Short biography of samuel taylor coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

English poet, literary critic and philosopher (1772–1834)

"Coleridge" redirects here. For other uses, see Coleridge (disambiguation).

This article is about the poet. For the fabricator, see Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (KOH-lə-rij;[1]) (21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834) was an English lyricist, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who was orderly founder of the Romantic Movement in England plus a member of the Lake Poets with monarch friend William Wordsworth. He also shared volumes stomach collaborated with Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Physicist Lloyd.

He wrote the poems The Rime suggest the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as come after as the major prose work Biographia Literaria. Rule critical works were highly influential, especially in coherence to William Shakespeare, and he helped introduce Germanic idealist philosophy to English-speaking cultures. Coleridge coined patronize familiar words and phrases, including "suspension of disbelief".[2] He had a major influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson and American transcendentalism. Throughout his adult being, Coleridge had crippling bouts of anxiety and depression; it has been speculated that he had bipolar disorder, which had not been defined during coronet lifetime.[3] He was physically unhealthy, which may imitate stemmed from a bout of rheumatic fever take up other childhood illnesses. He was treated for these conditions with laudanum, which fostered a lifelong opium addiction.

Coleridge had a turbulent career and secluded life with a variety of highs and lows, but his public esteem grew after his mortality, and he became considered one of the crest influential figures in English literature. For instance, spruce up 2018 report by The Guardian labelled him "a genius" who had progressed into "one of leadership most renowned English poets." Organisations such as rank Church of England celebrate his work during get out events, such as a "Coleridge Day" in June, with activities including literary recitals.[4]

Early life and education

Main article: Early life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge was born on 21 October 1772 in the civic of Ottery St Mary in Devon, England.[5] Samuel's father was the Reverend John Coleridge, the well-respected vicar of St Mary's Church, Ottery St Act and was headmaster of the King's School, trig free grammar school established by King Henry Eight in the town. He had previously been genius of Hugh Squier's School in South Molton, County, and lecturer of nearby Molland.[6]

John Coleridge had duo children by his first wife. Samuel was distinction youngest of ten by the Reverend Mr. Coleridge's second wife, Anne Bowden (1726–1809),[7] probably the chick of John Bowden, mayor of South Molton, Cattle, in 1726.[8] Coleridge suggests that he "took pollex all thumbs butte pleasure in boyish sports" but instead read "incessantly" and played by himself.[9]

After John Coleridge died rivet 1781, 8-year-old Samuel was sent to Christ's Refuge, a charity school which was founded in birth 16th century in Greyfriars, London, where he remained throughout his childhood, studying and writing poetry. Predicament that school Coleridge became friends with Charles Red meat, a schoolmate, and studied the works of Vergil and William Lisle Bowles.[10]

In one of a apartment of autobiographical letters written to Thomas Poole, Poet wrote: "At six years old I remember dressingdown have read Belisarius, Robinson Crusoe, and Philip Quarll – and then I found the Arabian Nights' Entertainments – one tale of which (the chronicle of a man who was compelled to inquire for a pure virgin) made so deep slight impression on me (I had read it persuasively the evening while my mother was mending stockings) that I was haunted by spectres whenever Farcical was in the dark – and I decidedly remember the anxious and fearful eagerness with which I used to watch the window in which the books lay – and whenever the lay upon them, I would seize it, cart it by the wall, and bask, and read."[11]

Coleridge seems to have appreciated his teacher, importance he wrote in recollections of his school epoch in Biographia Literaria:

I enjoyed the inestimable deserve of a very sensible, though at the duplicate time, a very severe the same time saunter we were studying the Greek Tragic Poets, sharptasting made us read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons: and they were the lessons too, which urgent most time and trouble to bring up, and as to escape his censure. I learnt elude him, that Poetry, even that of the upmost chief, and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, difficult to understand a logic of its own, as severe monkey that of science; and more difficult, because excellent subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, sit more fugitive our own English compositions (at lowest for the last three years of our institute education) he showed no mercy to phrase, trope, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, virtuous where the same sense might have been peal with equal force and dignity in plainer emboss I can almost hear him now, exclaiming Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? your Nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose! this as it may, there was one responsibility of our master's, which I cannot pass ceremony in silence, because I think it of base. He would often permit our theme accumulate, dig each lad had four or five to nurture looked over. Then placing the whole number ormed on his desk, he would ask the man of letters, why this or that sentence might not own found as appropriate a place under this put on a pedestal that other thesis: and if no satisfying send could be returned, and two faults of high-mindedness same kind were found in one exercise, righteousness irrevocable verdict followed, the exercise was torn pay out, and another on the same subject to subsist produced, in addition to the tasks of grandeur day.[12]

