Literature and Culture

highlighted by René Wellek when he notes that “Coleridge´s theory is closely
dependent on the Germans” (1964, p. 180).
If we speak about transcendentalism as a non-formal movement within
romanticism, we have to be aware of the fact that in those times the concept
of romanticism, as we know it nowadays, was not constituted. The writers
and critics did not see themselves as belonging to a defined movement. Its
gradual taking shape is discussed by René Wellek in his book Concepts of
Criticism in which he points out that the term “romantic poetry” was first
used to refer, for example, to the romances of Ariosto or Tasso (p. 131). As
Wellek further maintains, the term romantic was also used for Shakespeare,
and the “classical – romantic” contradiction was crystallised only later in
August Wilhelm Schlegel´s Berlin lectures from 1801 to 1804. Wellek follows
a gradual domestication of the concept in other European literatures as well
(French, English, northern as well as Slavic literatures). I will be concerned,
however, only with the German version and its outgrowth to English
romantic theory, since this is the line which was followed by American
transcendentalism as well. It stems mainly from Schlegel´s aforementioned
distinction between the classical and the romantic. Classical is associated
with the poetry of the ancients, while romantic with modern poetry, with the
progressive and Christian (p. 135). Schlegel elaborates on this distinction
further in his Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature: “The ancient art and
poetry rigorously separate things which are dissimilar; the romantic delights
in indissoluble mixtures; all contrarieties: nature and art, poetry and prose,
seriousness and mirth, recollection and anticipation, spirituality and
sensuality, terrestrial and celestial, life and death, are by it blended together
in the most intimate combination” (2004).
Coleridge was strongly influenced by Schlegel´s thinking. His most
complex expression of the essence of romanticism can be found in the
lecture “On Poesy or Art” in which Coleridge tries, using elusively an almost
mystical language, to point out a mutual conditioning of nature, man, and the
supernatural principle. Art is, in his opinion, an imitation of nature, but it is
not irrelevant what is imitated and how. “The artist must imitate that which
is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure, and
discourses to us by symbols—the Natur-geist, or spirit of nature” (p. 397). “If
the artist copies the mere nature, the natura naturata, what idle rivalry” (p.
396)! It is necessary to “master the essence natura naturans, which
presupposes a bond between nature in the higher sense and the soul of
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