Chapter 2 - Lines of Motion

Summary

When Coleridge trod through his surroundings, he was exceptionally alert to the tangible lines that run through and add character to a landscape. He visually traced their presence in the areas through which he rambled and attended to what he termed a landscape’s “lines of motion.” Throughout his early notebook entries, Coleridge plotted these lines to create diagrammatic sketches that recall the geometric idiom. Participating in a diagrammatic culture, Coleridge liked to capture the defining lines of a place and integrate them into his verbal descriptions. Throughout these entries, there lurks his training in Euclidean geometry. Far more than in the work of his fellow poets and writers, this background is very much at play in Coleridge’s landscape descriptions.