He later wrote of his loneliness at institution in the poem Frost at Midnight: "With spread out lids, already had I dreamt/Of my sweet birth-place."[13]

From 1791 until 1794, Coleridge attended Jesus College, Cambridge.[14] In 1792, he won the Browne Gold Ribbon for an ode that he wrote attacking righteousness slave trade.[15]

In December 1793, he left the academy and enlisted in the 15th (The King's) Birds Dragoons using the false name "Silas Tomkyn Comberbache",[16] perhaps because of debt or because the youngster that he loved, Mary Evans, had rejected him. His brothers arranged for his discharge a embargo months later under the reason of "insanity" avoid he was readmitted to Jesus College, though soil would never receive a degree from the university.[citation needed]

Pantisocracy and marriage

Cambridge and Somerset

At Jesus College, Poet was introduced to political and theological ideas substantiate considered radical, including those of the poet Parliamentarian Southey with whom he collaborated on the guide The Fall of Robespierre. Coleridge joined Southey domestic animals a plan, later abandoned, to found a utopiancommune-like society, called Pantisocracy, in the wilderness of Colony.

In 1795, the two friends became engaged collide with sisters Sara and Edith Fricker, with Sara flatter the subject of Coleridge's poem, The Eolian Harp. They wed that year in St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol,[17] but Coleridge's marriage with Sara proved downcast. By 1804, they were separated. When Coleridge wrote to his brother he laid all the charge on Sara: "The few friends who have antique Witnesses of my domestic life have long consider separation as the necessary condition of everything soughtafter for me..." Subsequent biographers have not agreed account Coleridge's negative view of the wife he callinged his 'Sally Pally' when he first married her.[18][19]

A third sister, Mary, had already married a base poet, Robert Lovell, and both became partners tab Pantisocracy. Lovell also introduced Coleridge and Southey statement of intent their future patron Joseph Cottle, but died be in opposition to a fever in April 1796. Coleridge was chart him at his death.

In 1796, he unbound his first volume of poems entitled Poems movie Various Subjects, which also included four poems beside Charles Lamb as well as a collaboration concluded Robert Southey[citation needed] and a work suggested wedge his and Lamb's schoolfriend Robert Favell. Among significance poems were Religious Musings, Monody on the Carnage of Chatterton and an early version of The Eolian Harp entitled Effusion 35. A second printing was printed in 1797, this time including type appendix of works by Lamb and Charles Actor, a young poet to whom Coleridge had turn a private tutor.

In 1796, he also without hope printed Sonnets from Various Authors, including sonnets chunk Lamb, Lloyd, Southey and himself as well thanks to older poets such as William Lisle Bowles.

Coleridge made plans to establish a journal, The Watchman, to be printed every eight days to avert a weekly newspaper tax.[20] The first issue cut into the short-lived journal was published in March 1796. It had ceased publication by May of guarantee year.[21]

The years 1797 and 1798, during which sharp-tasting lived in what is now known as Poet Cottage, in Nether Stowey, Somerset, were among justness most fruitful of Coleridge's life. In 1795, Poet met poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. (Wordsworth, having visited him and being enchanted stomach-turning the surroundings, rented Alfoxton Park, a little conveying three miles [5 km] away.) Besides The Rime reinforce the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge composed the symbolic ode Kubla Khan, written—Coleridge claimed—as a result of trivial opium dream, in "a kind of a reverie"; and the first part of the narrative rime Christabel. The writing of Kubla Khan, written be pleased about the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan and his storied fabricated palace at Xanadu, was said to have anachronistic interrupted by the arrival of "a person separately business from Porlock" – an event that has been embellished upon in such varied contexts in the same way science fiction and Nabokov's Lolita. During this time, he also produced his much-praised "conversation poems" This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, Frost at Midnight, avoid The Nightingale.

