On Poesy or Art (1818)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

MAN [1] communicates by articulation of sounds, and paramountly by

the memory in the ear; nature by the impression of bounds and surfaces

on the eye, and through the eye it gives significance and appropriation,

and thus the conditions of memory, or the capability of being

remembered, to sounds, smells, etc. Now Art, used collectively for

painting, sculpture, architecture, and music, is the mediatress between,

and reconciler of nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of

humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into

everything which is the object of his contemplation; color, form,

motion, and sound, are the elements which it combines, and it stamps

them into unity in the mould of a moral idea.

The primary art is writing;-primary, if we regard the purpose

abstracted from the different modes of realizing it, those steps of

progression of which the instances are still visible in the lower degrees

of civilization. First, there is mere gesticulation; then rosaries or

wampum; then picture-language; then hieroglyphics, and finally

alphabetic letters. These all consist of a translation of man into nature,

of a substitution of the visible for the audible.

The so-called music of savage tribes as little deserves the name of art

for the understanding as the ear warrants it for music. Its lowest state is

a mere expression of passion by sounds which the passion itself

necessitates; - the highest amounts to no more than a voluntary

reproduction of these sounds in the absence of the occasioning causes,

so as to give the pleasure of contrast- for example, by the various

outcries of battle in the song of security and triumph. Poetry also is

purely human; for all its materials are from the mind, and all its

products are for the mind. But it is the apotheosis of the former state, in

which by excitement of the associative power passion itself imitates

order, and the order resulting produces a pleasurable passion, and thus