The lene clinamen in the early poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Abstract

For today's readers of Romantic poetry, ‘uncertainty'—with its implications for a post-Heisenberg philosophical worldview—carries a great deal of scientific baggage. If, then, we allow for the uncertainty principle and admit probability at the micro level of a poem, the issue of volition and determinism becomes less straightforward than it might appear on a conventional reading of Coleridge's poetry. The transitions that enable Coleridgean creative acts in the early poems identify a need to reconceptualize the vital Coleridgean principle of the lene clinamen.