Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science

by Trevor H. Levere

• ISBN13: 9780521524902
• ISBN10: 0521524903
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-08-08
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Poetry Realized in Nature shows Coleridge's method at work and, more generally, explores German philosophical science, Naturphilosophie, and the relations between science and romantic thought. It combines a biographical approach with intellectual history, reconstructing Coleridge's imaginative enterprise across the whole range of the physical and life sciences. Coleridge strove for coherence in all realms of thought, and so the ways in which he explored scientific ideas illuminate all aspects of his inquiring spirit. He sought self-knowledge, which required a knowledge of man and mind in relation to nature and God. There was, accordingly, an intimate relationship between his theology and philosophy, and his ideas about the natural world. Science functioned as a touchstone in his philosophy, thus indirectly reinforcing his theology. The ideas he derived from science also bore directly on his critical doctrines, including the theory of imagination.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction: nature and mind

1. Early years: from Hartley to Davy

2. Surgeons, chemists and animal chemists: Coleridge's productive middle years from the Biographia literaria to Aids to reflection

3. Two visions of the world: Coleridge, natural philosophy, and the philosophy of nature

4. Coleridge and metascience: approaches to nature and schemes of the sciences

5. The construction of the world: genesis, cosmology and general physics

6. Geology and chemistry: the inward powers of matter

7. Life: crown and culmination

Notes

Index.