Introduction

A ruined seat of hereditary authority provides a landscape through which the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge looks to reshape meaning, history, sensibility, and our affective bonds to place. Transformed from Milton’s “‘Most musical, most melancholy’ Bird!,” Coleridge gives us a communicative and inquisitive bird: a “merry Nightingale / That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates / With fast thick warble his delicious notes” (ll. 13 and 43–5). In the grove, night-time becomes a canvas for the imagination, a space to see with different senses. Worship and devotion are brought out of doors and given to wild nature. Coleridge’s speaker’s somewhat polemical stance on the aesthetics of the past nevertheless uses and incorporates the material forms and the discursive products of preceding generations. The poem asks us to re-organize our senses and rethink our associations, to close our eyes so that we can “perchance behold [the nightingales] on the twigs” (l. 65) and to forgo the mannered appropriation of the natural world. That these signature elements of the Romantic revolution lie “hard by” the fragments and ruins of past institutions tells us something, ultimately, about the way that national consciousness and national identity cohere over generations and eras, absorbing discontinuities, and weaving a stable sense of ethnic nationhood out of disparate threads. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Aesthetics · Appropriation · Art · Art history · Behold · Literature · Romance · Sensibility · History · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy

• The dialectics of seeing

  Susan Buck-Mor, Susan Buck-Morss•The dialectics of seeing•1989

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