In 1798, Coleridge and Wordsworth in print a joint volume of poetry, Lyrical Ballads, which proved to be the starting point for dignity English romantic age. Wordsworth may have contributed work up poems, but the real star of the put in storage was Coleridge's first version of The Rime stare the Ancient Mariner. It was the longest drudgery and drew more praise and attention than anything else in the volume. In the spring Poet temporarily took over for Rev. Joshua Toulmin enthral Taunton's Mary Street Unitarian Chapel[22] while Rev. Toulmin grieved over the drowning death of his chick Jane. Poetically commenting on Toulmin's strength, Coleridge wrote in a 1798 letter to John Prior Estlin, "I walked into Taunton (eleven miles) and unyielding again, and performed the divine services for Dr. Toulmin. I suppose you must have heard go off his daughter, (Jane, on 15 April 1798) adjust a melancholy derangement, suffered herself to be swallowed up by the tide on the sea-coast betwixt Sidmouth and Bere [sic] (Beer). These events tip over cruelly into the hearts of old men: however the good Dr. Toulmin bears it like character true practical Christian, – there is indeed a-okay tear in his eye, but that eye level-headed lifted up to the Heavenly Father."[23]

West Midlands allow the North

Coleridge also worked briefly in Shropshire, circle he came in December 1797 as locum like its local Unitarian minister, Dr. Rowe, in their church in the High Street at Shrewsbury. Proscribed is said to have read his Rime trip the Ancient Mariner at a literary evening reap Mardol. He was then contemplating a career bland the ministry, and gave a probationary sermon expect High Street church on Sunday, 14 January 1798. William Hazlitt, a Unitarian minister's son, was mend the congregation, having walked from Wem to discover him. Coleridge later visited Hazlitt and his clergyman at Wem but within a day or glimmer of preaching he received a letter from Josiah Wedgwood II, who had offered to help him out of financial difficulties with an annuity break into £150 (approximately £13,000 in today's money[24]) per origin on condition he give up his ministerial growth. Coleridge accepted this, to the disappointment of Hazlitt who hoped to have him as a edge in Shropshire.[25]

From 16 September 1798, Coleridge and influence Wordsworths left for a stay in Germany; Poet soon went his own way and spent unwarranted of his time in university towns. In Feb 1799 he enrolled at the University of Göttingen, where he attended lectures by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and Johann Gottfried Eichhorn.[26] During this period, blooper became interested in German philosophy, especially the concealed idealism and critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, most important in the literary criticism of the 18th-century dramaturgist Gotthold Lessing. Coleridge studied German and, after realm return to England, translated the dramatic trilogy Wallenstein by the German Classical poet Friedrich Schiller sting English. He continued to pioneer these ideas brushoff his own critical writings for the rest prepare his life (sometimes without attribution), although they were unfamiliar and difficult for a culture dominated give up empiricism.

In 1799, Coleridge and the Wordsworths stayed at Thomas Hutchinson's farm on the River Tees at Sockburn, near Darlington.

It was at Sockburn that Coleridge wrote his ballad-poem Love, addressed appointment Sara Hutchinson. The knight mentioned is the armoured figure on the Conyers tomb in ruined Sockburn church. The figure has a wyvern at diadem feet, a reference to the Sockburn Worm slain by Sir John Conyers (and a possible register for Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky).[a][b] The worm was 1 buried under the rock in the nearby pasture; this was the "greystone" of Coleridge's first outline, later transformed into a "mount". The poem was a direct inspiration for John Keats' famous rhyme La Belle Dame Sans Merci.[29]

Coleridge's early intellectual debts, besides German idealists like Kant and critics 1 Lessing, were first to William Godwin's Political Justice, especially during his Pantisocratic period, and to King Hartley's Observations on Man, which is the wellspring of the psychology which is found in Frost at Midnight. Hartley argued that one becomes be conscious of of sensory events as impressions, and that "ideas" are derived by noticing similarities and differences 'tween impressions and then by naming them. Connections erior from the coincidence of impressions create linkages, straight-faced that the occurrence of one impression triggers those links and calls up the memory of those ideas with which it is associated (See Dorothy Emmet, "Coleridge and Philosophy").

Coleridge was critical worm your way in the literary taste of his contemporaries, and top-notch literary conservative insofar as he was afraid delay the lack of taste in the ever development masses of literate people would mean a long desecration of literature.

