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William Wordsworth, in his poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” recalling his past excursions into the wilds of Wales, wrote of those memories:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet. (Wordsworth, 132).
The din of the cities he refers to here is the newly urbanized England created by the industrial revolution. The Romantic Poets of England wrote during a time when England turned from a primarily agricultural society to an industrial, urbanized society within a generation. The dehumanizing effects of factory labor, cramped unsanitary living conditions, and the prevailing empirical philosophies of the day, were great concerns to Wordsworth and his colleagues. In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads he states, “For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind and … reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor” (Wordsworth, 599). The empirical epistemology, that nothing can be known except through empirical evidence derived from the scientific method, was one of the elements of this newly mechanized world that annoyed Coleridge. In a letter to Thomas Poole written in 1797, he voiced this opinion about the Empiricists of his day; “They contemplate nothing but parts—and all parts are necessarily little—and the Universe to them is but a mass of little things…but when they looked at great things, all became a blank and they saw nothing” (Hill, 6). It was against this “despotism of the eye” that Coleridge and Wordsworth fought. Wordsworth turned to poetry, and Coleridge turned to theory as their preferred means of raining higher truths down upon what they saw as a dried and desperate humanity.
Tolkien and his Inkling friends faced a very similar circumstance nearly 150 years later. World War I had introduced Europe to mechanized weaponry, as well as new and devastating chemical weaponry. Man, through science, had developed an unprecedented ability to kill each other. The depravity that an “Enlightened” Europe had sunk to, deeply affected Tolkien and his Inkling friends, some of whom, including Tolkien himself, fought on the front lines and witnessed the deaths of friends firsthand. They lived in an academic culture that emphasized the “hard” sciences over their area of interests: literature and philology. As Weston, the ultimate positivist from Out of the Silent Planet says upon meeting Ransom, “I don’t care two-pence what school he was at nor on what unscientific foolery he is at present wasting money that ought to go to research” (Lewis, 15). Like the romantic poets before them, the Inklings felt a great loss as the wonders of nature and mankind were being reduced to a series of chemical or mathematical formulae. The similarity of the movements against which these two groups of writers were pushing would predictably align much of their thought. In fact, both Owen Barfield and J.R.R. Tolkien drew deeply upon the foundational concepts of the Romantic Poets in order to develop their own theories concerning literature and its function.
Coleridge, like Barfield, spent much of his energies theorizing on poetry, instead of actually writing poetry. One aspect of his poetic theory that had much influence on Tolkien was his attempt to separate the meanings of the words ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination.’ The word ‘imagination’ had heretofore been used simply as the image making center of the brain, that part which reproduces the sense-data after the sensation has been removed. It is only under Romanticist philosophy that it came to be understood as an analogue to the supreme creative act (Seeman, 76). It was very important to Coleridge, philosophically, to clearly separate the terms imagination and fancy. For him they described two different processes in the making and receiving of good poetry. He says in a letter to Richard Sharp, “Imagination, or the modifying Power in that highest sense of the word in which I have ventured so oppose it to Fancy, or the aggregating power—in that sense in which it is a dim Analogue of Creation” (Hill, 50). The fancy simply took two unlike elements and put them together in the mind. The imagination performs a much higher purpose. It not only combines, or aggregates, but modifies to make an entirely new form, which has a life of its own. The ability of the mind of man to create new form was a proof of the divine spark within mankind, “To develop the powers of the Creator is our proper employment—and to imitate Creativeness by combination our most exalted and self-satisfying delight…Our Almighty Parent hath therefore given to us Imagination” (Hill, 27). Coleridge saw the highest goal of poetry to be a co-creating experience in the mind of both poet and reader; not to make a world that “imitates the created world, but constitutes an equivalent creation of its own” (Abrams, 6). To Coleridge, Imagination was the very soul of poetry. He laments in a letter to William Godwin, “The Poet is dead in me—my imagination” (Hill, 36).
Although Wordsworth did not go to the pains of separating out the semantic differences between ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination,’ he did have a similar view as to the function of the imagination. In “Tintern Abbey” he again relates the co-creative nature of the mind of man:
…Of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half-create
And what they perceive” (Wordsworth, 134).
Eyes and ears don’t just receive pure data and feed it into a perfect recording system. They only half create the reality around him and his mind does the other half of the creating. This is the imagination which blends the sense data received and then fills it in with mood, meaning and memory to create the subjective reality in which we live. In his “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads” he says, “I wished to draw attention to the truth, that the power of the human imagination is sufficient to produce such changes even in our physical nature as might appear miraculous” (611). For Wordsworth the imaginative mind even co-creates the character of the individual as well.
