ABSTRACT
If Romantic poetry can be described as plerotic poetry, it should be characterized by these effects: a tendency toward cognitive disorder produced by the use of multiple and expanded signifiers, a rejection of number and logic in favor of dream and nightmare, and linguistic failure reached by way of a loss of articulation rather than a fall into silence. As language approaches either order or disorder, it fails; yet language is most interesting at these points of failure. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was nonplussed by this tendency in Romantic poetry to abandon logical clarity at the most crucial moments. He was terrified by the expansion and fusion of reference because it meant the transgression of boundaries. Coleridge suggests that Geraldine not only possesses the capacity to transgress boundaries and to fuse opposites within herself, but that this capacity is infectious.