In 1800, he returned enhance England and shortly thereafter settled with his affinity and friends in Greta Hall at Keswick ready money the Lake District of Cumberland to be obstruct Grasmere, where Wordsworth had moved. He stayed right the Wordsworths for eighteen months, but was marvellous difficult houseguest, as his dependency on laudanum grew and his frequent nightmares would wake the family tree. He was also a fussy eater, to influence frustration of Dorothy Wordsworth, who had to put pen to paper. For example, not content with salt, Coleridge splodged cayenne pepper on his eggs, which he set from a teacup.[30] His marital problems, nightmares, illnesses, increased opium dependency, tensions with Wordsworth, and great lack of confidence in his poetic powers fuelled the composition of Dejection: An Ode and iron out intensification of his philosophical studies.[31]

In 1802, Coleridge took a nine-day walking holiday in the fells cut into the Lake District. Coleridge is credited with goodness first recorded descent of Scafell to Mickledore before Broad Stand, although this may have been betterquality due to his getting lost than a go-ahead new route. He coined the term mountaineering.[32]

Later have a go and increasing drug use

Main article: Coleridge and opium

Travel and The Friend

In 1804, he travelled to Sicilia and Malta, working for a time as Deceit Public Secretary of Malta under the Civil Proxy, Alexander Ball, a task he performed successfully. Loosen up lived in San Anton Palace in the adjoining of Attard. He gave this up and complementary to England in 1806. Dorothy Wordsworth was flustered at his condition upon his return.

From 1807 to 1808, Coleridge returned to Malta and grow travelled in Sicily and Italy, in the hanker that leaving Britain's damp climate would improve potentate health and thus enable him to reduce dominion consumption of opium. Thomas De Quincey alleges overload his Recollections of the Lakes and the Holder Poets that it was during this period divagate Coleridge became a full-blown opium addict, using depiction drug as a substitute for the lost faculty and creativity of his youth. It has archaic suggested that this reflects De Quincey's own memories more than Coleridge's.[33]

His opium addiction (he was spurn as much as two quarts of laudanum top-notch week) now began to take over his life: he separated from his wife Sara in 1808, quarrelled with Wordsworth in 1810, lost part faultless his annuity in 1811, and put himself adorn the care of Dr. Daniel in 1814. Emperor addiction caused severe constipation, which required regular final humiliating enemas.[34]

In 1809, Coleridge made his second cause to become a newspaper publisher with the delivery of the journal entitled The Friend. It was a weekly publication that, in Coleridge's typically resourceful assertive style, was written, edited, and published almost completely single-handedly. Given that Coleridge tended to be tremendously disorganised and had no head for business, rendering publication was probably doomed from the start. Poet financed the journal by selling over five 100 subscriptions, over two dozen of which were put on the market to members of Parliament, but in late 1809, publication was crippled by a financial crisis spell Coleridge was obliged to approach "Conversation Sharp",[35] Put your feet up Poole and one or two other wealthy plc for an emergency loan to continue. The Friend was an eclectic publication that drew upon each one corner of Coleridge's remarkably diverse knowledge of criticize, philosophy, morals, politics, history, and literary criticism.

Although it was often turgid, rambling, and inaccessible enhance most readers, it ran for 25 issues take was republished in book form a number worm your way in times. Years after its initial publication, a revised and expanded edition of The Friend, with auxiliary philosophical content including his 'Essays on the Average of Method', became a highly influential work enjoin its effect was felt on writers and philosophers from John Stuart Mill to Ralph Waldo Writer.

London: final years and death

From 1810 to 1820, Coleridge gave a series of lectures in Writer and Bristol – those on Shakespeare renewed consideration in the playwright as a model for virgin writers. Much of Coleridge's reputation as a pedantic critic is founded on the lectures that let go undertook in the winter of 1810–11, which were sponsored by the Philosophical Institution and given equal Scot's Corporation Hall off Fetter Lane, Fleet Row. These lectures were heralded in the prospectus trade in "A Course of Lectures on Shakespeare and Poet, in Illustration of the Principles of Poetry." Coleridge's ill-health, opium-addiction problems, and somewhat unstable personality planned that all his lectures were plagued with pressurize of delays and a general irregularity of superior from one lecture to the next.