There are very obvious resonances between the Romantic view of imagination’s co-creative powers, and Tolkien’s Sub-creation. Tolkien, like Coleridge, takes time in “On Fairy-Stories” to define Fantasy as being distinct from Imagination, but disagrees with Coleridge’s technical definition of Imagination; “Imagination has often been held to be something higher than the mere image making, ascribed to the operations of Fancy” (Fairy, 68). Tolkien returns ‘imagination’ to its classical meaning, and then chooses another word to denote co-creative art: Fantasy. Tolkien does not use ‘fantasy’ in the same exact manner as Coleridge uses imagination, however. He states, “I require a word which shall embrace both the Sub-Creative art in itself and a quality of strangeness and wonder in the Expression, derived from the image” (68). He is not simply swapping the meanings from one word to the other; the first part of this definition is much the same as Coleridge’s ‘imagination,’ but the second half is wholly Tolkien’s. Fantasy, in Tolkien’s hands, comes to mean not just the sub-creative act itself but “a distinct artistic mode” (Seeman, 76). In this new mode of high art, Tolkien is not only trying to achieve secondary belief, but is trying to do so “with images of things…which are indeed not to be found in our primary world” (Fairy, 69). The Romantic Poets sought to use natural imagery from the common world around them, expressed with such language as would engage the co-creative, imaginative mind of the reader, thus creating new form. Tolkien takes them a step further; he attempts to achieve this co-creative act, but in a world dissimilar to our own. Tolkien was the master of implementing his own theories into his works. Not only is sub-creation the invisible scaffold upon which The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion were built, but he has provided ample examples of it within the texts themselves. A prime example of this is the experience that the hobbits have in the house of Tom Bombadil. As Tom relates to the hobbits the story of the Old Forrest, Tolkien never tells us the actual words that Tom uses, but only expresses the image created by his words; “Suddenly Tom’s talk left the woods and went leaping up the young stream, over bubbling waterfalls, over pebbles and worn rocks…wandering at last up on to the Downs” (LOTR, 130). Tom’s words create a living world in which the Old Forest and the hobbits are but a part. The words Tom says, act upon the imagination in Frodo’s mind which creates the world anew in Frodo’s mind and continues to grow until it encompasses the entirety of the creation of Middle Earth, “and still on and back Tom went singing out into ancient starlight” (131). Like Tom, Tolkien has expressed, in elements both strange and yet believable, a story which, with the cooperation of the reader, achieves true secondary belief so that a new and fresh reality is created in the mind. (See my post on Tom Bombadil below)
These musings concerning imagination, Fantasy, and Sub-creative art, spring from a larger question: what is the use of such art? Wordsworth used his preface to the Lyrical Ballads to make a “systematic defense of the theory, upon which the poems were written” (Wordsworth, 595) Speaking of poetry in general he says:
Its object is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative; not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion; truth which is its own testimony, which gives strength and divinity to the tribunal to which it appeals and receives them from the same tribunal. (605)
This powerful statement argues directly against the positivists of his day. Though the scientific method can reveal many truths, it is not the supreme arbiter of truth, for there is truth that lies wholly outside of the capacity of science to even comment on. Poetry can elucidate truth; truth that cannot be got at through the scientific method, but in fact flow into the extra sensitive mind of the poet through nature, and to the reader through the gift of the poets language, and the imagination of the reader. As he states, this truth is “operational,” meaning that the truths that come from poetry are of an ontological and axiological nature, not an empirical one. It is to these truths that Wordsworth is referring when he writes in “Tintern Abbey,”
Well pleased to recognize
In nature and the nature of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the Nurse
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being. (133)
It is not just the positivist cause and effect that is important to mankind, but the meaning of such effects. As Coleridge points out in a lecture given in 1795, “the noblest gift of Imagination is the power of discerning the Cause in the Effect” (Hill, 27). To give the surrounding world new meaning was the effect that good poetry could give mankind.
