ABSTRACT
Coleridge drew repeatedly on Plato's Socratic dialogues for figures of poetic inspiration, and on later Platonic works for metaphysical thoughts on the nature of Ideas. My analysis of Coleridge's philosophical writing has challenged Orsini's belief that 'it is precisely on Plato that Coleridge is least satisfactory'. Chapter 1 reviewed Coleridge's earlier comments on Plato, showing that, contrary to a common assumption, Coleridge did consider it important to distinguish Plato from Neoplatonism, even if he did not always succeed in doing so. This desire to reach 'the Source' reflected a new tendency among contemporary commentators; but Coleridge was distinctive in his intuitive sympathy with Plato, his sense that he had read Plato 'by anticipation'. In Chapter 2, I considered how Coleridge links Plato with Kant. Coleridge has often been attacked for his distortion of the Kantian thought he mediated. I suggested, however, that this was due partly to unfavourable conditions in England at that time, and partly to the continuing dispute among the post-Kantians — who often invoked Plato in their arguments — about the fundamental principles of the Critical philosophy. Coleridge in particular sought to Platonize Kant's account of Ideas. Whereas Kant held them to have regulative status only, for Coleridge's Plato they are constitutive, living powers that actively inform the mind. This disagreement has a considerable implication for the writing of philosophy. Kant attacked those writers as lazy and unphilosophical who, following Plato, poetically evoked a direct intuition of the ideal realm. The double-minded Coleridge was divided between the prosaic rigour of Kant and the 'visionary flights' of Plato; but I pointed out in Chapter 3 that this ambivalence also appears in Plato's dialogues themselves. I discussed echoes of the Republic's 'ancient quarrel' between poetry and philosophy in Coleridge, notably his unease about the passivity of mimetic art. A long tradition, however, had looked to Plato's Demiurge as embodying a 'higher' model of mimesis, imitating not the phenomenal world but the Ideas; and Coleridge often conceives of poetic creativity in these terms. Further, I argued that the ambivalence of Coleridge's attitude to poetic inspiration — as divine, yet passive and requiring rational scrutiny — is strongly reminiscent of Plato.