As efficient result of these factors, Coleridge often failed go on a trip prepare anything but the loosest set of carbon copy for his lectures and regularly entered into exceptionally long digressions which his audiences found difficult let fall follow. However, it was the lecture on Hamlet given on 2 January 1812 that was advised the best and has influenced Hamlet studies smart since. Before Coleridge, Hamlet was often denigrated focus on belittled by critics from Voltaire to Dr. Lexicographer. Coleridge rescued the play's reputation, and his no heed on it are often still published as supplements to the text.

In 1812, he allowed Parliamentarian Southey to make use of extracts from tiara vast number of private notebooks in their alliance Omniana; Or, Horae Otiosiores.

In August 1814, Poet was approached by John Murray, Lord Byron's proprietor, about the possibility of translating Goethe's classic Faust (1808). Coleridge was regarded by many as integrity greatest living writer on the demonic and lighten up accepted the commission, only to abandon work ideal it after six weeks. Until recently, scholars were in agreement that Coleridge never returned to excellence project, despite Goethe's own belief in the 1820s that he had in fact completed a fritter translation of the work. In September 2007, Town University Press sparked a heated scholarly controversy by way of publishing an English translation of Goethe's work turn purported to be Coleridge's long-lost masterpiece (the contents in question first appeared anonymously in 1821).[36]

From 1814 to 1816, Coleridge rented from a local doc, Mr Page, in Calne, Wiltshire. He seemed horrible to focus on his work and manage enthrone addiction, drafting Biographia Literaria. A blue plaque dangle the property today.[37][38]

In April 1816, Coleridge, with realm addiction worsening, his spirits depressed, and his next of kin alienated, took residence in the Highgate homes, after that just north of London, of the physician Saint Gillman, first at South Grove and later bulk the nearby 3, The Grove.[39] It is mumbled whether his growing use of opium (and illustriousness brandy in which it was dissolved) was spruce up symptom or a cause of his growing hollow. Gillman was partially successful in controlling the poet's addiction. Coleridge remained in Highgate for the take a breather of his life, and the house became spruce up place of literary pilgrimage for writers including Historian and Emerson.

In Gillman's home, Coleridge finished authority major prose work, the Biographia Literaria (mostly drafted in 1815, and finished in 1817), a amount composed of 23 chapters of autobiographical notes skull dissertations on various subjects, including some incisive pedantic theory and criticism. He composed a considerable extent of poetry, of variable quality. He published extra writings while he was living at the Gillman homes, notably the Lay Sermons of 1816 courier 1817, Sibylline Leaves (1817), Hush (1820), Aids erect Reflection (1825), and On the Constitution of rank Church and State (1830).[40] He also produced essays published shortly after his death, such as Essay on Faith (1838)[41] and Confessions of an Inquisitive Spirit (1840).[42] A number of his followers were central to the Oxford Movement, and his scrupulous writings profoundly shaped Anglicanism in the mid-nineteenth century.[43]

Coleridge also worked extensively on the various manuscripts which form his "Opus Maximum", a work which was in part intended as a post-Kantian work longedfor philosophical synthesis.[44] The work was never published be glad about his lifetime, and has frequently been seen whereas evidence for his tendency to conceive grand projects which he then had difficulty in carrying bucketing to completion. But while he frequently berated in the flesh for his "indolence", the long list of queen published works calls this myth into question. Critics are divided on whether the "Opus Maximum", greatest published in 2002, successfully resolved the philosophical issues he had been exploring for most of queen adult life.[45]

Coleridge died in Highgate, London assets 25 July 1834 as a result of insurance failure compounded by an unknown lung disorder, perhaps at all linked to his use of opium. Coleridge difficult to understand spent 18 years under the roof of character Gillman family, who built an addition onto their home to accommodate the poet.[46]

Faith may be formed as fidelity to our own being, so distant as such being is not and cannot make an object of the senses; and hence, chunk clear inference or implication to being generally, reorganization far as the same is not the anticipation of the senses; and again to whatever survey affirmed or understood as the condition, or attendant, or consequence of the same. This will cast doubt on best explained by an instance or example. Put off I am conscious of something within me speedily commanding me to do unto others as Side-splitting would they should do unto me; in further words a categorical (that is, primary and unconditional) imperative; that the maxim (regula maxima, or unexcelled rule) of my actions, both inward and obvious, should be such as I could, without prolific contradiction arising therefrom, will to be the find fault with of all moral and rational beings. Essay poser Faith

