A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

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Viewing chapter Coleridge (25 quotes)
“Unless you understand a writer’s ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Quoted in “At the Flip Points—” (1975), p 1
Quote #1167
Year: 1975
Coleridge pointed out that the poetry of his own day was tending towards the flat landscape of the Chinese painters. Let us keep in mind that pictographic and ideogrammic cultures appear, unlike alphabetic ones, to be able to retain the acoustic speech pitches of pre-literate man. And acoustic cultures seem to be easily and naturally at home in inner space.
“Space, Time and Poetry”, in Explorations 4 (1955), p 62, (2016) reprinted in McLuhan Unbound, #13, (2017), p 14
Quote #1168
Year: 1955
As the visual gradient of the Renaissance reached its ultimate development, the poets, from Blake and Coleridge to Hopkins and Yeats, strove to restore the unity of the imaginative life by creating a multisensuous interplay.
“The Emperor’s Old Clothes”, (1966), reprinted in McLuhan Unbound #20 (2017), p 6-7
Quote #1169
Year: 1966
For it was Coleridge as much as anybody who hastened the recognition of the poetic process as linked with the modes of ordinary cognition, and with the methods of the sciences. The very great effort he made to thread the labyrinth of the arts and sciences compelled him to an encyclopedism unapproached since Francis Bacon.
“Coleridge as Artist” (1957) in The Interior Landscape (1969), p 115
Quote #1170
Year: 1957
To approach Coleridge's art, however, it is necessary to see him at work amid the technical developments of the poetry of his time. For poetry being concerned with obtaining specific effects must always be seeking new means for these effects amid the constantly changing conditions of culture.
“Coleridge as Artist” (1957), in The Interior Landscape (1969), p 121
Quote #1171
Year: 1957
... for Coleridge his own acceptance of the theory of imagination and perception exemplified in the poetry of Wordsworth was a detriment to the continuance of poetic activity.
“Coleridge as Artist” (1957), in The Interior Landscape (1969), p 123
Quote #1172
Year: 1957
But already in a [Coleridge] poem “written in very early youth” there is the opening line which fixes amid the picturesque techniques the mature vision: Calm is all nature as a resting wheel.
“Coleridge as Artist” (1957), in The Interior Landscape (1969), p 123
Quote #1173
Year: 1957

Drawn to McLuhan #4

Color illustration of a tired-looking mother on a cluttered couch holding a baby, surrounded by several children of different ages, most of them absorbed in phones or the television rather than each other.
"We are not the true parents of our children."
Color illustration of a hand holding a wrinkled "Monthly Megabucks" alumni loan letter with a bold red "LOAN PAYMENT OVERDUE" stamp, spotlit against a black background.
"The trouble with a cheap specialized education is you never stop paying for it."
Mixed-media illustration of a pencil-sketched woman seen from behind looking into an ornate framed mirror; her reflection, rendered in full color, shows a polished professional alter-ego against a city skyline, beneath the caption "What AI Knows About You."
"The data banks know us better than we know ourselves."
Color illustration of a devastated, cracked cityscape with skyscrapers splitting apart and toppling into a flooded street beneath a smoky orange sky.
"The contained, the distinct, the separate – our Western legacy – are being replaced by the flowing, the unified, the fused."
Color comic illustration of Superman flying between two winged, haloed angels against a cloudy blue sky, visually likening him to a medieval angel.
"Superman is the comic strip brother of the medieval angels."
Color illustration of a street musician trio playing guitar, violin, and drum on a tree-lined urban path while a diverse crowd of people dance, cartwheel, and celebrate around them.
"Sound, in this new world of dance and song, is not for listening, it's for making."
Color comic-style illustration of a pilot and a woman having breakfast in an airport cafe overlooking the tarmac, where a ground crew member signals a parked jet with semaphore flags; a speech bubble reads "Weird. He just said to the pilot, 'Knock knock'..."
"If our new media constitute so complete a range of expressiveness as both to enhance and almost to supplant speech itself, then we will have moved into the period of post-literacy."
