"Striking Passages": Memory and the Romantic Imprint (Critical Essay‪)‬

BURIED IN THE MIDDLE OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE'S BIOGRAPHIA literaria (1817) is an unusual little paragraph, one that (unsurprisingly) offers a critique of Wordsworth's poetic theory based on the elusive mechanisms of a (surprisingly) disordered memory. According to Coleridge, "the pleasure received from Wordsworth's poems being less derived either from excitement of curiosity or the rapid flow of narration, the striking passages form a larger proportion of their value." (1) And these "striking passages," Coleridge continues, find their own independent life in the memory of their reader: many people confess that "from no modem work had so many passages started up anew in their minds at different times" (2:106). Isolating themselves in the mind, they arise, we're told, "without reference to the poem in which they are found" (2:106). This decontexmalization and subsequent relocation of such passages matters to Coleridge in part because he sees it as the effect of an historical shift in the relationship of poetry to memory, one explicitly linked to the invention of print culture: In an oral culture, then, the memorization of poetry was facilitated by its rhythmic consensus, its integrity as a "series." But this changed, Coleridge says, with the introduction of print.