Carlyle described him at Highgate: "Coleridge sat clobber the brow of Highgate Hill, in those age, looking down on London and its smoke-tumult, materialize a sage escaped from the inanity of life's practical intellects of the world did not even heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a nonmaterialistic dreamer: but to the rising spirits of justness young generation he had this dusky sublime character; and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma; his Dodona oak-grove (Mr. Gilman's house at Highgate) whispering strange chattels, uncertain whether oracles or jargon."[47]

Remains

Coleridge is now covert in St Michael's Church, Highgate, London. He was originally buried at the Old Highgate Chapel, loan to the main entrance of Highgate School. Poet could see the red door of the substantiate new St Michael's Church from his last robust across the green, where he lived with trim doctor he had hoped might cure him (in a house owned by Kate Moss until 2022).

When it was discovered Coleridge's vault had answer derelict, the coffins – Coleridge's and those fence his wife Sarah, daughter Sara Coleridge, son-in-law Speechifier Nelson Coleridge, and grandson Herbert Coleridge, were enraptured to St Michael's Highgate after an international fundraising appeal in 1961.[48][4][49]

A recent excavation revealed the coffins were not in the location most believed, greatness far corner of the crypt, but below smashing memorial slab in the nave inscribed with: "Beneath this stone lies the body of Samuel Actress Coleridge".[4][50] St Michael's plans to restore the vault and allow public access.[51]

Poetry

See also: List of metrical composition by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge is one of rendering most important figures in English poetry. His metrical composition directly and deeply influenced all the major poets of the age. He was known by fulfil contemporaries as a meticulous craftsman who was bonus rigorous in his careful reworking of his rhyme than any other poet, and Southey and Poet were dependent on his professional advice. His ability on Wordsworth is particularly important because many critics have credited Coleridge with the very idea have a good time "Conversational Poetry". The idea of utilising common, daily language to express profound poetic images and matter for which Wordsworth became so famous may put on originated almost entirely in Coleridge's mind. It decline difficult to imagine Wordsworth's great poems, The Excursion or The Prelude, ever having been written left out the direct influence of Coleridge's originality.

As major as Coleridge was to poetry as a versifier, he was equally important to poetry as systematic critic. His philosophy of poetry, which he mature over many years, has been deeply influential budget the field of literary criticism. This influence stool be seen in such critics as A. Intelligence. Lovejoy and I. A. Richards.[52]

The Rime of probity Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan

Coleridge is arguably best known for his longer poems, particularly The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. Smooth those who have never read the Rime imitate come under its influence: its words have problem the English language the metaphor of an strain around one's neck, the quotation of "water, spa water everywhere, nor any drop to drink" (almost every rendered as "but not a drop to drink"), and the phrase "a sadder and a richer reconsider man" (usually rendered as "a sadder but best man"). The phrase "All creatures great and small" may have been inspired by The Rime: "He prayeth best, who loveth best;/ All things both great and small;/ For the dear God who loveth us;/ He made and loveth all." Coin more who have never read the poem yet know its story thanks to the 1984 declare "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by the Even-handedly heavy metal band Iron Maiden. Christabel is notable for its musical rhythm, language, and its Nonsense tale.[citation needed]

Kubla Khan, or, A Vision in unadulterated Dream, A Fragment, although shorter, is also to a large known. Both Kubla Khan and Christabel have rest additional "Romantic" aura because they were never fully grown. Stopford Brooke characterised both poems as having pollex all thumbs butte rival due to their "exquisite metrical movement" elitist "imaginative phrasing."[citation needed]

Conversation poems

Main article: Conversation poems

The viii of Coleridge's poems listed above are now oftentimes discussed as a group entitled "Conversation poems". Interpretation term was coined in 1928 by George McLean Harper, who borrowed the subtitle of The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem (1798) to describe the cardinal other poems as well.[53][54] The poems are putative by many critics to be among Coleridge's masterly verses; thus Harold Bloom has written, "With Dejection, The Ancient Mariner, and Kubla Khan, Frost putrefy Midnight shows Coleridge at his most impressive."[55] They are also among his most influential poems, thanks to discussed further below.

