I’ve been enjoying following along in these M on M threads on form, although I can’t participate much online these days.
The passage from Coleridge quoted by Chris that stands out for me is:
Quote:
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The true ground of the mistake lies in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form. The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material;- as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes, as it developes, itself from within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form. Such as the life is, such is the form.
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Chris’s questions after the Coleridge quote got me thinking about Dante’s terza rima, which as everyone knows he invented for the
Divine Comedy. Coleridge’s definition is vaguely dualistic or just plain vague, so no wonder it’s been misinterpreted at times. This is where Dante can be instructive. He’s clearer than Coleridge, although on a similar wavelength. Dante wouldn’t have conceived of form as arising from the material. For him, form was the stamp or impress of Mind-Spirit on the material--which itself has its essence in its intelligibility--and so is an imitation of God’s creating act in the eternal present. Art in scholastic philosophy was not the finished object or art object, but a mental predisposition to making things well--it was a skill that resided in the mind of the artist. Form was transparent to the reality that gives and continually gives it being, the reality in which all things consist, including the artist’s mind. That this was Dante’s view of form in his mature poetics can be seen in his use of terza rima.
It’s often been pointed out how brilliant an innovation terza rima was for the narrative Dante had in mind, how the pattern infuses a forward motion into the story, since each tercet begins with a rhyme on the middle line of the previous tercet--one tercet spills into the next. Terza rima (it’s been said) combines past and future in this way, the new rhyme looking forward the old rhymes looking back, which is exactly Aristotle’s definition of time (which Dante quotes elsewhere): “a kind of middle-point, uniting in itself both a beginning and an end, a beginning of future time and an end of past time.” This temporality is important since the whole DC is so soaked in history (historical figures, events, etc.), even as it pictures and reaches for transcendence. This forward-look of each tercet and its backward-twist to the tercet before it suggest the shape of a spiral, which itself mirrors the plotline of Dante’s story since the movement of Dante and Virgil through Inferno and Purgatorio traces a spiral, to the left and going down in the Inferno and to the right and going up in Purgatorio.
Then there’s the numerology behind terza rima: Each tercet is composed of 3 11-syllable lines, totaling 33 syllables, which is age of Christ’s ministry (traditionally he died at age 33 and 1/3, so the extra line that ends each canto provides this fraction as well). Each tercet mirrors the overall structure of the entire poem, which is made up of 3 canticles, each of which has 33 cantos (plus 1 in the Inferno which is a proem to the whole). 3 is the number of the Trinity, the 3-in-1 which each tercet and the entire DC imitates in its 3-in-1 structure.
This kind of conscious architecture seems to contradict what Coleridge says about form, since it’s hardly “spontaneous” in the trite sense that some have applied to Coleridge’s concept. Or does it contradict the organic-mechanical dichotomy that Coleridge posits? It could be said that terza rima “develops itself from within,” since it’s an imitation of the archetypal structure of the cosmos as Dante and his contemporaries viewed it (e.g., Augustine’s “traces” of the Trinity in creation, which was picked up by Aquinas and Bonaventure). But this would be so because the same structure forms the foundation of the human mind--so Dante’s imitation of creation is at the same time a rehearsal of his inner self. There’s no distinction between the two, in his view, so any form that arises from that intersection would have to be organic,
natura naturans, an “imitation of nature in its manner of operation,” as Aquinas put it--not
natura naturata, nature imitated as if from outside, which I think is the same (more or less) as what Coleridge says about mechanical form.
The idea that “organic” in Coleridge’s essay means “whatever pops into your head” is obviously easy to debunk. Our egos take up way too much of our line of vision for that approach to work. Terza rima is about as clear an instance as possible of form that arises from the nature of things (as Dante and many medieval mystics saw it), while at the same time it gave Dante a huge and supple and flowing edifice for shaping and drawing out his endlessly rich imagination and thought.