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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.
The Introduction outlines Coleridge’s alertness to the geometric idiom that helped shaped his responses to the landscape of his surroundings. In particular, this opening explains why Euclid’s Elements was such a basic text in Coleridge’s cultural context. To guide the reader, the Introduction outlines the book’s argument.
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.
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