Silence and the Pantheistic Sublime in Coleridge's Early Poetry

ilence plays an intriguing role in eighteenth century accounts of the sublime. It is often present in lists of sublime objects, typically (as in Burke) associated with the other privations—darkness, solitude etc.2 In the course of the century there was a huge variety of increasingly intricate speculations on the sublime, leaving behind their Longinian origins in rhetoric and variously becoming subjectivized, more clearly defined in distinction from beauty, and associated with experiences of the infinite.3 By the early 1800s someone like Richard Payne Knight could articulate a theory in which privations like silence and darkness are specifically associated with the infinite because the infinite is itself a privation of limits or boundaries.4 It seems quite characteristic that Coleridge would pick out the word ‘silence’ from this background, and recognize the philosophical and poetic resources latent in it. This is significant because Effusion XXXV (later to become The Eolian Harp) begins with silence. Quietness, of the familiar soon-to-be-interrupted kind, pervades the opening lines; and although the word ‘silence’ does not occur until line 11—when the interruption occurs—it marks the beginning of the philosophical and linguistic complexity of the poem: S