Return to the Eternal Recurrence: Coleridge and the "Echo or Mirror Seeking of Itself"

Abstract

This dissertation demonstrates how Samuel Taylor Coleridge provides a unique vision of reality in which his evolving self-consciousness mirrors, contributes to, and is subsumed by a single universal consciousness. Utilizing the divine power of imagination, he is able to decipher the images from the material world as characters of God's symbolic language of self-revelation; subsequently, through the divine "attribute" of reason, he is able to transform them into a corresponding symbolic language of poetry. He realizes that his creativity is a finite repetition of God's infinite act of creation in which "spirit," God's consciousness in creation, comes to an awareness of itself through the human mind. This study argues that, according to Coleridge, these processes follow a divine intention, and the human faculties and the mind's structure have been molded precisely to achieve a particular understanding of reality that conforms to God's requirements and for spirit's self-actualization. Furthermore, the process by which Coleridge creates and derives knowledge from his poetic expressions follows an archetypal blueprint according to which all natural processes operate. This project illustrates not only how the theory of organicism lies at the foundation of the complex, reciprocal relationship between Coleridge's artistic expression and developing subjectivity, but also how there is an organic interrelationship between an individual's developing self-consciousness and spirit's growing awareness of its cosmic totality. Ultimately, Coleridge's writings reveal that the macrocosmic and microcosmic processes are organically interrelated, interdependent, and symbiotic and that this "truth" is gradually discovered through his experiences of the divine elements of love and beauty in creation.