12 Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes on Writing

Samuel Taylor Coleridge quotes on writing

15. Trochee trips from long to short; From long to long in solemn sort Slow Spondee stalks.

18. Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication, of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.

19. Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, etc., if they could; they have tried their talents at one or the other, and have failed; therefore they turn critics.

28. I counted two and seventy stenches, All well defined, and several stinks.

105. Never pursue literature as a trade.

106. Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.

123. Humour is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.

129. I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; poetry = the best words in their best order.

134. That passage is what I call the sublime dashed to pieces by cutting too close with the fiery four-in-hand round the corner of nonsense.

138. The Pilgrim's Progress is composed in the lowest style of English, without slang or false grammar. If you were to polish it, you would at once destroy the reality of the vision. For works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

153. I have known books written on Tolerance, the proper title of which would be - intolerant or intolerable books on tolerance. Should not a man who writes a book expressly to inculcate tolerance learn to treat with respect, or at least with indulgence, articles of faith which tens of thousands ten times told of his fellow-subjects or his fellow-creatures believe with all their souls, and upon the truth of which they rest their tranquillity in this world, and their hopes of salvation in the next, - those articles being at least maintainable against his arguments, and most certainly innocent in themselves?

162. My next shall be a more sober & chastised Epistle - but you see I was in the humour for metaphors - and to tell thee the Truth, I have so often serious reasons to quarrel with my Inclination, that I do not chuse to contradict it for Trifles.