In 1816 Coleridge, still addicted to opium and now estranged from his family, took residence in the London home of an admirer, the doctor James Gillman. There he wrote his major prose work, Biographia Literaria (1817), a series of autobiographical notes and dissertations on many subjects, including some brilliantly perceptive literary criticism. He argues that the process of writing poetry should be an organic one that involved the poet’s whole being:
The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination.
Other writings were published while he was in seclusion at the Gillman home, notably Sibylline Leaves (1817), Aids to Reflection (1825), and On the Constitution of Church and State (1830). He died in London on July 25, 1834.
Despite the fact that his best-known works were written by 1800, and that several of these remain unfinished, Coleridge’s status as a major poet has remained secure. The dramatic end to his period of poetic production, and his habit of leaving work incomplete have become legendary, and he even turned these problems into the subject of a poem, “Dejection: An Ode” (1802), an agonizing expression of his desire for poetic inspiration.
II DEVELOPMENT
Coleridge was born in Ottery St Mary, Devon, on October 21, 1772, the son of a vicar. From 1791 until 1794 he studied classics at Jesus College, Cambridge University, and became interested in French revolutionary politics. His heavy drinking and debauchery incurred massive debts which he attempted to clear by entering the army for a brief period. Eventually, his brother paid for him to be discharged on a plea of insanity. At university he absorbed political and theological ideas then considered radical, especially those of Unitarianism. He left Cambridge without a degree and joined his university friend, the poet Robert Southey in a plan, soon abandoned, to found a Utopian society in Pennsylvania. Based on the ideas of William Godwin, this new society was dubbed “Pantisocracy”. In 1795 the two friends married sisters, Sara and Edith Fricker. Not only did Coleridge’s marriage to Sara proved extremely unhappy, but he also became estranged from Southey, who departed for Portugal that same year. Coleridge remained in England to write and lecture, editing a radical Christian journal, The Watchman, from his new home in Clevedon. In 1796 he published Poems on Various Subjects, which included “The Eolian Harp” and his “Monody on the Death of Chatterton”.
In June 1797 Coleridge met and began what was to be a lifelong friendship with the poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. The years 1797 and 1798, during which the friends lived near Nether Stowey, in Somerset, were among the most fruitful of Coleridge’s life. The two men anonymously published a joint volume of poetry, Lyrical Ballads (1798), that became a landmark in English poetry; it contained the first great works of the Romantic school (see Romanticism (literature)). The 1800 edition of the book contained a preface by Wordsworth, written at Coleridge’s request. This piece offered an explanation of the thinking behind the collection, arguing that “the real language of men” should be part of poetic diction. The relationship between the imagination of the poet and the beauty of the natural world was also a central concern.
III CONVERSATIONAL POEMS
Critical interest in Coleridge has focused on the poems he wrote in the 1790s. One of the major achievements of this period was his development of the Conversational or Conversation poem. Deeply personal, these works are emotional meditations upon experiences from everyday life. “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison” (1797) relates the poet’s frustration when injury prevents him from taking a walk with friends. Through the faculty of his imagination, he participates in their pleasure, and realizes that the tree bower under which he is convalescing also possesses a profound beauty, arguing that:
Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure;
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,
No waste so vacant, but may well employ
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to Love and Beauty!
“The Nightingale” (1798) moves from the poet’s admission that the bird’s conventional associations with melancholy are a human construct, but then goes on to relate the intense experience of observing his son’s delight in birdsong and moonlight. “Frost at Midnight” (1798), perhaps Coleridge’s most powerful work in this style, is quietly meditative in tone. This gentle quality is provided by the poem’s lack of artificial, self-conscious devices. There are few end-stopped lines, and even fewer full rhymes, so the rhythm of the poem is subtle and unforced, successfully suggesting the rhythms of real speech. The poem’s speaker reflects on the silence of the night as he watches over his sleeping child. As in the other Conversational works, the mind of the poet and his environment are brought into intimate contact. Here, the evocative but ambiguous phrase, “the secret ministry of frost” is the mystic agency of the poet’s imaginative journey. In “dim sympathy” with the wintry night’s silence, he muses on an unhappy urban childhood, spent in “the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim”, and resolves that this will not be the case for his son. Coleridge returns from his thoughts with a touching and unpretentious expression of joy in the sight of his sleeping child: “My babe so beautiful it thrills my heart”.
IV SUPERNATURAL POEMS
The opening poem of the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, is, in a precise historical sense, the only true ballad in the book. Conforming to the genre’s traditional rules of metre, it is a kind of pastiche: an attempt to construct a historical artefact in the way that aristocrats of the period were enhancing their parks and gardens with picturesque ruins. The diction of the poem is scattered with archaisms such as “unhand me, grey-beard loon! “ The 1798 edition had used the mock-medieval spelling “Ancyent Marinere”. Later, Coleridge added prose glosses in the style of a 17th-century scholar.
The poem is essentially a narrative one, and describes a meeting between the title character and a guest at a wedding. The Wedding Guest expects to hear an amusing anecdote from the Mariner, but finds himself listening to the story of a horrific supernatural ordeal. The Mariner tells how his rash act of killing an albatross brings ghostly retribution upon the crew of his ship. The dead bird is hung around his neck to indicate his cursed status. The ship is adrift in a stagnant sea alive with “slimy things”. Dying of thirst, the men are visited by a spectre, the “Night-mare Life-in-Death”. Adrift on a ship of dead men, the Mariner is released when, looking at the slimy “water-snakes”, he blesses them for their strange beauty. The albatross falls from his neck, but for his crime he is condemned to wander the Earth, preaching reverence for all creatures.
The poem achieves the stated aims of Lyrical Ballads with its strong, simple rhythms and repetitions, creating the impression that it is a product of oral rather than written culture:
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound.
As well as emphasizing its balladic features, the insistent rhymes allude to the irresistible supernatural powers that take control of the ship, and give urgency to the Mariner’s narration. This urgency is a cursed one: “I pass, like night, from land to land”, he declares, compelled to relate his story with his “strange power of speech”. There is much strangeness in the poem that is hard to interpret consistently. Centrally, the momentous killing of the albatross seems a totally motiveless act.
The similarly supernatural poem “Christabel” (1798, revised 1800) is presented as a fragment: Coleridge drafted but never completed a second part. It is a fantasy with a medieval setting influenced by the conventions of Gothic fiction. Like the “Ancient Mariner”, it is narrative-based rather than reflective, and tells the story of a baronet’s daughter who discovers a mysterious woman in the forest that surrounds her castle home. This woman, Geraldine, appears to be the victim of an abduction, but in fact is a predatory, vampire-like entity. Coleridge gives her malignity a strongly erotic edge, placing much emphasis on Geraldine’s desire to look at Christabel’s naked body—”a sight to dream of, not to tell! “ Exclamations such as this are urgently addressed to the reader, a convention also borrowed from Gothic fiction.
V “KUBLA KHAN: OR, A VISION IN A DREAM” (1798)
Coleridge claimed that “Kubla Khan” was the product of a hallucinatory dream experienced after he had taken opium“in consequence of a slight indisposition”. On awaking, he began to commit the experience to paper, but was interrupted by “a person on business from Porlock”. On returning to his desk, he found that the intensity of his impressions had faded. The poem claims to be “scattered lines and images” from a longer, forgotten work. Whether the story is true or not, the poem takes the unrecapturable nature of such dreams as its theme. It opens with sumptuous images of a mythic land, in which a powerful ruler orders the construction of a fabulous palace.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree;
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Coleridge conveys the idea of harmony and order with Latinate syntax, strong monosyllabic rhymes, and the percussive beat of alliteration. The poem offers sensual images of an oriental paradise: there are “gardens bright with sinuous rills” and “many an incense-bearing tree”. With a powerful sense of movement, the poem follows the progress of the river Alph in order to focus on a violent natural force beyond the palace walls: a “chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething”. Coleridge describes this place with a mass of contradictory adjectives: it is “holy”, “enchanted”, and “savage”, its massive force like that of a living being. If, as it has been suggested, this place is a metaphor for the imagination, its blasts might be compared to Wordsworth’s definition of the poetic process as “a spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling”.
The second half of the poem considers the fading of the dream, and the speaker’s attempt to recapture it. He finds that his attempt to communicate his vision to others threatens to alienate him from those people.
