Coleridge
1772-1834
Great literary Critic: Biographia Literaria (1815), Shakespeare Lectures
Great dinner party guest:
‘ he would talk a book greater than he had ever written’
His major work never appeared
Addicted to laudanum since college, always apologized for not finishing
A major project.
Father a vicar, he the youngest of 14, father’s favorite, disliked by other family members, so alone, read a lot.
Went to Cambridge and won many scholarships, medals, grants—but great political movements of the day caught him—lost his scholarship, goes in debt, joins the cavalry.
Meets fellow poet Robert Southey in 1794, and together they seek to set up a pantisocracy to eradicate selfishness, superstition, and vice of humanity. Community was to be founded on banks of the Sesequhanna river, Pennsylvania:
Property held in common (Godwin on property)
Live by farming and shepherding
Literary activities most of the day
Engaged to Southey’s sister—the prudish Sara, conventional, a scold.
Marries, has son Hartley
Pantisocracy crumbles, despite Coleridges literary attempts to fund it:
A play on Robespierre
Political lectures in Bristol
Southey suggests that they bring servants to utopia—end of friendship
Meets WW in 1795, corresponded, then in 1797, rented cottages next to each other near Bristol, for 18 months. SC had no money, however, and was planning on becoming a Unitarian minister. Offered an annuity by a China importer in 1798, to “use his talents in any way he deems fit.” First thing fit: trip to Germany to learn the language (1798-9). WW paid for this trip with Lyrical Ballads.
SC starts to read Kant. Falls in love with WW’s sister in law, Sara Hutchinson.
1804 to Malta for ill health
1808: new course of lectures on poetry in London, disorganized
Started a periodical: The Friend essays on morality, taste, religion
Closeness with Hutchinson ended friendship with WW.
1813, Byron, on Board of Directors of Drury Lane Theater, gets C’s play, Remorse staged, and pays him 400 pounds—his largest payment ever received for work done.
Decline into debt, drunkenness—his son Hartley thrown out of Cambridge for drunkenness. At a dinner in London, SC throws a glass of claret through the window, and sets a wine glass on top of a whiskey tumbler and starts throwing forks at it.
Nevertheless, he friends always loyal.
Dies quietyly, 1834
Poetic Innovation:
Style 1: Romantic Witchery
Kubla Khan
Cristabel
Mariner
Scene: supernatural or strange
Technique: colloquial freedom, highly suggestive and ambiguous imagery; psychological depth
Style 2: Meditative Conversation poems
Dejection, and Ode
Lime Tree Bower
Aolian Harp
Scene: moments in domestic life
Technique: exactitude of image; sentences the structure of conversation—not arguments, as in 18th, but inward-gazing, relaxed, movements of the mind through seemingly free association that has psychological and moral and aesthetic ramifications…Spontaneous utterances, grounded in the processes of the mind, using symbols pitched in what Pound calls the profounder sense:
Not symbols as one thing representing another, but instead, symbols as “living parts or instances in the larger reality [they] manifest:
Silent icicles
Quietly shining to the quiet moon
….intimations of intercommunion of all things in organic universe
Philosophical Groundwork
Primary imagination (not fancy)
Common to all people, corresponds to the act of SEEING or HEARING, hence, PI is a sign of human existence. It is the finite mind’s assertion of “I am.” It is passive in nature.
Secondary Imagination
As an echo, is somewhat dependent on perception (Primary), but Secondary more active, co-existing with the conscious WILL which dissolves, diffuses, and dissipates in order to create. Secondary Imagination creates, destroys. It is active, assertive, willful.
Consider Aolian Harp:
Primary poet observes details of the scene. But then Secondary Imagination kicks in, and Coleridge becomes MAD LUTANIST, and then is recalled to the details of the scene proving his Human existence by both Primary Imagination and Sara.
But unlike Wordsworth, who believes that perception itself stimulates the individual to joy and healing (half-create and half perceive), Coleridge denies the external world’s ability to do anything on its own. Rather, it is the inward turned mind of Secondary Imagination that creates all inspiration and generative powers of the world. The world is THERE, but in itself, uninspiring. SEES HIS POEMS AS MOUNTAIN BIRTHS FROM WITHIN.
Coleridge an anti-Platonist. Deplored dualist theory of universe, sought to reconcile, an explored recurrences of contradictions in the mysterious process of universal production and life.
Greater Romantic Lyric (Abrams)
***origins in 18th century LOCAL POEM, entitled with name of geographic location—combined description of that scene with thoughts the scene suggests.
Sir john Denham’s Coopers Hill (1642)
- objects of nature carry something of divinity
- God designed universe analogically, relating physical to
Moral and spiritual realms.
Romantics Add Interfusion, Organicism, the melting of Subject and Object
- Present determinant speaker in a particularized setting, carrying on a colloquoy with a silent auditor, present or no.
- Speaker begins with description of landscape
- An aspect of change in landscape evokes a varied but integral process of memory, thought, anticipation, closely intervolved with the outer scene.
- Through interplay, speaker achieves insight, faces up to tragic loss, comes to moral decision, or resolves emotional problems
- Poem often rounds upon itself (rondo) to where it began, the peaker with an altered consciousness, mood, resulting from the meditative interplay. Reflections often depersonalized/landscape displaced.