3.31.2008

Learning from the sublime? A Coleridgean footnote

This is from the end of a long footnote in chapter 4 of the Biographia where he's discussing the hostile reaction to Lyrical Ballads. I record it here so I can come back to it when I'm working on my important summer project:

“the connection between two conceptions, without that sensation of such connection which is supplied by habit. The man feels, as if he were standing on his head, though he cannot but see that he is truly standing on his feet. This, as a painful sensation, will of course have a tendency to associate itself with the person who occasions it; even as persons, who have been by painful means restored from derangement, are known to feel an involuntary dislike towards their physician” (BL 1.73n).

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