VI AFTER THE LYRICAL BALLADS In the autumn of 1798 Coleridge and Wordsworth left for a trip to the Continent; Coleridge soon went his own way, spending much of his time in Germany. During this period he lost early sympathy with political radicalism and became interested in German philosophy, especially the 18th-century Idealism of Immanuel Kant and the 17th-century mystical writings of Jakob Boehme, and in the literary criticism of the 18th-century dramatist G. O. E. Lessing. Coleridge studied German and translated into English the dramatic trilogy Wallenstein by the Romantic poet Friedrich von Schiller. These studies made him the most influential English interpreter of German Romanticism. By this time Coleridge had become addicted to opium, which he used to ease the pain of rheumatism. In 1800 he returned to England, and shortly thereafter settled with family and friends at Keswick in the Lake District. In 1804 he went to Malta as secretary to the governor. He returned to England in 1806. Between 1808 and 1819 he gave his famous series of lectures on literature and philosophy; the lectures on Shakespeare were partly responsible for a renewed interest in the playwright. In this period Coleridge also wrote on religion and political theory. Financial donations and grants supplemented his literary income.
In 1816 Coleridge, still addicted to opium and now estranged from his family, took residence in the London home of an admirer, the doctor James Gillman. There he wrote his major prose work, Biographia Literaria (1817), a series of autobiographical notes and dissertations on many subjects, including some brilliantly perceptive literary criticism. He argues that the process of writing poetry should be an organic one that involved the poet’s whole being:
The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination.
Other writings were published while he was in seclusion at the Gillman home, notably Sibylline Leaves (1817), Aids to Reflection (1825), and On the Constitution of Church and State (1830). He died in London on July 25, 1834.
Despite the fact that his best-known works were written by 1800, and that several of these remain unfinished, Coleridge’s status as a major poet has remained secure. The dramatic end to his period of poetic production, and his habit of leaving work incomplete have become legendary, and he even turned these problems into the subject of a poem, “Dejection: An Ode” (1802), an agonizing expression of his desire for poetic inspiration.
II DEVELOPMENT
Coleridge was born in Ottery St Mary, Devon, on October 21, 1772, the son of a vicar. From 1791 until 1794 he studied classics at Jesus College, Cambridge University, and became interested in French revolutionary politics. His heavy drinking and debauchery incurred massive debts which he attempted to clear by entering the army for a brief period. Eventually, his brother paid for him to be discharged on a plea of insanity. At university he absorbed political and theological ideas then considered radical, especially those of Unitarianism. He left Cambridge without a degree and joined his university friend, the poet Robert Southey in a plan, soon abandoned, to found a Utopian society in Pennsylvania. Based on the ideas of William Godwin, this new society was dubbed “Pantisocracy”. In 1795 the two friends married sisters, Sara and Edith Fricker. Not only did Coleridge’s marriage to Sara proved extremely unhappy, but he also became estranged from Southey, who departed for Portugal that same year. Coleridge remained in England to write and lecture, editing a radical Christian journal, The Watchman, from his new home in Clevedon. In 1796 he published Poems on Various Subjects, which included “The Eolian Harp” and his “Monody on the Death of Chatterton”.
In June 1797 Coleridge met and began what was to be a lifelong friendship with the poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. The years 1797 and 1798, during which the friends lived near Nether Stowey, in Somerset, were among the most fruitful of Coleridge’s life. The two men anonymously published a joint volume of poetry, Lyrical Ballads (1798), that became a landmark in English poetry; it contained the first great works of the Romantic school (see Romanticism (literature)). The 1800 edition of the book contained a preface by Wordsworth, written at Coleridge’s request. This piece offered an explanation of the thinking behind the collection, arguing that “the real language of men” should be part of poetic diction. The relationship between the imagination of the poet and the beauty of the natural world was also a central concern.
III CONVERSATIONAL POEMS
Critical interest in Coleridge has focused on the poems he wrote in the 1790s. One of the major achievements of this period was his development of the Conversational or Conversation poem. Deeply personal, these works are emotional meditations upon experiences from everyday life. “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison” (1797) relates the poet’s frustration when injury prevents him from taking a walk with friends. Through the faculty of his imagination, he participates in their pleasure, and realizes that the tree bower under which he is convalescing also possesses a profound beauty, arguing that:
Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure;
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,
No waste so vacant, but may well employ
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to Love and Beauty!
