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Details
COLERIDGE, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834). Autograph annotations signed (with initials, 'S.T.C.'), including 2½ lines of verse, in his copy of Friedrich Girardet (tr.), Hebels Allemannische Gedichte (Leipzig: Joh. Friedr. Hartknopf, 1821), the annotations on front and rear free endpapers, 3 pages, small 4to, a few other annotations (mostly translations) to five other pages (printed text pages browned with damp-staining in places), contemporary half-leather (rubbed, hinges weak). Provenance: Edward Hogg (friend of Coleridge; signatures to inside u.c. and front free endpaper).
Coleridge's first note comprises a draft translation for a verse, including a play on the words 'pens' and 'pence', which he admits to be 'an execrable Pun; but in a Pothouse Didactic Doggrel not the worse for that'. The remainder of the manuscript is an extended meditation on nature comparisons, criticising 'the arbritrary unvisual or rather contra-visual character of the Personifications' in Hebel's poems, as well as their length: 'when the Analogy is that of visible Shape, some Likeness there must be, however faint! It must be conceivable, that a Poet in a high state of excitement might have had such and such recollections of the human form', an argument he reinforces with a personal recollection, 'in describing a File of large Firs or Pines at irregular distances from each other but all in the same Line ... on a high Bank by the Sea shore, all the branches Sea-ward stubbed and shorn by the effects of the Sea-blast, I had the image of Bacchanti suggested to my mind -- "In the dim twilight glimpse they seem'd to flee From the fierce Sea blast, all their Tresses wild Streaming before them"'. Coleridge uses the same lines (which are his own composition) in two different forms in a passage of Biographia Literaria, Ch.15, also in relation to nature comparisons.
Coleridge's first note comprises a draft translation for a verse, including a play on the words 'pens' and 'pence', which he admits to be 'an execrable Pun; but in a Pothouse Didactic Doggrel not the worse for that'. The remainder of the manuscript is an extended meditation on nature comparisons, criticising 'the arbritrary unvisual or rather contra-visual character of the Personifications' in Hebel's poems, as well as their length: 'when the Analogy is that of visible Shape, some Likeness there must be, however faint! It must be conceivable, that a Poet in a high state of excitement might have had such and such recollections of the human form', an argument he reinforces with a personal recollection, 'in describing a File of large Firs or Pines at irregular distances from each other but all in the same Line ... on a high Bank by the Sea shore, all the branches Sea-ward stubbed and shorn by the effects of the Sea-blast, I had the image of Bacchanti suggested to my mind -- "In the dim twilight glimpse they seem'd to flee From the fierce Sea blast, all their Tresses wild Streaming before them"'. Coleridge uses the same lines (which are his own composition) in two different forms in a passage of Biographia Literaria, Ch.15, also in relation to nature comparisons.
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