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• Title: An Experiment in Honesty: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's the Friend (Conservative Minds Revisited) (Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Conservatism can be Observed in the Friend, A Serial Publication)
• Author : Modern Age
• Release Date : January 22, 2003
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 239 KB

Description

CONSERVATIVES TODAY OWE A debt of gratitude to Russell Kirk for rightly seeing in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's mature thought a great deal more than the epithet "romantic poet" might suggest. Still, some may wonder how exactly Coleridge--notorious for his opium addiction, youthful enthusiasm for the French Revolution, intellectual fixation with German Romanticism, estranged family life, amorous obsessions, bohemian lifestyle, plagiarisms, and long-held interest in establishing a utopian community--found a place among Kirk's pantheon of conservative minds. To imagine the one-time wayfarer of the Lake District and author of the laudanum-inspired "Kubla Kahn" in Kirk's "august line of English Christian" thinkers--Richard Hooker, John Milton, the Cambridge Platonists, Edmund Burke, and John Henry Newman--seems, at first thought, rather unlikely. One of the virtues of Kirk's account of Coleridge's conservatism is that he never becomes sidetracked by his subject's infamous biography. In an age of Benthamite industrialists and entrepreneurs, men of matter, Coleridge argued in The Constitution of the Church and State for the necessity of ideas in directing men's lives and in guiding the nation. For Kirk, Coleridge demonstrated that "religion and politics are inseparable, that the decay of one must produce the decay of the other." (1) Kirk praised Coleridge's spirited Platonic defense of church and state, a defense that separated the idea of both institutions from their worldly deficiencies. He also lauded Coleridge's notion of a national clerisy--a third estate that maintains and advances the cultivation of the people--as a means of safeguarding the masses from becoming alienated from the church. Like Burke's "ever-originating" social contract, Kirk's Coleridge understood the ideal of church and state as an ongoing agreement "between God and man and among several elements of society, a spiritual reality that can be discerned only by spiritual perception." (2) For Kirk, Coleridge is therefore the "real" philosopher of conservatism among the Romantic generation, the heir of Burke's politics of prescription who foreshadowed the careers of John Keble and John Henry Newman, and who later became a source of "inspiration for Disraeli and conservative reformers a century afterward." (3)

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