Color cartoon of scientists in lab coats dancing among physics laboratory equipment, with a speech bubble joking about subatomic particles "dancing," while two onlookers watch in surprise from the doorway.
"Science and magic have married each other."
Color illustration of a string quartet performing on a circular stage in an ornate domed concert hall; one of the four musicians is depicted as a metallic robot playing alongside the human performers, before an applauding crowd.
"Nothing is so human about us as our technology."
Color cartoon illustration of a female stand-up comedian performing on a small club stage under a "The Laugh Comedy" marquee, with an enthusiastic audience laughing, clapping, and cheering below her.
"Manslaughter and man's laughter are spelled the same."
And it is much owing to Coleridge that since Poe and Baudelaire poetry and fiction have largely employed the pattern of the spiritual and intellectual quest rather than that of realistic narrative.
“Coleridge as Artist” (1957), in The Interior Landscape (1969), p 132
Quote #1174
Year: 1957
Until Newton the Senecans had dominated the literary scene from Montaigne to Pascal and from Donne to Pope. Their preoccupation was with the literary techniques for arresting and projecting some phase of the human mind: to arrest in order to project, and to project in order to contemplate. Like the inventors of cinema at the beginning of this century they hit upon the technique of stylistic discontinuity as a means of arresting a moment of consciousness. The movie camera takes a thousand still shots in order to capture the aspects of a brief moment. The style coupé and the “cutting period” attempted something comparable in the essay and the poem. But to have carried this art further than Pope was probably impossible. At any rate the advent of Newton’s Optics diverted artistic effort from poetic statement to the use of external landscape as a means of projecting and controlling states of mind under the guidance of two major concepts. The first of these derived from the study of the visual harmonics of the spectrum which led to a revival of the classic images of the harps of Aeolus and Memnon. If the surfaces of matter were varied prisms for revealing the qualities of light, then the entire visible and audible world could be conceived as a species of visual music. The second concept is related to the first. For, if the external world is attuned to the mind of man then the whole of Nature is a language and the poet is a pontifex or bridge between the two worlds.
“Coleridge as Artist” (1954), in The Interior Landscape (1969), pp 119-120
Quote #1175
Year: 1954
Chapters: Between Two Ages | From Tribal to Literate | Hardware / Software | Poetry | Today’s Transition
Like Coleridge's Mariner, they [the early Symbolists] were the first that ever burst into that silent sea. This was the world of experience emerging to Keats when he spoke of "magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faene lands forlorn." It was to be a world in which the eye listens, the ear sees, and in which all the senses assist each other in concert.
Counterblast (1969), p 114
Quote #1176
Year: 1969
Just when the circulating libraries were disillusioning Samuel Taylor Coleridge with the world of the novel, and distressing him with the spectacle of the corruption of taste and morals through this kind of entertainment, the newspaper was coming in as the new technological cliché.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 36
Quote #1177
Year: 1970
Inner-tripping began with the Symbolists, long before Jung and Freud—with Coleridge, De Quincy, Baudelaire and Poe, with Lewis Carroll.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 87
Quote #1178
Year: 1970
Chapter: Freud, Sigmund
When Coleridge said that all men are born either Platonists or Aristotelians, he was saying that all men tend to be either acoustic or visual in their sensory bias. 
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 113
Quote #1179
Year: 1988
Chapters: Aristotle | Eye vs Ear
You will remember Coleridge saying that "Shak keeps to the main highway of the human affections." GK [Gilbert Keith Chesterton] continues: "It attributes an irrational talismanic power to single words and memories and wallows in the idea of wild things that appear in action without ever sans ever having passed through thought ... I can suggest that GBS [George Bernard Shaw] became a socialist economist because he nearly swallowed a penny when he was a child.
Letter to Maurice McLuhan, Cambridge, December 1934, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 45
Quote #1180
Year: 1934
You may know that Dwight Culler in The Imperial Intellect discusses how Newman's Idea of a University derives from Coleridge's idea of an encyclopedia.
Letter to I. A. Richards, July 12, 1968, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 355
Quote #1181
Year: 1968
Using Coleridge's principle that the most effective approach to anyone's knowledge is via his ignorance, would you agree that Plato was quite unaware of the imperceptible environment of "visual space" created for the first time in human history by the phonetic alphabet?
