from outside with a ‘pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of
the properties of the material’, like moulded clay.^11 Thinking of the work
of art as internally organised, organicism rejects the subordination of any
part as a means to an overall end, and hence any poem where the form is
conspicuously determining the content. Rather, content and form are
inseparable, and organicism is thus of a piece with autonomy for a poetic
which makes the characteristic quality of the true work of art its freedom
from allexteriority. In its brief criticisms of the form of ‘Simon Lee’,
Biographia Literariaexpresses for English readers the dominant political
motif of European Romantic aesthetics, which made the work of art of
supreme importance because it models the highest possibilities of human
development, freedom and self-determination.
Yet on Coleridge’s own logic, Wordsworth could have replied that if
‘Simon Lee’ were not a strictly organic poem, neither is it an inorganic
one. For a problem with self-determination is exactly Wordsworth’s
point: its speaker thinks he is doing a kindness, yet on second reading
turns out to be playing out a prescriptive sentimental fantasy which in
turn derives from unequal social relations. Hence the poem’s form here
occupies a strange position as both interior to and necessarily somewhat
exterior to the content. The double rhymes, for example, are inseparable
from the poem’s entire meaning, and to change them would be to change
that meaning. But part of that meaning is that finally they are revealed as
an external force which has been pushing the poem along in a direction in
which it does not, finally, want to travel. In a sense, the poem confirms
everything a militant organicist would argue against over-regular form,
that it is rhythmic exteriority that inevitably leads to moral coerciveness.
And yet this ability to pitch form against content, to give Coleridge his
sense of disappointment, is precisely what allows the poem to indicate
that something is wrong, that the speaker has been saying one thing and
meaning another. The remorselessly jolly rhymes and bouncy metre
suggest very well the emotional briskness which would treat poor people
as objects to be assisted. And the flat, awkward ending is made possible
because the regular form makes the reader expect a double rhyme and
then not get it, which makes the present moment of disappointment then
ironise everything that precedes it. Were the form always simply doing
what the content was saying, such internal divisions could not occur. But
because its regular pattern can make non-syntactic, non-linear links
between elements of the poem, can play off one part of the poem against
another, it offers a sense of several different forces working at once,
pulling and dividing the material in different directions, in mixed
22 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism