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

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