The ideal poem is a “balance or reconciliation of opposite or
discordant qualities: of sameness with difference; of the general with
the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the
representative….a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual
order. All of this formed into one graceful and intelligent whole”—which
sounds a lot like discordia concours. This was, Coleridge
said, “the nature of poetry in the strictest sense of the
word”—undoubtedly the kind Coleridge aspired to write himself—and, as to
be discussed below, it had metaphysical implications. Poems, like other works of art, have to make sense, more or less, if
they are to sustain interest, but people are more likely to go to the
arts for wildness than order. In a story or novel “something has to
happen,” we say. We usually mean something surprising, something out of
the ordinary, and probably disorderly. (A friend who read the
early chapters in the first draft of a novel I had written complained,
“It’s like waiting for a bus that never arrives.”)
