Chapter 3 - A Geometric Frame of Mind

Summary

While trudging through the landscape of his rambles, Coleridge filled his notebooks with reference to and drawings of geometric figures. The question arises: Given his fascination with the uncultivated, irregular wild hills and rivers of his rambles, why would he utilize the fixed, abstracted geometric idiom removed from time? This chapter addresses this seeming contradiction by suggesting that his attraction to the geometric figure in his landscape descriptions is neither perplexing nor inconsistent but rather an expression of his immersion in an environment that nurtured a geometric frame of mind and believed in a mathematical ordering of the entire universe. Beginning with his mathematical training both at Christ’s Hospital School and at the University of Cambridge, Coleridge inherited a cultural conviction that one should take Euclid seriously. Furthermore, this training sharpened his powers of attention, abstraction, and an a priori intuition. Ultimately, his attachment to a geometric perspective did not distract him from his attraction to the sensuous movements, sounds, and colors of his natural surroundings. He intertwined them both and in so doing tempered his contemporaries’ way of thinking that separated the two modes of perception.