Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) - Life

He met Robert Southey and they planned to emigrate in America and found a "Pantisocracy" (idealistic community of 20 men and 20 women based o 626c24g n communistic ideals), but they failed.

They met 2 sister Edith and Sarah Fricker that they married. But for Coleridge was a very unhappy marriage.

In 1796 he went to Nether Stowey, a village in Somerset, where he began a very important friendship with William and Dorothy Wordsworth.

With William he went to Germany to study Kant and then they went to the Lake District in the north-east part of England.

In 1801 he increased the opium doses and became an opium-addicted. He met Sarah Hutchinson and he fell in love with her.

He went to Malta in order to recover his health.

In 1810 he had a serious quarrel with Wordsworth and decided to left the Lake District and he went to London where he died.

Features and Themes

Guilt from childhood on C. suffering a tormenting sense of guilt, later increased by his unhappy marriage and his opium addiction.

Visions "Kubla Khan" can be interpreted as a poem about inspiration and its loss (it described drams and visions.

Ballad Structure adopted the rhythm and the rhyme patterns creating the dramatic atmosphere of the medieval ballads.

Medieval setting.

Exoticism some poems were set in distant place or time.

Mystery and supernatural he described "persons and characters supernatural" to procure "suspension of disbelief"

Nature He did not believed in Pantheistic vision of nature because of his strong Christian faith. He saw it in a sort of Neo-platonic interpretation as the reflection of the perfect world of ideas. The material world is nothing but the projection of the real world of ideas on the flux of time.C. believed that natural images carried abstract meanings and he used them in his most visionary poems.

Music C. used words and devices (alliterations, onomatopoeias ecc) in order to create the unreal atmosphere of his best poems.

Imagination 2 Types:

Primary faculty by which we perceived the world around us. It's common to all human beings.

Secondary faculty by which a men recreated reality and tried to unify the dispersed objects of the reality. It is the poetic vision and it is characteristic of the poet.

Wordsworth and Coleridge had 2 different consideration of imagination:

Wordsworth Imagination modified and transformed the data of experience (recollection in tranquility)

Coleridge Imagination transcend the data of experience and created.

Fancy was inferior to the imagination, it had not creative power.

Poetry it is the product of the unconscious which brings about a kind of ecstasy and can then be reproduced through memory. Imagination is the creative principle of poetry (sources kant, Shelling, Shaftesbury and Addison).

The poet and the artist were very different and separated from ordinary people, he was a prophet looking for truth within himself through a kind of natural or artificial trance-like state which leaded him to ectasy.

Style language very different from that of Wordsworth (a selection of a real language used by men) more ideal and traditional. In the ballad he adopted an archaic language because he wanted to make credible the experience of the supernatural and the wonderful. In "Kubla khan" he adapted to the different tasks of describing the natural scenes of the 1^st part or the prophet like behavior of the poet in the 2^nd part.

Works

Poems on various subject.

Christabel tale in 2 parts set in medieval time that talked about virtuous girl.

Kubla Khan fragment of 54 lines written in 1798. While he is reading a passage of a book of travels ("Purchas: his pilgrimage") on Kublai Khan and on the wonderful palace he wanted to build, Coleridge fell asleep. The sleep gave to him the inspiration to write a poem on Kublai Khan himself and when he awoke he wrote down the lines that he have dreamed. But C. was interrupted by a friend and he wasn't able to continue this book.

This fragment was important for 2 reason:

was a manifesto of the working of the poets mind

it emphasized that "suspension of disbelief for the moment" which for C. was the only way to created a beautiful poem.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner composed between 1787 and 1788 and published 1^st with the "Lyrical Ballads". It is the story of a crime and a punishment told by the protagonist himself, an old mariner. He after having killing an Albatross (symbol of the path of love between all the creatures) was condemned to travel from land to land telling his story. The poem is divided in 7 sections, each ending with a hint of his crime and each constituting a new stage in the progress to the crime to punishment.

The Eolian Harp.

To William Wordsworth .

Biographia Literaria divided in 2 volume and published in 1817 wrote on characters and incident supernatural that procure a "suspension of disbelief". C. asked to the readers to contemplate the supernatural events and their mystery.

Lectures on Shakespeare.