4. Emily Brontë and Coleridge

Coleridge's spirit of creation spans the Romantic period and also survives a change in medium from poetry to philosophy. Apart from an occasional, almost incidental parallel between Wuthering Heights and The Ancient Mariner, the relation between Emily Brontë and Coleridge has not been investigated by Brontë scholars. This is probably owing to the elusive nature of any ‘facts’ about her private reading, in addition to conclusions which might be drawn from her own statement that she was temperamentally lazy in pursuing systematic courses of studies.32 Her poems, indeed, are full of echoes of the Mariner; but apart from this, there is also a sympathetic resonance between some of their central ideas, implicit and explicit, which suggests that she had read enough of his prose work to gather an essential idea of the working of his mind. She may, for example, have read the Biographia Literaria; perhaps The Statesman's Manual or On the Constitution of the Church and State, which was written in connection with the issues of the Reform Bill of 1832 — a subject of great excitement amongst the young Brontës and their father. Emily Brontë's explicit philosophy is most openly and simply expressed in her poetry. But the deeper metaphysical parallels which I wish to draw out here, require comparison with Wuthering Heights, where she comes to grips with the issues of mental growth which Coleridge formulated in a particularly profound and poetic way. As always, when comparing poetic principles, the degree of direct ‘influence’ must remain conjectural. My aim here, is to describe how Emily Brontë's evolving pattern of a hero has essential links with Coleridge's conception of a man of genius — which itself has its roots in the vibrant emotionality of The Ancient Mariner.

The central principles in Coleridge's poetic philosophy, which are relevant to Emily Brontë, are: the foundation of all true thought in feeling, and the distinction between the ‘man of genius’ who is able to think symbo