Letter to I. A. Richards, July 12, 1968, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 355
Quote #1182
Year: 1968
Chapter: Ignorance
The reader is hypocrite in the very act of putting on the author’s poem as his mask, for in reading the poem he is perceiving the world in a very special way, using what another poet, S.T. Coleridge, called "a willing suspension of disbelief” for the moment.
“At the Moment of Sputnik” (1972), in Marshall McLuhan: the Man and His Message (1989), p 78
Quote #1183
Year: 1972
These effects are carefully arranged, as in musical or pictorial composition, to bring about a single emotional impact, Wordsworth seeks the eerie in the· everyday as “The Ancient Mariner'' of Coleridge seeks the casual and everyday amidst the remote and eerie.
“Camera Eye on Poetry” (1955), transcript, p 4
Quote #1184
Year: 1955
Everybody is familiar with Eliot's magical theories of art and communication, which he shares with Coleridge and many others. If the health of letters in the Western world depends on the conceptual, rationalist tradition in opposition to the magical poetics, then why not say so? Why impugn the products of "magical" poets when it is their theory that is repugnant?
“Poetry and Society”, in Explorations 2 (1954), p 94
Quote #1185
Year: 1954
Facing this unrivalled sophistication and self-awareness of metaphysical landscape in modern poetry, it is easier to observe what the eighteenth century was striving for as well as what effects Wordsworth, Coleridge and their successors were interested in obtaining. Hitherto the eighteenth century has been examined in retrospect from Wordsworth and Coleridge rather than from Keats and Tennyson.
“Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry” (1955), in Essays in Criticism, Vol 1, No 3, July (1951), p 271, reprinted in The Interior Landscape The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan, (1969), p 271
Quote #1186
Year: 1955
It naturally follows for the early Wordsworth and Coleridge that the best mirrors of the radiant universe of life are those simple, spontaneous natures who have received the least admixture of social artifice and corruption.”
“Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry” (1955), in Essays in Criticism, Vol 1, No 3, July (1951), p 273, reprinted in The Interior Landscape The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan, (1969), p 273
Quote #1187
Year: 1955
That Burke's treatise had the greatest effect on the later "eighteenth century is admitted by historians. Its influence on Coleridge and Poe, and through them on Baudelaire and the Symbolists, still deserves to be traced very carefully.
“Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry” (1955), in Essays in Criticism, Vol 1, No 3, July (1951), p 275, reprinted in The Interior Landscape The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan, (1969), p 275
Quote #1188
Year: 1955
From the dream of universal social therapy and regeneration which Wordsworth and Coleridge had at first accepted as a necessary consequence of submission of the heart to the pure messages of the external world, Coleridge awakened with his 'Dejection: An Ode' in 1802.
“Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry” (1955), in Essays in Criticism, Vol 1, No 3, July (1951), p 276, reprinted in The Interior Landscape The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan, (1969), p 276
Quote #1189
Year: 1955
So that when landscape was no longer supported by Newtonian physics for Coleridge and Keats, it was reinforced by botany, biology and geology for Tennyson, Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites. Science remained as an important prop for interests which were primarily aesthetic.
“Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry” (1955), in Essays in Criticism, Vol 1, No 3, July (1951), p 278, reprinted in The Interior Landscape The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan, (1969), p 278
Quote #1190
Year: 1955
It was in the format of the daily press that Rimbaud and Mallarmé discovered the means of rendering the interplay of all the functions of what Coleridge called the "esemplastic" imagination. * 
“THE GALAXY RECONFIGURED or the Plight of Mass Man in an Individualist Society” in The Gutenberg Galaxy: the Making of typographic man (1965), p 268. * McLuhan is referring to his article “Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press", in The Sewanee Review, Vol.62, No.1, Jan-March (1954) p 38-55. Reprinted in The Interior Landscape The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan, (1969), p 5-21
Quote #1191
Year: 1965
Chapters: Blake, William | Corporate Consciousness | Dropout | Imagination | Living Unity | Media Effects
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