Poetry over Prose (1)

A first attempt at responding to JBL's question about why we need poetry at all when we already have prose through which to communicate:

I'm pretty sure it has a lot to do with communication through images and symbols.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge offers insight into this question. According to Coleridge, three of the five parts of the soul are the Understanding, Imagination, and Reason. He has a very different understanding of these from how we understand them today. For Coleridge, the Understanding is concerned with sense experience. Reason, on the other hand, is both our perception and the reality that we perceive. Imagination is the thing that leads the faculty of our Understanding to participate in Reason (and Imagination is most remarkable for its unifying power). This most often happens through poetry and in the Scriptures. I'm not going to lie, the following bit is from a paper I wrote years ago (sorry, there are footnotes):


One Coleridge scholar writes about the difference between poetry and prose in Coleridge's thought: “Prose will be the medium of the understanding; analysis and generalization will be the modes of thought, and they will require intellectual assent from the reader. Imaginative, symbolic, paradoxical, and nonrational language will presumably be excluded [from prose], because its proper medium is poetry.”[1] As Coleridge’s career develops, he is increasingly convinced that “prose, considered as the language of distinctions, definitions, logic (in short, of the understanding), is ultimately futile.”[2] Poetry unifies particularly through its use of symbols.[3] The symbol is “the awakening source” of the power of the imagination, “its mediatory channel and its product, that which reveals the universal in the particular and which is often the means of raising human consciousness to the contemplation of spiritual truth.”[4] The symbol not only points to reality, but it is the “inward unity of the objective reality of the universal idea and the subjective apperception of that reality expressed in a particular form.”[5] Symbols, then, somehow participate in that objective reality that they also work to communicate to us. Poetry, through its use of symbols, brings together the subjective and objective through the participation of symbols (at least in a small degree) in the objective itself. It parallels that use of language by God in the creation of the world, when language brought order to chaos.[6] Here we see an apologia for the importance of literature and other art that develops the imagination, and particularly for poetry, since it unifies the Understanding and the Reason through symbol. The Logos, or Christ, is the greatest of all symbols, because he mediates between God and man.[7] Coleridge’s idea of the Logos is a key part of his thought, but he does not fully develop it (he planned to but left unwritten a book about this idea in particular). The Logos is both a principle and a Person, as identified in the book of John.[8] It is both the Word and words, “the source and living power of language.”[9] It is, in a sense, the Imagination as applied to God.





[1] David R. Sanderson, “Coleridge’s Political ‘Sermons’: Discursive Language and the Voice of God,” Modern Philology, 70.4 (May 1973), 322.
[2] Ibid., 324.
[3] Douglas Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: Aids to Reflection and the Mirror of the Spirit, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 132.
[4] Mary Anne Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy: The Logos as Unifying Principle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 48.
[5] Ibid., 49.
[6] Gene M. Bernstein, “Self-Creating Artifices: Coleridgean Imagination and Language,” Modern Philology, 76.3 (Feb. 1979), 246-47.
[7] Perkins, 52.
[8] Ibid., 22.
[9] Ibid., 26.