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Coleridge on the English Language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Joshua H. Neumann
Joshua H. Neumann*
Affiliation:
Brooklyn College
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Extract

Coleridge's interest in philology, more specifically in English linguistics, was one manifestation—by no means the least important—of his amazing myriad-mindedness. His lectures, essays, notes, and reported conversations abound with allusions, comments, and speculations on the nature and problems of language in general and of English in particular; and his experiments in vocabulary bear additional testimony to his interest in the subject. Although increasing attention has recently been paid to this aspect of his genius, a systematic study of the subject awaits the publication of a definitive edition of his works. Nevertheless, an attempt might be made to examine certain limited phases of his interest in linguistics, particularly his theories about the nature and development of language, his observations on the character of English, and his own remarkable contributions to the enrichment of its vocabulary.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 63 , Issue 2 , June 1948 , pp. 642 - 661
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1948

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References

1 Cf. particularly J. H. Hanford, “Coleridge as a Philologian”, MP, xvi (1919), 615; L. A. Willoughby, “Coleridge as a Philologist”, MLR, xxxi (1936), 176; J. Isaacs, “Coleridge's Critical Terminology”, Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, xxi (1936), 86. Comment on Coleridge's language appears also in Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (New York, 1927), I. A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination (New York, 1935), Stephen Potter, Coleridge and S.T.C. (London, 1935), and Richard W. Armour and Raymond F. Howes, Coleridge the Talker (Ithaca, 1940).

2 Ernest Hartley Coleridge, Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, 1895), i, 425.

3 T. Ashe, éd., The Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, 1909), p. 41.

4 W. G. T. Shedd, ed., Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 7 vols. (New York, [1844], iv, 240). Most of these ideas seem to be based on Coleridge's reading of Schlegel, whose language, apparently, he did not always understand. See Thomas N. Raysor, Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism (Cambridge, Mass., 1930), i, 197.

5 Raysor, ii, 119 ff.

6 Works, iv, 336. -

7 Earl Leslie Griggs, Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, 1932), i, 400.

8 Ernest Hartley Coleridge, Anima Poetae (London, 1895), p. 95.

9 Ibid., p. 11.

10 Ibid., p. 13. Cf. also, J. Shawcross, ed., Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford, 1907), ii, 39. “The best part of human language … is derived from reflection of the acts of the mind itself. It is formed by a voluntary appropriation of fixed symbols to internal acts, to processes and results of imagination.”

11 Anima Poetae, p. 19.

12 Works, iv, 45.

13 Table Talk, p. 311.

14 Griggs, Letters, i, 156. The thought of the last sentence seems to be that words, which are after all only “signs” or symbols, may under certain conditions exercise as much influence over our minds as concrete objects, or “things.”

16 Anima Poetae, p. 181.

18 Table Talk, p. 75.

17 Biographie Liieraria, ii, 22.

18 Works, i, 437.

19 Griggs, Letters, ii, 418.

20 Raysor, Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism, ii, 246.

21 Works, vi, 38, f. n.

22 Biographia Literaria, ii, 22. 23 Ibid., ii, 116.

24 Works, i, 140.

25 Anima Poeiae, p. 204.

26 Table Talk, p. 182.

27 Anima Poelae, p. 123. 28 Works, iv, 407.

29 Biographia Literaria, i, 164, f. n.

30 p. 163, f. n.

31 Alice D. Snyder, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Treatise on Method (London, 1934), p. 71.

32 Anima Poetae, p. v.

33 A. S. Brandi, “S. T. Coleridges Notizbuch”,Archivfiir das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, xcvii (1896), 354. This is the notebook of 1795–98. Number 24, in a list of literary projects headed “My Works” is “A History of Phrases, ex. gr. The king must have men.”

34 Biographia Literaria, ii, 115.

35 T. M. Raysor, Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism (London, 1936), p. 132.

36 Works, TV, 406. In Biographia Literaria, ii, 81, Coleridge objects to the extension of the meaning of the word scene (as signifying “the general appearance of any action”) because the word already has two meanings and is “more equivocal than might be wished.”

37 Anima Poetae, p. 267.

38 Biographia Literaria, i, 4.

39 Armour and Howes, op. cit., p. 277.

40 Edith J. Morley, ed., Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers (London, 1938), i, 29, 34, etc. E. de Selincourt, Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth (London, 1941), i, 224.

41 Cf. Logan Pearsall Smith, Words and Idioms (London, 1925), pp. 111–2, 125.

42 Biographia Literaria, i, 109.

43 Potter, op. cit., p. 128.

44 Quoted by Richards, op. cit., p. 107.

45 Table Talk, p. 182.

46 Biographia Literaria, i, 165, f. n.

47 Table Talk, p. 182.

48 Biographia Literaria, ii, 255.

49 Ibid., i, 62. Leaving aside Coleridge's theorizing about the function of a mystical “good sense” in the matter, the process outlined here is correct for a large number of synonyms. The explanation does not, however, go far enough, for it does not take into account other circumstances which play a part in the development of synonyms—poetic creations, for example, or the conflict of homophones.

50 Table Talk, p. 415. The New English Dictionary makes no distinction in the meaning of these two spellings.

51 Raysor, Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, p. 173. Cf. also Coleridge's comment on his coinage proprietage in Works, vi, 96, f. n.

52 Biographia Literaria, i, 61, f. n. Coleridge's account of the history of property-propriety should be received with caution. The earlier of the two, according to the NED, is properly, the first citation for which (in the sense of “the condition of being owned”) is dated c. 1380. In the sense of “that which one owns; one's wealth or goods” the Dictionary observes that there are few examples before the seventeenth century. The word propriety appears first about the middle of the fifteenth century.

53 Thus Jespersen points out that the two pronunciations of the word medicine (in two and three syllables) have produced a differentiation in the meaning and use of the word—at least in British English. People take [medsin], but study [medisin]. Otto Jespersen, Language, Its Nature, Development, and Origin (London, 1922), p. 176. Cf. also Daniel Jones' Pronouncing Dictionary s. v. medicine.

54 Derwent Coleridge, Notes, Theological, Political, and Miscellaneous by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, 1853), p. 14.

55 Works, iv, 76.

56 Table Talk, p. 248.

57 Raysor, Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, p. 451.

58 Ibid., p. 60.

59 Morley, op. cit., i, 114.

60 Griggs, Letters, n, 118.

61 Raysor, Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, p. 63.

62 Ibid., p. 38.

63 Raysor, Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism, i, 28.

64 Raysor, Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, p. 112. Cf. also Works, i, 167, f. n.

65 Anima Poetae, p. 225. On the literary and psychological implications of punning cf. Works, iv, 124. On the part played by original root-creation in the forming of words, see Henry Bradley, The Making of English (London, 1907), p. 158.

66 Ibid., p. 176.

67 Table Talk, p. 414.

68 Biographia Literaria, ii, 172, f. n. Another prefix the weakening of which he regrets is be-, as in bedropt, besprinkle.

69 Anima Poetae, p. 187.

70 Henri Nidecker, “Notes Marginales de S. T. Coleridge”, Revue de Litterature Comparee, vii (1927), 136.

71 Anima Poetae, p. 176.

72 Biographia Literaria, ii, 172–3, f. n.

73 Ibid., ii, 147.

74 Raysor, Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism, ii, 119.

75 Biographia Literaria, ii, 172.

76 Table Talk, pp. 262, 300.

77 Anima Poetae, p. 155.

78 Table Talk, p. 353.

79 Works, iv, 373.

80 Biographia Literaria, I, 204, note.

81 Raysor, Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, p. 307.

82 Biographia Literaria, i, 2, f. n.

83 Bernard Groom, “The Formation and Use of Compound Epithets in English Poetry from 1579”, Society for Pure English, Tract XLIX (Oxford, 1937), p. 295.

84 Less than half-a-dozen such epithets are listed in Sister Eugenia Logan's Concordance to the Poetry of S. T. Coleridge (St.-Mary-of-the-Woods, Indiana, 1940).

