biographia’s chapter 13. In this alternate line of development, Coleridge pursues the poetic implications of the linguistic act of “desynonymy” — a discrimination of meaning at both lexical and historical levels — in the chapters leading up to the missing deduction as well in the subsequent chapters on the practical criticism of poetry. Hamilton explains the key term desynonymy as follows:
Desynonymy for Coleridge means increasing the vocabulary of a language by showing how words which were thought to be synonymous in fact mean different things. The original thinker adds to the number of meanings in the language we use. He does this by coining new words, and showing that we need them. Or he can desynonymize existing words by showing that we are putting words which we mistakenly think are synonyms to quite different uses. (CP, 65)
For example, in chapter 4 of the Biographia Coleridge claims historical originality in being “the first of my countrymen, who had pointed out the diverse meaning of which [metaphysics and psychology] were capable,” immediately relating these not only to “the faculties to which they should be appropriated” but to the prior linguistic synonymy between them.29 Coleridge’s better known distinction between the faculties of imagination and fancy would follow as well from the act of desynonymy. In a kind of circular logic, the act of distinguishing between faculties becomes valorized as an imperative to distinguish between word meanings as, in turn, that which distinguishes between faculties:
When two distinct meanings are confounded under one or more words, (and such must be the case, as sure as our knowledge is progressive and of course imperfect) erroneous consequences will be drawn, and what is true in one sense of the word, will be affirmed in toto. Men of research startled by the consequences, seek in the things themselves (whether in or out of the mind) for a knowledge of the fact, and having discovered the difference, remove the equivocation either by the substitution of a new word, or by the appropriation of one of the two or more words, that had before been used promiscuously. When this distinction has been so naturalized and of such general currency, that the language itself does as it were think for us . . . we then say, that it is evident to common sense. (BL, 86)
The relation of the faculties of understanding to distinctions between the meanings (and senses) of words has a key consequence for romantic and modernist aesthetics as it leads to the notion of defamiliarization, the Russian Formalists’ ostranenie. In the above passage, we see a movement from the defamiliarization of language, accomplished by “men of research,” to the habituation of common sense, when language “as it were think[s] for us,” which might end in merely normative senses if it were not for the recognition of an expanded register of meaning that is historically irreversible, “as sure as our knowledge is progressive and thus imperfect.” Habit, here, exists by virtue of a linguistic before and after, between which is an act of reflection on language and polysemy that appeals to “things themselves” (both interior and exterior, empirical referent and psychological faculty). In Hamilton’s view, Coleridge introduces his account of new meaning only to give it over and subsume it to the ideality of poetic form, which as a sublime horizon of unmediated expression provides the values of sensory immediacy that precede desynonymy in the first place, demanding the distinctions of nature made by “men of research.” Poetic expression, in other words, overrides the slippage between form and “the more continuous state of Passion” it assumes; its relation to the transcendental imagination is its own presentation of a passion that passes understanding (as with the notion of the egotistical sublime, leading on to the now predictable result of Coleridge’s cultural conservatism). There is another reading of Coleridge’s argument, however, in which a radical approach to poetic form can be found that is comparable to, even derivative of, the relation of the expansion of new meaning to desynonymy. Hamilton does not develop this argument, but it provides a way out of identifying form with expression in poetry after Coleridge.
The crux of this undeveloped argument depends precisely on the relation of habituated thought to the reception of experimental poetry, which is evident in “the unexampled opposition which Mr. Wordsworth’s writings have been . . . doomed to encounter” (BL, 71). Coleridge is dumbfounded that such disparate judgments of the poems in Lyrical Ballads could be made by men of equally good taste: “The composition which one had cited as execrable, another had