when Wordsworth, having conceded that rhyme and metre obviously do
make a difference to ordinary language ‘of themselves’, insists that the
difference does not ‘pave the way to other distinctions’ between prose and
verse language. ‘The distinction of rhyme and metre is voluntary and
uniform’, he writes, ‘and not like that produced by (what is called) poetic
diction, arbitrary and subject to infinite caprices, upon which no calcula-
tion can be made’.^8 Quoting this part of the sentence, Coleridge explodes,
‘But is this apoet, of whom a poet is speaking? No surely!’ ( 81 ). True poets
are never arbitrary or capricious, and if we do not trust the poet’s genius,
as Wordsworth implies we must not, it implies there is a rule for
harmony, which would be the antithesis of art: ‘Could a rule be given
fromwithout, poetry would cease to be poetry, and sink into a mechanical
art. It would bemo%’osiς[morphosis] notposiς[poiesis]. Therulesof
the IMAGINATION are themselves the very powers of growth and
production’ ( 83 – 4 ). Poiesis creates; morphosis merely shapes from the
outside. This principle applies to metre as well, for the sentence of Words-
worth that Coleridge interrupted continues to insist that unlike poetic
diction, ‘the metre obeys certain laws, to which the Poet and Reader both
willingly submit’. But there is no language of submission to law in
Coleridge, for when he suggests the psychological origins of metre at the
beginning of the chapter, he describes it as a union of ‘spontaneous
impulse’ and ‘voluntarypurpose’ ( 65 ). The essential tension or balance
of metre is derived from the poet’s impulse and his willing control of it,
not between his desires and an external system to which he must submit.
Situated where it is inBiographia Literaria, Coleridge’s aesthetic com-
plaint against ‘Simon Lee’ thus involves considerably more than simple
aesthetics. For drawing on Schiller’s idea of art as an aesthetic education,
Biographia Literariaproposes a model of poetry in which the freedom
from external determination that guarantees the poem’s completeness of
being makes it a guide for human progress and education.^9 Simply
copying the real language of men (as Wordsworth claimed to have taken
a line ‘word for word’ from Simon Lee), or bolting on a metre to
something unpoetic ( as Coleridge accused Wordsworth of doing) makes
the work dependent on exterior events or rules, whereas it is precisely its
imaginative autonomy, its unity with itself through reconciling ‘opposite
or discordant qualities’ which makes it free and the ideal, ‘graceful and
intelligent whole’ that is the goal of human development ( 16 , 17 ).^10 These
considerations underlie Coleridge’s famous adaptation of A. W. Schlegel’s
ideas about organic form. A poem’s form is organic when it ‘is innate, it
shapes as it developes itself from within’, as opposed to being formed
Inside and outside modernism 21