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Coleridge and Lyric Progressivism

Among the recurrent themes in Jonathan Culler's Theory of the Lyric (2015) is the "ritualistic" aspect of lyric poetry, a notion which he repeatedly emphasizes and expands upon when he discusses matters of meter, lyric address, and lyric structure (3). By calling the lyric "ritualistic," Culler means that lyric poetry, rather than fictionally representing states of affairs ("the imitation of an utterance" as Barbara Herrnstein Smith argues [5]), enacts them or puts them in place in a way that draws upon the performative functions of language (131). And this ritualistic, quasi-performative character in turn supports what he understands to be the resolutely social dimension of lyric: the sociality of lyric is vividly displayed, for instance, in the way that even the most intimate love poems are not actually just about a speaker but about a "triangulated" relationship among speaker, beloved, and reader--all of whom are included in the performance of the poetry-ritual (186). My interest in Culler's account is located exactly in the implications of this move: the lyric is a form of ritual, while ritual--in its mystical conjuring of "sympathetic" relations among reader, addressee, and audience--establishes the speaker's "similarity to others" (325). Culler's important account is interesting from an historical point of view because it is immediately recognizable as a product of the current cultural moment, in which is it difficult to find anyone who doesn't want to see poetry, or literature in general, as an expression of sympathy. But his account is equally important from a theoretical point of view, because its connections between lyric, ritual, and sympathy seem too generalized for explaining the ethical, religious, and political maneuverings within lyric poetry of any given period. And I think it could be argued that Romantic poetry in particular (or at least many instances of it) provides evidence of a lyric strain that runs in a direction very much opposed to, or at least in tension with, the one that Culler suggests it takes. To explore this direction, I focus on some lyric poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: these are poems which self-consciously adopt a contentious relation to the formation of sympathetic bonds among political subjects. One prominent way in which this contentious relation is conveyed is by first echoing, and finally turning against, the tropes of enlightened progressive histories and the poetry they inspired. While historians such as William Robertson spoke of the advance of knowledge and "polished" society in Europe (1:5), James Thomson in The Seasons celebrated the "fervent" advance of "culture, toil, and arts," all of which inspired Britain's triumphant movement toward "progressive truth" ("Autumn," 427, 878). The impact of this normalizing, routinizing, and homogenizing account of history--which correlates advances in science, arts, and politics with each other--has seldom been discussed in accounts of Romantic writing, which tend to focus more consistently on lyric poetry's inspired utterances (James Chandler's essay on the "Immortality Ode" and Emily Rohrbach's Modernity's Mist are notable exceptions). Focusing on the way that a poet like Coleridge appropriates enlightenment accounts of progress exposes the ways in which his lyric projects allow him to explore the question of what kind of culture literature is--or, more specifically, what kind of culture, or progressive acculturation, is recommended by, and embodied in, lyric poetry. The distinctive mode of lyric thought that emerges in so many of Coleridge's poems of the 1790s emphasizes the voice of the lyric poet as the outcome of hard-won knowledge, an enlightened progressivism that echoes such writers as Voltaire or William Robertson. His verses on the philologist and radical John Horne Tooke, for instance, celebrate the advance of "Truth and Freedom" (18) against "Superstition" (16), led by the "Patriot and Sage" to whom to the verse epistle is addressed (13). …