student abroad
my presentation at the international coleridge summer conference By Joseph Donovan
T
he English Romantic Samuel Taylor Coleridge (right)is perhaps best known as a poet, with his masterful poems “Kubla Khan,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and “Frost at Midnight” which add to his reknown. Yet he may be one of the most prolific and important philosophers of the nineteenth century. His extensive writings on metaphysics, theology, aesthetics, epistemology and political science demonstrate an eager and ingenious mind at the crossroads of British empiricism and German idealism, a mind uniquely and personally devoted to the discovery of an ultimate, unifying Truth in a period of Western philosophy that was so strongly polarized.
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Under the direction of Ave Maria Literature Department chair and resident Coleridge scholar Dr. Michael Raiger, I had the great honor and privilege this summer to be the first undergraduate to present a paper at the International Coleridge Summer Conference in Cannington, Somerset, England, where I discussed the role of music in Coleridge’s aesthetic theories. This study of the relationship between Coleridge’s philosophy and his exposure to art has been a new area of interest in Coleridge scholarship. Dr. Raiger has recently made the argument that Coleridge’s conversion to Trinitarian theology, and his subsequent exposure to Catholic renaissance art
during his time in Malta and Rome in 1804-1805, were instrumental in the development of his influential theory of symbol in The Statesman’s Manual, as well as his theories of aesthetics and art advanced in The Principles of Genial Criticism. In my paper, I was able to follow up on that connection by demonstrating Coleridge’s love for Catholic Renaissance sacred music, which he heard during his time in Rome. I argued that his exposure to music at this time in his life inspired him to consider music one of the greatest of arts. In an entry from his notebooks a year before he died, Coleridge says this of music: “Yet I sometimes think, that a great Composer, a Mozart, a Beethoven