Carl-Ludwig Conning

Scholarship at the Swedish Institute in Rome

In 1806, the English poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) lived in Rome. There, he first met the American painter Washington Allston (1779–1843), who had studied art at the Royal Academy in England before coming to Rome in 1805. While in Rome, Coleridge and Allston discussed art and philosophy. Coleridge stated bluntly in a letter (postmarked 22 August 1806) that, “by my regular attention to the best of the good things in Rome, and associating almost wholly with the Artists of acknowledged highest reputation[,] I acquired more insight into the fine arts in the three months, than I could have done in England in 20 years”.[1] Allston, in turn, would state that: “To no other man do I owe so much intellectually as to Mr. Coleridge, with whom I became acquainted in Rome, and who has honored me with his friendship for more than five and twenty years”. Indeed, Allston added that, “when I recall some of our walks under the pines of the Villa Borghese, I am almost tempted to dream that I have once listened to Plato in the groves of the Academy”.[2]

This fall semester, as the grateful recipient of the scholarship at Istituto Svedese di Studi Classici a Roma, I will pursue work on Coleridge’s encounter with Allston and the fine arts. This work is part of my doctoral dissertation in English literature, which has the working title, Imperfection and Romanticism: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and His Circle. Coleridge’s work often appears in fragmented textual forms, such as letters, notebook entries, marginalia, or unfinished manuscripts. Indeed, Coleridge even presented one of his most famous poems, “Kubla Khan: or A Vision in a Dream” (1797/1816), as a “fragment”, and in the 1809 “Prospectus” to his periodical The Friend he had lamented the fact that his intellectual work had amounted to “a Mass” of “miscellaneous Fragments”. When he died in 1834, his projected “Opus Maximum”—which he thought would be “a revolution of all that has been called Philosophy”[3]—existed of a series of manuscript fragments. As of the early 2000s, the critical editions of Coleridge’s Collected Works, Notebooks, and Collected Letters are complete in 50 volumes. Since the completion of these editions, critics have been able to re-examine the fragmentary form of Coleridge’s work. A more precise understanding of the intellectual progression, coherence, and context of Coleridge’s thought is now possible. My dissertation on imperfection in Coleridge’s work is a contribution to this scholarly investigation. I argue that imperfection is a form of progression, process, and intellectual creativity in Coleridge’s work. I argue, moreover, that imperfection offers Coleridge a literary and philosophical form by which he can—in a seemingly paradoxical way—support his belief in the absolute perfection of God. To develop this argument, I show that imperfection in Coleridge’s work is directly related to his interest in natural science, philosophy, theology, and the fine arts. While Coleridge’s engagement with the fine arts has received comparatively little scholarly attention, I argue that the notion of imperfection in Coleridge’s work must be examined in relation to his encounter with the fine arts. At the Istituto Svedese di Studi Classici a Roma, I am particularly well-positioned to develop this argument of my doctoral dissertation.

[1] Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 vols., ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1956–1971), vol. II, 1178.
[2] Jared B. Flagg, The Life and Letters of Washington Allston (New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1892), 64.
[3] Collected Letters, vol. V, 28.

Email: carl-ludwig.conning@english.su.se