Coleridge
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"Genius" was,
of course a word dear to the Romantic movement. Barfield uses it sparingly
but with emphasis.
In What Coleridge
Thought, for example, he quotes Coleridge
on genius approvingly.
In Man the
centripetal and individualizing tendency of all Nature is itself concentrated
and individualized--he is a revelation of Nature! Henceforward he is referred
to himself, delivered up to his own charge; and he who stands the most
on himself, and stands the firmest, is the truest, because the most individual,
Man. In social and political life this acme is interdependence; in moral
life it is independence; in intellectual life it is genius. (Coleridge,
quoted in WCT 68)
In Speaker's
Meaning, Barfield supplies his own history of the concept, attempting
to ascertain its significance for the evolution of consciousness.
We must
say . . . that the history of poetic psychology is the story of a superindividual
psychology, which extends from as far back as can be investigated up to
at least the Renaissance, but with reverberations still going on much later;
and which only then begins to be transformed into something like an individual
psychology. Then it becomes, or begins to become, a psychology of individual
"genius." And so the word "genius" changes its meaning. Originally the
genius was a spirit-being, other than the
poet himself (though certainly with a special relation to the poet himself);
but that is not what we mean by genius today. The Romans (for it is a Latin
word) would never have said of a man he is a genius. They would have said
that he had, or was accompanied or inspired by, a genius. We prefer to
say that he is one. (SM 78)
See in particular
Speaker's
Meaning, Chap. 3. |
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