HIGHER CRITICISM

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 532, 2 September 1949, Page 13

HIGHER CRITICISM

COLERIDGE AS CRITIC, by Herbert Read; Feber and Faber, London, 1949. English price, 6/-. LAST year, at a symposium on "The Great Critics," held at John Hopkins University, Herbert: Read contributed a lecture on Coleridge: that lecture, considerably expanded and fortified with an appendix on Richard Woltereck that will be of interest to philosophers, forms the substance of this 40-page monograph. It is possible to prove almost anything out of Coleridge; and Mr. Read has no difficulty in showing that "writing before Kierkegaard was born, Coleridge had already formulated the terms of an existentialist philosophy." He is also able to demonstrate that Coleridge was familiar with Vico’s Scienza Nuova in Italian before that seminal book (with which philosphers and philologists have not yet caught up) had any European currency. Mr, Read is perhaps more successful in emphasising again the extraordinary range and catholicity of Coleridge’s mind, than in proving his powers of systematisation. But he makes here a spirited plea for the philosopher in Coleridge (whom the purely literary critics have so often condemned), credits him with the first introduction in English of a philosophical method of criticism, and claims that in philosophy Coleridge, "‘so far from being mediocre, anticipated in many import-

ant respects the point of view to which the philosophy of our own time is busily

returning:

J.

B.