“The Nightingale” (1798) moves from the poet’s admission that the bird’s conventional associations with melancholy are a human construct, but then goes on to relate the intense experience of observing his son’s delight in birdsong and moonlight. “Frost at Midnight” (1798), perhaps Coleridge’s most powerful work in this style, is quietly meditative in tone. This gentle quality is provided by the poem’s lack of artificial, self-conscious devices. There are few end-stopped lines, and even fewer full rhymes, so the rhythm of the poem is subtle and unforced, successfully suggesting the rhythms of real speech. The poem’s speaker reflects on the silence of the night as he watches over his sleeping child. As in the other Conversational works, the mind of the poet and his environment are brought into intimate contact. Here, the evocative but ambiguous phrase, “the secret ministry of frost” is the mystic agency of the poet’s imaginative journey. In “dim sympathy” with the wintry night’s silence, he muses on an unhappy urban childhood, spent in “the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim”, and resolves that this will not be the case for his son. Coleridge returns from his thoughts with a touching and unpretentious expression of joy in the sight of his sleeping child: “My babe so beautiful it thrills my heart”.
IV SUPERNATURAL POEMS
The opening poem of the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, is, in a precise historical sense, the only true ballad in the book. Conforming to the genre’s traditional rules of metre, it is a kind of pastiche: an attempt to construct a historical artefact in the way that aristocrats of the period were enhancing their parks and gardens with picturesque ruins. The diction of the poem is scattered with archaisms such as “unhand me, grey-beard loon! “ The 1798 edition had used the mock-medieval spelling “Ancyent Marinere”. Later, Coleridge added prose glosses in the style of a 17th-century scholar.
The poem is essentially a narrative one, and describes a meeting between the title character and a guest at a wedding. The Wedding Guest expects to hear an amusing anecdote from the Mariner, but finds himself listening to the story of a horrific supernatural ordeal. The Mariner tells how his rash act of killing an albatross brings ghostly retribution upon the crew of his ship. The dead bird is hung around his neck to indicate his cursed status. The ship is adrift in a stagnant sea alive with “slimy things”. Dying of thirst, the men are visited by a spectre, the “Night-mare Life-in-Death”. Adrift on a ship of dead men, the Mariner is released when, looking at the slimy “water-snakes”, he blesses them for their strange beauty. The albatross falls from his neck, but for his crime he is condemned to wander the Earth, preaching reverence for all creatures.
The poem achieves the stated aims of Lyrical Ballads with its strong, simple rhythms and repetitions, creating the impression that it is a product of oral rather than written culture:
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound.
As well as emphasizing its balladic features, the insistent rhymes allude to the irresistible supernatural powers that take control of the ship, and give urgency to the Mariner’s narration. This urgency is a cursed one: “I pass, like night, from land to land”, he declares, compelled to relate his story with his “strange power of speech”. There is much strangeness in the poem that is hard to interpret consistently. Centrally, the momentous killing of the albatross seems a totally motiveless act.
The similarly supernatural poem “Christabel” (1798, revised 1800) is presented as a fragment: Coleridge drafted but never completed a second part. It is a fantasy with a medieval setting influenced by the conventions of Gothic fiction. Like the “Ancient Mariner”, it is narrative-based rather than reflective, and tells the story of a baronet’s daughter who discovers a mysterious woman in the forest that surrounds her castle home. This woman, Geraldine, appears to be the victim of an abduction, but in fact is a predatory, vampire-like entity. Coleridge gives her malignity a strongly erotic edge, placing much emphasis on Geraldine’s desire to look at Christabel’s naked body—”a sight to dream of, not to tell! “ Exclamations such as this are urgently addressed to the reader, a convention also borrowed from Gothic fiction.
