fruit), but from the way it coheres according to its own internal principles
while imitating something else, the same in the different. A copy has
insufficient difference from an exterior model, but an imitation is struc-
turally independent of the thing it respectfully imitates. Coleridge’s idea
of ‘imitation’ is here drawing on the idea of living form in Schiller’s
Aesthetic Educationand behind that, Kant’sCritique of Judgement, for
which ‘art can be called fine [scho ̈n] art only if we are conscious that it is
art while yet it looks to us like Nature’.^6 That is, it is art in so far as it
seems to appear on its own account, as Schiller glosses Kant’s passage:
First of all, we must know that the beautiful thing is a natural object, that is, that
it is through itself; secondly, it must seem to us as if it existed through a rule,
since Kant says that it must look like art. The two claimsit is through itselfandit
is through a rulecan only be combined in a single manner, namely if one says:it
is through a rule which it has given itself. Autonomy in technique, freedom in
artfulness.^7
In imitation, the formal rules are not exterior to the content but
coextensive with it; ‘Simon Lee’ is bad art because the pathetic content
is too patently being pushed around by a metrical form which does not
derive from its nature. True art is thoroughly ‘assimilated’ into unity, and
because unified, free from external determination.
This violation of the true poem’s autonomy lies at the heart of all of
Biographia Literaria’s complaints against Wordsworth. By thinking of the
Cumbrian peasantry as somehow poetic in and of themselves, he has
failed to see that ‘poetry as poetry is essentiallyideal, that it avoids and
excludes allaccident’ of individual circumstance ( 46 ), because the acci-
dental would mean there was a point in the art in which the form of the
art work did not determine itself. Claiming that rustic language is more
naturally poetic suffers the same problem, because the uneducated la-
bourer is likely to ‘particularize’ his feelings, rather than reflect on them,
and it is through the operation of reflection that any sense of freedom
from immediate circumstance is gained ( 54 ). ‘There is a want of that
prospectiveness of mind, thatsurview, which enables a man to foresee the
whole of what he is to convey, appertaining to any one point’ ( 58 ), and
without such freedom of expression, the diction will be determined by
local circumstance. On the same principle, throughout chapter 18 of
Biographia Literaria, Coleridge takes issue with Wordsworth’s idea that
there ‘neither is nor can be any essential difference between the language of
prose and metrical composition’, because it would imply that metre was
simply external to the language used, rather than the poem being an
inseparable unity of the two ( 60 ). The point he particularly objects to is
20 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism