Four Classes of Readers
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge (detail) by Washington Alston, 1814 (National Portrait Gallery, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
“Language is the armory of the human mind and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.” — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817
We are all different kinds of readers.
Some of us read slowly while others speed-read. Some read in every spare moment, in waiting rooms, bathrooms, subway cars, and noisy bars.
We read for different purposes: to entertain, inform, educate, challenge ourselves, or just avoid boredom. But we read because we’re interested in the printed word.
This is nothing new. In fact, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his Lectures on Principles of Poetry in 1808, managed to lump readers into four different categories:
1. Spunges that suck up every thing and, when pressed give it out in the same state, only perhaps somewhat dirtier — . 2. Sand Glasses — or rather the upper Half of the Sand Glass, which in a brief hour assuredly lets out what it has received — & whose reading is only a profitless measurement & dozeing away of Time — . 3. Straining Bags, who get rid of whatever is good & pure, and retain the Dregs. — and this Straining-bag Class is again subdivided into Species of the Sensual, who retain evil for the gratification of their own base Imaginations, & the calumnious, who judge only by defects. . . 4 and lastly, the Great-Moguls Diamond Sieves — which is perhaps going farther for a Simile than its superior Dignity can repay, inasmuch as a common Cullender would have been equally symbolic/ but imperial or culinary, these are the only good, & I fear the least numerous, who assuredly retain the good, while the superfluous or impure passes away & leaves no trace.
Coleridge certainly had a way with words.
Which type of reader are you?
No judgment from me. I’ve been every one of them from time to time, depending on my level of alertness or interest in the material at hand.
Particularly if it’s Coleridge.
There’s so much to learn,