V “KUBLA KHAN: OR, A VISION IN A DREAM” (1798)
Coleridge claimed that “Kubla Khan” was the product of a hallucinatory dream experienced after he had taken opium“in consequence of a slight indisposition”. On awaking, he began to commit the experience to paper, but was interrupted by “a person on business from Porlock”. On returning to his desk, he found that the intensity of his impressions had faded. The poem claims to be “scattered lines and images” from a longer, forgotten work. Whether the story is true or not, the poem takes the unrecapturable nature of such dreams as its theme. It opens with sumptuous images of a mythic land, in which a powerful ruler orders the construction of a fabulous palace.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree;
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Coleridge conveys the idea of harmony and order with Latinate syntax, strong monosyllabic rhymes, and the percussive beat of alliteration. The poem offers sensual images of an oriental paradise: there are “gardens bright with sinuous rills” and “many an incense-bearing tree”. With a powerful sense of movement, the poem follows the progress of the river Alph in order to focus on a violent natural force beyond the palace walls: a “chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething”. Coleridge describes this place with a mass of contradictory adjectives: it is “holy”, “enchanted”, and “savage”, its massive force like that of a living being. If, as it has been suggested, this place is a metaphor for the imagination, its blasts might be compared to Wordsworth’s definition of the poetic process as “a spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling”.
The second half of the poem considers the fading of the dream, and the speaker’s attempt to recapture it. He finds that his attempt to communicate his vision to others threatens to alienate him from those people.
VI AFTER THE LYRICAL BALLADS In the autumn of 1798 Coleridge and Wordsworth left for a trip to the Continent; Coleridge soon went his own way, spending much of his time in Germany. During this period he lost early sympathy with political radicalism and became interested in German philosophy, especially the 18th-century Idealism of Immanuel Kant and the 17th-century mystical writings of Jakob Boehme, and in the literary criticism of the 18th-century dramatist G. O. E. Lessing. Coleridge studied German and translated into English the dramatic trilogy Wallenstein by the Romantic poet Friedrich von Schiller. These studies made him the most influential English interpreter of German Romanticism. By this time Coleridge had become addicted to opium, which he used to ease the pain of rheumatism. In 1800 he returned to England, and shortly thereafter settled with family and friends at Keswick in the Lake District. In 1804 he went to Malta as secretary to the governor. He returned to England in 1806. Between 1808 and 1819 he gave his famous series of lectures on literature and philosophy; the lectures on Shakespeare were partly responsible for a renewed interest in the playwright. In this period Coleridge also wrote on religion and political theory. Financial donations and grants supplemented his literary income.
In 1816 Coleridge, still addicted to opium and now estranged from his family, took residence in the London home of an admirer, the doctor James Gillman. There he wrote his major prose work, Biographia Literaria (1817), a series of autobiographical notes and dissertations on many subjects, including some brilliantly perceptive literary criticism. He argues that the process of writing poetry should be an organic one that involved the poet’s whole being:
The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination.
Other writings were published while he was in seclusion at the Gillman home, notably Sibylline Leaves (1817), Aids to Reflection (1825), and On the Constitution of Church and State (1830). He died in London on July 25, 1834.
Despite the fact that his best-known works were written by 1800, and that several of these remain unfinished, Coleridge’s status as a major poet has remained secure. The dramatic end to his period of poetic production, and his habit of leaving work incomplete have become legendary, and he even turned these problems into the subject of a poem, “Dejection: An Ode” (1802), an agonizing expression of his desire for poetic inspiration.
t was Rousseau who established the cult of the individual and championed the freedom of the human spirit, announcing, “I felt before I thought”. More formal precepts came from Goethe and his compatriots, the philosopher and critic Johann Gottfried von Herder and the historian Justus Möser, who collaborated on a group of essays entitled Von deutscher Art und Kunst (1773, Of German Style and Art). In this work the authors extolled the Romantic spirit as manifested in German folk songs, Gothic architecture, and the plays of Shakespeare. Goethe sought to imitate Shakespeare's free and untrammelled style in his Götz von Berlichingen (1773; trans. 1799), a historical drama of a 16th-century robber knight. The play, which justifies revolt against political authority, inaugurated the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) movement, a forerunner of German Romanticism. In this tradition also was Goethe's novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1779). One of the great influential documents of Romanticism, this work exalts sentiment, even to the point of justifying committing suicide over unrequited love. It set a tone and mood much copied by the Romantics in their works and often in their personal lives: a fashionable tendency to frenzy, melancholy, world-weariness, even self-destruction.