It was exactly on this concept of meaning that Barfield spent much of his time theorizing. He was a true disciple of the Romantic poets and saw his theories as the coming to fruition of what they started; as expressed in his book called Romanticism Comes of Age. He too saw that the prevailing theories of his day had led men into a desiccated understanding of poetry and language in general. He turned to the Romantic Poets, not his contemporaries, to better understand language. The linguists of his day held that language had in general moved from a primitive form in which each word referred to a simple, physical object or phenomena, toward increasingly complex meanings and metaphorical expressions. When Barfield read Shelley’s "In Defense of Poetry" he found that Shelley had observed the exact opposite trend; “In the infancy of society, every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry” (Barfield, 58). Barfield agreed with Shelley and went against the prevailing theories. He showed that all meaning is metaphorical and that a study of the history of poetics reveals that the oldest civilizations employed the most metaphorical language; “Because of this radical correspondence between visible things and human thoughts, savages, who have only what is necessary, converse in figures. As we go back in history language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy when it is all poetry; or all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols” (Barfield, 92). It is not that words used in the infancy of mankind were used to mean more things—words simply meant more, because they encompassed both material and abstract, spiritual meanings at the same time. Modern Language has lost the ability to contain these large amalgamated meanings because it has been splitting and specializing for thousands of years, and now each word used today actually has less meaning (69). Because of this, Barfield believed that it was in the power of the poet to recreate meaning by joining words anew, that the future of language lay. This refreshing of meaning through poetry brings with it a rejuvenated perception of the world itself. Barfield quotes from Shelley’s poem “Asia,” “My soul is an enchanted boat/ Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float/ upon the silver waves of thy singing.” He says, “The image contains so much truth and beauty that henceforth the eyes with which I behold real boats and waves and swans, the ears with which in the right mood I listen to a song, are actually somewhat different (55).
The Lake poets saw this effect, of remaking the mundane in the readers mind so that the common world could take on rejuvenated life, as one of the noble ends to which poetry ought to aspire. As Coleridge writes in his magnum opus, Biograhia Literaria, “To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances, which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar” (Coleridge, 155). It is the unique ability of the poet to take ordinary things and, “throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way” (Wordsworth, 597).
As with his concepts of sub-creative art, Tolkien drew heavily upon this foundation laid by the Romantic tradition, and then added to it. In “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien states very clearly what he believed was the desired effect of his art. He says, “But fairy-stories offer also, in a peculiar degree of mode, these things: Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, Consolation” (Fairy, 67). Speaking of fantasy, Tolkien sounds very much like Coleridge when he says, “We make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker” (Fairy, 75). Tolkien’s thoughts on Recovery closely parallel those of Coleridge, but with another addition. He says, “We should look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue…we should meet the centaur and the dragon, and then perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds, sheep, and dogs and horses. This recovery, fairy-stories help us to make” (Fairy, 77). This part follows very near to the idea of Coleridge’s that good poetry ought to bring novelty back to life, but Tolkien adds to this concept a “regaining” facet; “Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a regaining—regaining of a clear view. I do not say ‘Seeing things as they are,’ though I might venture to say ‘seeing things as we are …meant to see them’” (77). So Tolkien not only finds a refreshing of form, but also a source of deeper truth with the regaining concept of Recovery.
There is a fantastic example of what Tolkien means by Recovery in The Lord of the Rings, in the chapter “Houses of the Healing,” Aragorn heals Faramir of the Black Breath using Athelas leaves. Athelas is, to all but Aragorn, a weed; and as the herb master says “it has no virtue.” Despite this, Aragorn, the master healer, takes the leaves and, “laid them on his hands and breathed on them, and then he crushed them, and straightway a living freshness filled the room” (865). The scent of the leaves brings to the minds of those present memories of the world when it was alive and young. Of course the remedy brings Faramir back from the brink of death. As soon as Faramir awakes he says, “My lord you called me. I come. What does the king command” (866)? Athelas is an analogue of what Tolkien sees as the value of Recovery in fantasy. When the world around us is seen constantly through a Positivist lens, it loses its magic, and may seem to be of no value. But in the hands of a master of fantasy, that black breath is blown away and a new and fresh world is perceived. As with Faramir, who sees the Stewardship for what it ought to be, the reader of fantasy done right can gain deeper meaning as the world around him is seen as it ought to be seen.
This concept of seeing things in the way they ought to be seen is also something that Barfield wrote about. He explains in Poetic Diction that through the use of new poetic metaphor, poets create new meaning in words. This creation, he explains, is “not some fantastic ‘creation out of nothing’, but the bringing farther into consciousness of something which already exists as unconscious life” (112). The relationship between words never brought together already exists, and it is the poet who discovers them and then brings them into the reader’s consciousness. In effect, the poet sees the relationship between words “as they ought to be seen” and in so doing brings new and greater meaning to words.