85 Lane Cooper, “Pleonastic Compounds in Coleridge”, MLN, xix (1904), 223.

86 Among these are: “opium-stupidly-wild eyes”, “a whetker-you-will-or-no slumber”, “an every-time-felt inconvenience”, “only-with-Rabelais-to-be-compared argument.” Compounds of other kinds, not epithet compounds, are more common: “dazzle-darkened his intuition”, “may the Devil sulphur-roast them”, “I do not greatly flatter-blind myself.” For these and similar compounds cf. Emest Hartley Coleridge, Letters, i, 148, 156, 336, 417; ii, 467, 519, 640, 761.

87 Biographia Literaria, i, 189.

88 Raysor, Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism, i, 181.

89 Works, iv, 406.

90 Biographia Literaria, ii, 229. Cf. also Works, vi, 96, f. n.

91 Anima Poetae, p. 123.

92 Works, iv, 200.

93 Raysor, Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, pp. 52–3.

94 The word accommodation in the sense of “room and suitable provision for the reception of people; entertainment; lodgings”, appears first, according to the NED, in Othello (i, iii, 239). C. T. Onions, in his Shakespeare Glossary, points out that Ben Jonson describes it as one of the perfumed words of his time. The earliest citation for remuneration in the NED is dated 1477.

95 Raysor, Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, p. 434.

96 Works, iv, 417.

97 Ibid., vii, 699.

98 Biographia Literaria, i, 189.

99 Works, vi, 187.

100 Biographia Literaria, i, 207, 249; Anima Poetae, 236. In the latter the word appears as esenoplastic. Cf. Patrick L. Carver, “Evolution of the Term Esemplastic”, MLR, xxiv, (1929), 329.

101 ?. H. Coleridge, Letters, i, 73.

102 Biographia Literaria, i, 87, f. n.

103 Anima Poetae, p. 21.

104 NED records no use between Milton and Coleridge. Similarly, though Coleridge attributes the word multeity to a scholastic source, NED records no earlier use. Cf. Works, i, 388, f. n.

105 David Masson, ed., Collected Works of Thomas De Quincey (London, 1897), xiv, 157 ff.

106 “Mr. Fax immediately recognized the poeticopolitical, rhapsodicoprosaical, deis-daemoniacoparadoxographical, pseudolatreiological, transcendental meteorosophist, Moley Mystic, Esquire, of Cimmerian Lodge.” Melincourl, or Sir Oran Haut-ton, Chapter xxxi.

107 “I am sorry”, says Mr. Floskey (=Coleridge) to Marionetta, who had come to solicit his help in regard to her cousin's unhappiness, “to find you participating in the vulgar error of the reading public, to whom an unusual collocation of words, involving a juxtaposition of antiperistatical ideas, immediately suggests the notion of hyperoxysophistical paradoxology.” Nightmare Abbey, Chapter viii.

108 Works, iv, 343.

109 Armour and Howes, p. 34.

110 Raysor, Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism, ii, 121.

111 Griggs, Letters, ii, 188.

112 In his essay on the English Language, De Quincey notes Coleridge's predilection for the prefix inter-. In addition to the two words in inter- given here, the NED records the following as occurring first in Coleridge : interadditive, interfhience, interfusion, interlink, intermundium, interramification, intertanglement, intertrude, intertwine (sb.).

113 Richard Chenevix Trench, English Past and Present (13th ed., New York, 1889)' p. 228.

117 Derwent Coleridge, op. cit., p. 154.

115 For a full account of the German borrowings see Charles T. Carr, “The German Influences on the English Vocabulary”, Society for Pure English, Tract XLII (Oxford, 1934). The word minnesinger is recorded in the NED as appearing first in 1825, but Carr notes an earlier use by Coleridge. On the other hand, Coleridge regarded the word forget-me-not as a new and original translation from the German, for he glosses it in his poem The Keepsake although the NED shows an earlier use.

116 Table Talk, pp. 237-8. Cf. also, Works, v, 380.

117 Works, ii, 329.

118 Raysor, Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, p. 219.

119 Griggs, Letters, i, 269.

120 Table Talk, p. 167. See also Henry L. Mencken, Supplement One (New York, 1945), p. 3. f. n.