Coleridge and the Geometric Idiom

When Coleridge described the landscapes he passed through while scrambling among the fells mountains and valleys of Britain he did something unprecedented in Romantic writing: to capture what emerged before his eyes he enlisted a geometric idiom. Immersed in a culture still beholden to Euclid's Elements and schooled by those who subscribed to its principles he valued geometry both for its pragmatic function and for its role as a conduit to abstract thought. Indeed his geometric training would often structure his observations on religion aesthetics politics and philosophy. For Coleridge however this perspective never competed with his sensitivity to the organic nature of his surroundings but rather intermingled with it. Situating Coleridge's remarkable ways of seeing within the history and teaching of mathematics and alongside the eighteenth century's budding interest in non-Euclidean geometry Ann Colley illuminates the richness of the culture of walking and the surprising potential of landscape writing.