There is one last aspect of Romantic Poetry that ought to be covered when comparing it to the work of Tolkien and that is the use of nature in both of their works. Romantic poetry is so associated with nature scenes that it is often referred to as Nature poetry. The relationship between man and nature as a whole was a very important topic to the Romanticists who saw the fields of England being enclosed and cities springing up, bristling with factory towers huffing with coal driven steam engines. As previously shown, Wordsworth found in nature the “anchor” of his mortal Soul (133). Coleridge wrote in one of his notebooks, “In looking at the objects of nature…I have always an obscure feeling as if that new phenomenon were the dim awakening of a forgotten or hidden Truth of my inner Nature” (Havens, 127). To Coleridge, man is part of a greater whole, and as such we have in our minds the veiled remembrance of the whole of nature. He theorized that good poetry should express a Natura naturans (nature naturing) and not a Natura naturata (nature natured). Nature was not something formed, but forming. Nature was something that was becoming, and man was co-participating in that becoming. Throughout Tolkien’s LOTR, nature plays a very active role. In the creation story, or Ainulindalë, Tolkien writes of the Ainur, “their power should thenceforward be contained and bounded in the World, to be with it forever, until it is complete, so that they are its life and it is theirs. And therefore they are named the Valar, the Powers of the World” (Silmarillion, 10) Here it can be seen that Tolkien perceived Middle-earth as continually creating. The Valar are still creating the earth during the time frame that the story contained in LOTR is happening. As Micheal Havens points out, it is Coleridge’s Natura Naturans realized (Havens, 127).
One of the great benefits of being in nature was to achieve a sense of the sublime. The Romantic notion of the sublime was created by a dramatic (usually mountainous) landscape which overwhelmed the physical senses and forced the imagination to engage in order to comprehend it. In one of Coleridge’s famous notebooks he gave an example of what he thought created the sublime. He said that “A mountain in a cloudless sky, its summit hidden by clouds and seemingly blended with the sky, while mists and floating vapors encompass it, is sublime” (Sandner, 4). For Coleridge it was the inability of the eye to make out the entire object that created the sense of sublime. The mind, knowing that there is more to the scene than it can perceive must engage the imagination to fill in the parts of the story that the eye cannot. The sense that we are seeing only a portion of the whole and that the scene extends beyond our ability to see creates the sense of the sublime. It is this sense of the sublime that Tolkien alone has been able to create in the minds of his readers. The infiniteness of his creation can leave the mind reeling. The vastness of the lore and histories gives the impression that they have only just been touched upon by Tolkien. The story actually achieves the sense that it extends out in time, infinitely in both directions, and that we are only glimpsing a portion of the story that Tolkien brought to light. Tolkien tried to create a world that felt real, in order to accomplish his ideals for fantasy. To do this he created histories that are never fully explained and makes references to stories that are only vaguely filled in. While there is no evidence to show that Tolkien was aware that this incompleteness also created a Romantic feeling of sublime, it does nonetheless.
On March 26th, 1802 Wordsworth wrote these lines:
My Heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky
So was it when my life began
So it is now I am a man
So be it when I shall grow old
Or let me die! (Wordsworth, 246)
He wrote these lines to an audience whose concept of light had been shaped by Newton's prism. The magical beauty of the rainbow was being sheered away by the Empirical lens that people saw it through. He was fighting to give to his English readers renewed meaning that would make their “hearts leap up” the next time they saw one. More than one hundred years later, Barfield wrote:
That light observes—not light through Newton’s hole
(The force we see by when we are not blind)
But light inbreathed by man’s adoring soul (Reader, 31).
Works Cited
Abrams, M.H. et al, eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 3rd ed. Vol. 2. Newyork: Norton and Co., 1974.
Coleridge, S. T. “Biographia Literaria.”Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge. Donald Stauffer ed. New York: Random House, 1951.
Hill, John Spencer, ed. Imagination in Coleridge. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978.
Lewis, C.S. Out of the Silent Planet. New York: Scribner, 2003.
Seeman, Chris. “Tolkien’s Revision of the Romantic Tradition.” Mythlore 21.2 (1996): 76.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.
Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy-Stories.” The Tolkien Reader. New York: Random House, 1966.
Wordsworth, William. “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey On Revisiting the Bank of the Wye During a Tour.” The Oxford Authors: William Wordsworth. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