B The Romantic Style
Of prime importance also as a manifesto of literary Romanticism was the preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), the work of the English poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Here, they affirmed the importance of feeling and imagination to poetic creation and disclaimed conventional literary forms and subjects. Thus, in Romantic literature everywhere, as it developed, imagination was praised over reason, emotion over logic, and intuition over science—making way for a vast body of literature of great sensibility and passion, literature that emphasized content over form, encouraged the development of complex and fast-moving plots, and allowed mixed genres (tragicomedy and the mingling of the grotesque and the sublime) and freer style.
No longer tolerated, for example, were the fixed Classical conventions, such as the famous three unities (time, place, and action) of tragedy. An increasing demand for spontaneity and lyricism—qualities that the adherents of Romanticism found in folk poetry and in medieval romance—led to a rejection of regular metres, strict forms, and other conventions of the Classical tradition. In English poetry, for example, blank verse largely superseded the rhymed couplet that dominated 18th-century poetry. The opening lines of the swashbuckling melodrama Hernani (1830; trans. 1830), by the great French Romantic writer Victor Hugo, are a departure from the conventional 18th-century rules of French versification; and in the preface to his drama Cromwell (1827; trans. 1896), a famous critical document in its own right, Hugo not only defended his breaking away from traditional dramatic structure but also justified the introduction of the grotesque into art. In their choice of heroes, also, the Romantic writers replaced the static universal types of classical 18th-century literature with more complex, idiosyncratic characters; and much drama, fiction, and poetry was devoted to a celebration of Rousseau's “common man”.
III THE GREAT ROMANTIC THEMES As the Romantic movement spread from France and Germany to England and then to the rest of Europe and across the western hemisphere, certain themes and moods, often intertwined, became the concern of almost all 19th-century writers.
A Libertarianism
Many of the libertarian and abolitionist movements of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were engendered by the Romantic philosophy—the desire to be free of convention and tyranny, the new emphasis on the rights and dignity of the individual. Just as the insistence on rational, formal, and conventional subject matter that had typified Neo-Classicism was bound to experience reversal, the authoritarian regimes that had encouraged and sustained Neo-Classicism in the arts were inevitably subjected to popular revolutions. Political and social causes became dominant themes
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834), English poet, critic, and philosopher, who was a leader of the Romantic movement.
II DEVELOPMENT
Coleridge was born in Ottery St Mary, Devon, on October 21, 1772, the son of a vicar. From 1791 until 1794 he studied classics at Jesus College, Cambridge University, and became interested in French revolutionary politics. His heavy drinking and debauchery incurred massive debts which he attempted to clear by entering the army for a brief period. Eventually, his brother paid for him to be discharged on a plea of insanity. At university he absorbed political and theological ideas then considered radical, especially those of Unitarianism. He left Cambridge without a degree and joined his university friend, the poet Robert Southey in a plan, soon abandoned, to found a Utopian society in Pennsylvania. Based on the ideas of William Godwin, this new society was dubbed “Pantisocracy”. In 1795 the two friends married sisters, Sara and Edith Fricker. Not only did Coleridge’s marriage to Sara proved extremely unhappy, but he also became estranged from Southey, who departed for Portugal that same year. Coleridge remained in England to write and lecture, editing a radical Christian journal, The Watchman, from his new home in Clevedon. In 1796 he published Poems on Various Subjects, which included “The Eolian Harp” and his “Monody on the Death of Chatterton”.
In June 1797 Coleridge met and began what was to be a lifelong friendship with the poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. The years 1797 and 1798, during which the friends lived near Nether Stowey, in Somerset, were among the most fruitful of Coleridge’s life. The two men anonymously published a joint volume of poetry, Lyrical Ballads (1798), that became a landmark in English poetry; it contained the first great works of the Romantic school (see Romanticism (literature)). The 1800 edition of the book contained a preface by Wordsworth, written at Coleridge’s request. This piece offered an explanation of the thinking behind the collection, arguing that “the real language of men” should be part of poetic diction. The relationship between the imagination of the poet and the beauty of the natural world was also a central concern.
