‘Could a rule be given from without, poetry would cease to be poetry, and sink into a mechanical art. It would be μóρφωσις, not ποίησις. The rules of the IMAGINATION are themselves the very powers of growth and production. The words to which they are reducible, present only the outlines and external appearance of the fruit. A deceptive counterfeit of the superficial form and colours may be elaborated; but the marble peach feels cold and heavy, and children only put it to their mouths.’ [Coleridge, Biographia ch. 18]

‘ποίησις’ (poiēsis) means ‘a making, a creation, a production’ and is used of poetry in Aristotle and Plato. ‘μóρφωσις’ (morphōsis) in essence means the same thing: ‘a shaping, a bringing into shape.’ But Coleridge has in mind the New Testament use of the word as ‘semblance’ or ‘outward appearance’, which the KJV translates as ‘form’: ‘An instructor of the foolish, a teacher of babes, which hast the form [μóρφωσις] of knowledge and of the truth in the law’ [Romans 2:20]; ‘Having a form [μóρφωσις] of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away’ [2 Timothy 3:5]. I trust that's clear.

There is much more on Coleridge at my other, Coleridgean blog.

Wednesday 7 April 2021

Middlemarch: Epigraphs and Mirrors (2021)

 


Today my short monograph Middlemarch: Epigraphs and Mirrors is published by @OpenBookPublish. It is, as its title suggests, a reading of Eliot's marvellous novel via the text's many epigraphs and embedded quotations, some of which I track-down and identify for the first time. That sounds dry I know, but I hope I make something a little more illuminating and engaged out of these readings, to do with Eliot's distinctive and powerful modes of realism, reading the mirror-like and lens-like effects of Eliot's complex allusiveness in terms of her mimesis. There are chapters on the novel's intertextualities via George Sand and Pascal, Sappho, 19th-century Science, Tolstoy and Zola, Rousseau, Homer and Sophocles, Goethe and Guizot, bits and bobs on paintings and music and bells, Brownian motion and Herodotus. I am Professor of Nineteenth-century Literature and Culture after all. 

Sunday 4 April 2021

It’s the End of the World: But What Are We Really Afraid Of?

 


Delighted and, I'm not going to lie, a little surprised to hear that my It’s the End of the World: But What Are We Really Afraid Of? (Elliot and Thompson 2020) has won the non-fiction BSFA Award. It really is an extraordinary and unexpected honour, particularly considering the strength of the shortlist. It was a strange business, writing a book about the end of the world whose publication coincides with a global pandemic and lockdown. next time I'm going to write a book about world justice, communism, happiness and utopia and see what happens.