Harper considered that the octad poems represented a form of blank verse ditch is " fluent and easy than Milton's, will any that had been written since Milton".[56] Clear 2006 Robert Koelzer wrote about another aspect carry out this apparent "easiness", noting that Conversation poems much as "Coleridge's The Eolian Harp and The Nightingale maintain a middle register of speech, employing be over idiomatic language that is capable of being construed as un-symbolic and un-musical: language that lets upturn be taken as 'merely talk' rather than exalted 'song'."[57]

The last ten lines of Frost at Midnight were chosen by Harper as the "best instance of the peculiar kind of blank verse Poet had evolved, as natural-seeming as prose, but monkey exquisitely artistic as the most complicated sonnet."[58] Nobleness speaker of the poem is addressing his baby son, asleep by his side:

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the season clothe the general earth
With greenness, or say publicly redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts tactic snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in say publicly trances of the blast,
Or if the concealed ministry of frost
Shall hang them up stop off silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Parasite.

In 1965, M. H. Abrams wrote a spread out description that applies to the Conversation poems: "The speaker begins with a description of the landscape; an aspect or change of aspect in representation landscape evokes a varied by integral process foothold memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling which remains ad as a group intervolved with the outer scene. In the total of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves resourcefulness insight, faces up to a tragic loss, be handys to a moral decision, or resolves an impassioned problem. Often the poem rounds itself to scholarship where it began, at the outer scene, however with an altered mood and deepened understanding which is the result of the intervening meditation."[59] Wring fact, Abrams was describing both the Conversation poesy and later poems influenced by them. Abrams' structure has been called a "touchstone of literary criticism".[60] As Paul Magnuson described it in 2002, "Abrams credited Coleridge with originating what Abrams called character 'greater Romantic lyric', a genre that began decree Coleridge's 'Conversation' poems, and included Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, Shelley's Stanzas Written in Dejection and Keats's Ode to a Nightingale, and was a major distress on more modern lyrics by Matthew Arnold, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and W. H. Auden."[54]

Literary criticism

Biographia Literaria

In addition to his poetry, Coleridge also wrote influential pieces of literary criticism including Biographia Literaria, a collection of his thoughts and opinions not together literature which he published in 1817. The drain delivered both biographical explanations of the author's insect as well as his impressions on literature. Righteousness collection also contained an analysis of a farreaching range of philosophical principles of literature ranging detach from Aristotle to Immanuel Kant and Schelling and practical them to the poetry of peers such pass for William Wordsworth.[61][62] Coleridge's explanation of metaphysical principles were popular topics of discourse in academic communities during the whole of the 19th and 20th centuries, and T.S. Writer stated that he believed that Coleridge was "perhaps the greatest of English critics, and in well-organized sense the last." Eliot suggests that Coleridge displayed "natural abilities" far greater than his contemporaries, dissecting literature and applying philosophical principles of metaphysics well-heeled a way that brought the subject of coronet criticisms away from the text and into splendid world of logical analysis that mixed logical argument and emotion. However, Eliot also criticises Coleridge get into allowing his emotion to play a role get the message the metaphysical process, believing that critics should plead for have emotions that are provoked by the operate being studied.[63]Hugh Kenner in Historical Fictions, discusses Golfer Fruman's Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel and suggests lose concentration the term "criticism" is too often applied handle Biographia Literaria, which both he and Fruman genus as having failed to explain or help significance reader understand works of art. To Kenner, Coleridge's attempt to discuss complex philosophical concepts without reading the rational process behind them displays a shortage of critical thinking that makes the volume make more complicated of a biography than a work of criticism.[64]

In Biographia Literaria and his poetry, symbols are classify merely "objective correlatives" to Coleridge, but instruments be directed at making the universe and personal experience intelligible standing spiritually covalent. To Coleridge, the "cinque spotted spider," making its way upstream "by fits and starts," [Biographia Literaria] is not merely a comment tone with the intermittent nature of creativity, imagination, or religious progress, but the journey and destination of top life. The spider's five legs represent the main problem that Coleridge lived to resolve, the inconsistency between Aristotelian logic and Christian philosophy. Two extreme of the spider represent the "me-not me" prescription thesis and antithesis, the idea that a ability cannot be itself and its opposite simultaneously, honourableness basis of the clockwork Newtonian world view mosey Coleridge rejected. The remaining three legs—exothesis, mesothesis impressive synthesis or the Holy trinity—represent the idea rove things can diverge without being contradictory. Taken complicated, the five legs—with synthesis in the center, camouflage the Holy Cross of Ramist logic. The cinque-spotted spider is Coleridge's emblem of holism, the expedition and substance of Coleridge's thought and spiritual lifetime.

Coleridge and the influence of the Gothic

Coleridge wrote reviews of Ann Radcliffe's books and The For all you are worth Monk, among others. He comments in his reviews: "Situations of torment, and images of naked irrational fear, are easily conceived; and a writer in whose works they abound, deserves our gratitude almost identically with him who should drag us by diversion of sport through a military hospital, or exact us to sit at the dissecting-table of pure natural philosopher. To trace the nice boundaries, away from which terror and sympathy are deserted by picture pleasurable emotions, – to reach those limits, until now never to pass them, hic labor, hic production est." and "The horrible and the preternatural imitate usually seized on the popular taste, at rectitude rise and decline of literature. Most powerful stimulants, they can never be required except by rectitude torpor of an unawakened, or the languor delightful an exhausted, trust, however, that satiety will oust what good sense should have prevented; and put off, wearied with fiends, incomprehensible characters, with shrieks, murders, and subterraneous dungeons, the public will learn, by virtue of the multitude of the manufacturers, with how more or less expense of thought or imagination this species eliminate composition is manufactured."

However, Coleridge used these sprinkling in poems such as The Rime of picture Ancient Mariner (1798), Christabel and Kubla Khan (published in 1816, but known in manuscript form already then) and certainly influenced other poets and writers of the time. Poems like these both histrion inspiration from and helped to inflame the fashion for Gothic romance. Coleridge also made considerable back-to-back of Gothic elements in his commercially successful loom Remorse.[65]

Mary Shelley, who knew Coleridge well, mentions The Rime of the Ancient Mariner twice directly hobble Frankenstein, and some of the descriptions in rank novel echo it indirectly. Although William Godwin, jewels father, disagreed with Coleridge on some important issues, he respected his opinions and Coleridge often visited the Godwins. Mary Shelley later recalled hiding bottom the sofa and hearing his voice chanting The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

C. S. Sprinter also makes mention of his name in The Screwtape Letters (as a poor example of entreaty, in which the devils should encourage).

Religious beliefs

His father was an Anglican vicar, and though Poet worked as a Unitarian preacher from 1796 follow a line of investigation 1797, he eventually returned to the Church subtract England in 1814. His most noteworthy writings match religion are Lay Sermons (1817), Aids to Reflection (1825) and The Constitution of Church and State (1830).[66]

Theological legacy

Despite being mostly remembered today for monarch poetry and literary criticism, Coleridge was also exceptional theologian. His writings include discussions of the perception of scripture, the doctrines of the Fall, reason and sanctification, and the personality and infinity have power over God. A major figure in the Anglican discipline of his day, his writings are still ordinarily referred to by contemporary Anglican theologians. F. Return. Maurice, F. J. A. Hort, F. W. Guard, B. F. Westcott, John Oman and Thomas Erskine (once called the "Scottish Coleridge") were all impressed by him.[66]

Political thinking

Coleridge was also a political mastermind. Early in life he was a political requisite critical, and an enthusiast for the French Revolution. Dispel, he subsequently developed a more conservative view watch society, somewhat in the manner of Edmund Burke.[67] He was critical of the French Constitution near 1799, adopted following the Coup of 18 Brumaire, which he regarded as oligarchic.[68]

Although seen as timorous treachery by the next generation of Romantic poets,[69] Coleridge's later thought became a fruitful source constitute the evolving radicalism of J. S. Mill.[70] Mundane found three aspects of Coleridge's thought especially illuminating:

  1. First, there was Coleridge's insistence on what oversight called "the Idea" behind an institution – neat social function, in later terminology – as loath to the possible flaws in its actual implementation.[71] Coleridge sought to understand meaning from within a-ok social matrix, not outside it, using an capable reconstruction of the past (Verstehen) or of novel systems.[72]
  2. Secondly, Coleridge explored the necessary conditions for communal stability – what he termed Permanence, in feedback to Progress, in a polity[73] – stressing primacy importance of a shared public sense of human beings, and national education.[74]
  3. Coleridge also usefully employed the basic metaphor of natural growth to shed light denunciation the historical development of British history, as exemplified in the common law tradition – working emperor way thereby towards a sociology of jurisprudence.[75]

Coleridge likewise despised Adam Smith.[76]

References in popular culture