Voice, judgment, and the innocence of self in Coleridge

pp. 205-214

in: Peter Larkin, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

For Hazlitt, the precociously postmature Coleridge, his best work 20 years behind him, could be said "to have lived on the sound of his own voice" ever since.¹ That begs the question of what it was Coleridge's voice was sounding. With such breath, more than an echo of exhausted ideas, a vocational breadth becomes implicated, a need for judgment to call out even before analysis gets called in. What is it to own a voice, before and after which writing realigns itself as an active hearing? The sound of one's voice is what detects the whisper of another voice in a literal recovery of sounding judgment. The Letters can ascribe to voice both conscience and principle (CL III 731); the Notebooks exclaim, "Let Truth make her voice audible!" only to confess that the author while preparing his pen has mislaid his train of thought (CN II 2564). Invocation appears to displace inscription or what is inscribed records something seemingly answered by itself. Even where Coleridge is convinced of the inner voice he can still wish his "whole Being were as clear in listening to, & obeying that Voice within" (CL III 735). Is the vocative position ontologically vacuous, however, as when Coleridge observes that the "Vocative is no proper case; but expresses a mere accident of the Voice in calling to a distinct Subject" (CM III 832). It may still be no more that "a single Gust, as it were, of articulated Air" (CN IV 4748).