III CONVERSATIONAL POEMS
Critical interest in Coleridge has focused on the poems he wrote in the 1790s. One of the major achievements of this period was his development of the Conversational or Conversation poem. Deeply personal, these works are emotional meditations upon experiences from everyday life. “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison” (1797) relates the poet’s frustration when injury prevents him from taking a walk with friends. Through the faculty of his imagination, he participates in their pleasure, and realizes that the tree bower under which he is convalescing also possesses a profound beauty, arguing that:
Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure;
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,
No waste so vacant, but may well employ
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to Love and Beauty!
“The Nightingale” (1798) moves from the poet’s admission that the bird’s conventional associations with melancholy are a human construct, but then goes on to relate the intense experience of observing his son’s delight in birdsong and moonlight. “Frost at Midnight” (1798), perhaps Coleridge’s most powerful work in this style, is quietly meditative in tone. This gentle quality is provided by the poem’s lack of artificial, self-conscious devices. There are few end-stopped lines, and even fewer full rhymes, so the rhythm of the poem is subtle and unforced, successfully suggesting the rhythms of real speech. The poem’s speaker reflects on the silence of the night as he watches over his sleeping child. As in the other Conversational works, the mind of the poet and his environment are brought into intimate contact. Here, the evocative but ambiguous phrase, “the secret ministry of frost” is the mystic agency of the poet’s imaginative journey. In “dim sympathy” with the wintry night’s silence, he muses on an unhappy urban childhood, spent in “the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim”, and resolves that this will not be the case for his son. Coleridge returns from his thoughts with a touching and unpretentious expression of joy in the sight of his sleeping child: “My babe so beautiful it thrills my heart”.
IV SUPERNATURAL POEMS
The opening poem of the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, is, in a precise historical sense, the only true ballad in the book. Conforming to the genre’s traditional rules of metre, it is a kind of pastiche: an attempt to construct a historical artefact in the way that aristocrats of the period were enhancing their parks and gardens with picturesque ruins. The diction of the poem is scattered with archaisms such as “unhand me, grey-beard loon! “ The 1798 edition had used the mock-medieval spelling “Ancyent Marinere”. Later, Coleridge added prose glosses in the style of a 17th-century scholar.
The poem is essentially a narrative one, and describes a meeting between the title character and a guest at a wedding. The Wedding Guest expects to hear an amusing anecdote from the Mariner, but finds himself listening to the story of a horrific supernatural ordeal. The Mariner tells how his rash act of killing an albatross brings ghostly retribution upon the crew of his ship. The dead bird is hung around his neck to indicate his cursed status. The ship is adrift in a stagnant sea alive with “slimy things”. Dying of thirst, the men are visited by a spectre, the “Night-mare Life-in-Death”. Adrift on a ship of dead men, the Mariner is released when, looking at the slimy “water-snakes”, he blesses them for their strange beauty. The albatross falls from his neck, but for his crime he is condemned to wander the Earth, preaching reverence for all creatures.
The poem achieves the stated aims of Lyrical Ballads with its strong, simple rhythms and repetitions, creating the impression that it is a product of oral rather than written culture:
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound.
As well as emphasizing its balladic features, the insistent rhymes allude to the irresistible supernatural powers that take control of the ship, and give urgency to the Mariner’s narration. This urgency is a cursed one: “I pass, like night, from land to land”, he declares, compelled to relate his story with his “strange power of speech”. There is much strangeness in the poem that is hard to interpret consistently. Centrally, the momentous killing of the albatross seems a totally motiveless act.
The similarly supernatural poem “Christabel” (1798, revised 1800) is presented as a fragment: Coleridge drafted but never completed a second part. It is a fantasy with a medieval setting influenced by the conventions of Gothic fiction. Like the “Ancient Mariner”, it is narrative-based rather than reflective, and tells the story of a baronet’s daughter who discovers a mysterious woman in the forest that surrounds her castle home. This woman, Geraldine, appears to be the victim of an abduction, but in fact is a predatory, vampire-like entity. Coleridge gives her malignity a strongly erotic edge, placing much emphasis on Geraldine’s desire to look at Christabel’s naked body—”a sight to dream of, not to tell! “ Exclamations such as this are urgently addressed to the reader, a convention also borrowed from Gothic fiction.
