Chapter 1 - Striking Passages

Summary

Chapter One outlines the relationship of poetry to both print media and physiology at the turn of the nineteenth century. It argues that Coleridge’s theory of “striking passages”—excerpts of poetry that impress a reader instantaneously and then, subsequently, arise spontaneously in the mind—marks an historical shift in the relationship of poetry to memory, one linked explicitly to the invention of print culture and implicitly to physiological theories of hallucination. Coleridge’s theory echoes Romantic physiologists who conceived of memory as material, physical, and imprinted; in particular, they sought to explain our strange liability to hallucination as visual memories decontextualized, relocated, and involuntarily recalled. Tracing the problem of the isolated, autonomous imprint—the striking passage—in Romantic poetry, poetic theory, and physiology, this chapter argues that print culture reconfigured poetry’s age-old mnemonic effects into a logic of visuality and mechanical reproduction.