To rescue this enlightened age, the supernatural and Coleridge's divining poetics

Abstract

This dissertation asserts that Coleridge's poems of the supernatural sprang from his own "supernatural" experiences and that they constitute one episode in his lifelong struggle to resist the growing rationalism of his age.

Part 1 provides an overview of contemporary literary supernaturalism as a manifestation of the kind of "enlightenment" that Coleridge opposed, a mindset that, dividing past from present and imagination from reason, effectively equated the supernatural with the imaginary.

Part 2 draws from works on religio-mystical experience, particularly those of Rudolph Otto, Henry Corbin, and Jess Byron Hollenback, to explore Coleridge's own intuitions and encounters. In it, I establish a "Coleridgean supernatural" that includes two disparate dimensions: a divine dimension which Coleridge valorized and named "Bright Reality," and a delusional yet quasi-material dimension which he distrusted and which I call the "spectral realm." Synthesizing the terminologies of Coleridge, Otto, Corbin, and Hollenback, I discuss these realms through the heuristics of the "diving imagination" and the "witching imagination," respectively.

Part 3 examines "The Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel" in light of the witching imagination, the mind's power in certain states of consciousness to concretize thought. In these poems, supernatural agents and events are presented as simultaneously real and imaginary.

Part 4 utilizes J.R.R. Tolkien's and Tzvetan Todorov's treatments of fantasy, in combination with studies of mysticism and language, to explicate Coleridge's "diving poetics." I argue that, by portraying the realities of the spectral realm in "The Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel," Coleridge created a poetry of paradox designed to suspend discursive reasoning and provide a space for the intuitive divining imagination. Part 4 closes with a treatment of "Kubla Khan," a complex text in which Coleridge articulates the relationship between the witching imagination and his divining poetics, making an ambiguous visionary experience the means to divine encounter.