V “KUBLA KHAN: OR, A VISION IN A DREAM” (1798)
Coleridge claimed that “Kubla Khan” was the product of a hallucinatory dream experienced after he had taken opium“in consequence of a slight indisposition”. On awaking, he began to commit the experience to paper, but was interrupted by “a person on business from Porlock”. On returning to his desk, he found that the intensity of his impressions had faded. The poem claims to be “scattered lines and images” from a longer, forgotten work. Whether the story is true or not, the poem takes the unrecapturable nature of such dreams as its theme. It opens with sumptuous images of a mythic land, in which a powerful ruler orders the construction of a fabulous palace.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree;
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Coleridge conveys the idea of harmony and order with Latinate syntax, strong monosyllabic rhymes, and the percussive beat of alliteration. The poem offers sensual images of an oriental paradise: there are “gardens bright with sinuous rills” and “many an incense-bearing tree”. With a powerful sense of movement, the poem follows the progress of the river Alph in order to focus on a violent natural force beyond the palace walls: a “chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething”. Coleridge describes this place with a mass of contradictory adjectives: it is “holy”, “enchanted”, and “savage”, its massive force like that of a living being. If, as it has been suggested, this place is a metaphor for the imagination, its blasts might be compared to Wordsworth’s definition of the poetic process as “a spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling”.
The second half of the poem considers the fading of the dream, and the speaker’s attempt to recapture it. He finds that his attempt to communicate his vision to others threatens to alienate him from those people.
VI AFTER THE LYRICAL BALLADS In the autumn of 1798 Coleridge and Wordsworth left for a trip to the Continent; Coleridge soon went his own way, spending much of his time in Germany. During this period he lost early sympathy with political radicalism and became interested in German philosophy, especially the 18th-century Idealism of Immanuel Kant and the 17th-century mystical writings of Jakob Boehme, and in the literary criticism of the 18th-century dramatist G. O. E. Lessing. Coleridge studied German and translated into English the dramatic trilogy Wallenstein by the Romantic poet Friedrich von Schiller. These studies made him the most influential English interpreter of German Romanticism. By this time Coleridge had become addicted to opium, which he used to ease the pain of rheumatism. In 1800 he returned to England, and shortly thereafter settled with family and friends at Keswick in the Lake District. In 1804 he went to Malta as secretary to the governor. He returned to England in 1806. Between 1808 and 1819 he gave his famous series of lectures on literature and philosophy; the lectures on Shakespeare were partly responsible for a renewed interest in the playwright. In this period Coleridge also wrote on religion and political theory. Financial donations and grants supplemented his literary income.
In 1816 Coleridge, still addicted to opium and now estranged from his family, took residence in the London home of an admirer, the doctor James Gillman. There he wrote his major prose work, Biographia Literaria (1817), a series of autobiographical notes and dissertations on many subjects, including some brilliantly perceptive literary criticism. He argues that the process of writing poetry should be an organic one that involved the poet’s whole being:
The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination.
Other writings were published while he was in seclusion at the Gillman home, notably Sibylline Leaves (1817), Aids to Reflection (1825), and On the Constitution of Church and State (1830). He died in London on July 25, 1834.
Despite the fact that his best-known works were written by 1800, and that several of these remain unfinished, Coleridge’s status as a major poet has remained secure. The dramatic end to his period of poetic production, and his habit of leaving work incomplete have become legendary, and he even turned these problems into the subject of a poem, “Dejection: An Ode” (1802), an agonizing expression of his desire for poetic inspiration.
oleridge’s greatest poetic achievements came in the 1790s during his literary partnership with Wordsworth. Apart from the famous supernatural poems, such as “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan”, he developed a style known as “Conversation Poems”—lonely, meditative blank verse in which the scene viewed and the reflections of the mind fuse. The language is free of artifice and the verse runs fluidly across the line structure, bringing the voice of the poem closer to that of natural speech. In “Frost at Midnight” the narrator thinks back to an unhappy city upbringing away from the country town of his birth, and vows to raise his own child, over whom he is watching, in a spiritually rich natural environment.
"Coleridge, Samuel Taylor," Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2000. © 1993-1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
"Coleridge, Samuel Taylor," Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2000. © 1993-1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
"Coleridge, Samuel Taylor," Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2000. © 1993-1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
"Romanticism (literature)," Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2000. © 1993-1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
"“Frost at Midnight”," Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2000. © 1993-1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
