Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge, English poet, 1795

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (October 21, 1772 – July 25, 1834) was an English author who was, along with his friend William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England. A difficult figure to categorize in the history of English literature, Coleridge vacillated between poetry, philosophy, and literary criticism throughout his career. His work and thought are notoriously sporadic, and were no doubt influenced by the rather tragic circumstances of his life; yet what we do have suggests that Coleridge possessed one of the most subtle and brilliant minds of his generation. A remarkable polymath (as a boy he famously read the entire contents of the third largest library in England) Coleridge, through his dazzling essays, poems, and talks, continues to exert a tremendous influence on the Anglophone intellectual world.

Life

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Ottery St Mary, the son of a vicar. After the death of his father, he was sent to Christ's Hospital, a boarding school in London. In later life, Coleridge idealized his father as a pious innocent, but his relationship with his mother was difficult. From 1791 until 1794 he attended Jesus College at the University of Cambridge, except for a short period when he enlisted in the royal dragoons. At the university he encountered political and theological ideas then considered radical. He left Cambridge without a degree and joined the poet Robert Southey in a plan, soon abandoned, to found a utopian communal society, called pantisocracy, in the wilderness of Pennsylvania. In 1795 the two friends married Sarah and Edith Fricker (who were sisters), but Coleridge's marriage proved unhappy. Southey departed for Portugal, but Coleridge remained in England. That same year, Coleridge met poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. They became immediate friends, and their correspondence would form one of the richest intellectual parternships of the Romantic era.

Around 1796, Coleridge started using opium as a pain reliever. His and Dorothy Wordsworth's notebooks record that he suffered from a variety of medical complaints, including toothache and facial neuralgia. While there was little stigma associated with taking opium then, there was also little understanding of the physiological or psychological aspects of addiction.

The years 1797 and 1798, during which Wordsworth and Coleridge lived in Nether Stowey, Somerset, were among the most fruitful of Coleridge's life. Besides the Ancient Mariner, he composed the symbolic poem Kubla Khan, written—Coleridge himself claimed—as a result of an opium dream, in "a kind of a reverie"; and the first part of the narrative poem Christabel. During this period he also produced his much-praised "conversation" poems This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, Frost at Midnight, and The Nightingale.

In 1798 Coleridge and Wordsworth published a joint volume of poetry, Lyrical Ballads, which proved to be the starting-point for the English Romantic movement. Though the productive Wordsworth contributed more poems to the volume, Coleridge's first version of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was the longest poem and drew more immediate attention.

In the autumn of 1798 Coleridge and Wordsworth left for a stay in Germany; Coleridge soon went his own way and spent much of his time in university towns. During this period he became interested in German philosophy, especially the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant, and in the literary criticism of the 18th-century dramatist Gotthold Lessing. Coleridge studied German and, after his return to England, translated the dramatic trilogy Wallenstein by the German Classical poet Friedrich Schiller into English.

In 1800 he returned to England and shortly thereafter settled with his family and friends at Keswick in the Lake District of Cumberland. Soon, however, he fell into a vicious cycle of self-doubt, ill-health, and increased opium dependency.

Between 1808 and 1819 Coleridge gave a series of lectures in London and Bristol – those on Shakespeare renewed interest in the playwright as a model for contemporary writers. Coleridge's lectures were so popular that it was considered a rite of passage for any aspiring intellectual to travel to London and hear Coleridge read. One such intellectual who did precisely that was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, afterwards, would devote his life to the literary arts.

In 1816 Coleridge took residence in the home of the physician James Gillman, in Highgate. ln Gillman's home he finished his major prose work, the Biographia Literaria (1817), a volume composed of 25 chapters of autobiographical notes and dissertations on various subjects, including some incisive literary theory and criticism. The sections in which Coleridge expounded his definitions of the nature of poetry and the imagination are particularly important, laying out the division between true imagination and mere fancy that was to influence writers well into the Victorian period. He published other writings while he was living at the Gillman home, notably Sibylline Leaves (1817), Aids to Reflection (1825), and Church and State (1830). He died in Highgate on July 25, 1834.

Poetry

Coleridge is probably best known for his long narrative poems, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. Even those who have never read the Rime have come under its influence: its words have given the English language the metaphor of an albatross around one's neck, the (mis)quote of "water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink", and the phrase "a sadder but wiser man". Christabel is known for its musical rhythm and Gothic horror.

Both poems exhibit what Coleridge and Wordsworth set out to achieve in the Lyrical Ballads: a triumph of the imagination over the dull poverty of the mind. However, in stark contrast to Wordsworth's poems, Coleridge's project a wild and truly imaginative universe, where seemingly impossible things happen, all of which is a far cry from Wordsworth's attempts to render humble life "in the languge really used by men."

In contrast, a poem like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the outlandish story of a sailor who, after killing a symbolic albatross, condemns himself and his shipmates to death on a motionless sea, where they sat "idle as a painted ship/upon a painted ocean." Death arrives on a ghostly ship, and takes the lives of all the crew but that of the eponymous Mariner, who is cursed to wear the albatross about his neck and live aboard a ship of corpses. Then the moon—Coleridge's symbol of the imagination—appears and reanimates the Mariner's crew; the ghosts sail the ship back to land where the mariner washes ashore, to tell his tale to anyone who passes. In Coleridge's hands a poem such as this, though wildly fantastic, does not devolve into mere fantasy. As in his other strongest poems, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is profoundly moving and engrossing, affecting a complete suspension of disbelief in the reader.

Kubla Khan, or, A Vision in a Dream, A Fragment, although shorter, is also widely known and loved. It consists of strange collage of dream-like imagery, beginning with a description of a mythical palace built by Kubla Khan, and moving rapidly into a vortex of imaginative and seemingly unrelated scenes. The poem is renowned for its exquisite metrical flow and creativity. Many poets who were to succeed Coleridge — among them future poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson — would cite Kubla Khan as the most beautiful poem written in the English language.

Coleridge's shorter, meditative "conversation poems," however, proved to be the most influential of his work, perhaps because his other poems have proven so difficult to imitate. These include both quiet poems like This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison and Frost at Midnight and also strongly emotional poems like Dejection and The Pains of Sleep. Wordsworth immediately adopted the model of these poems, and used them to compose several of his major poems. Via Wordsworth, the conversation poem became a standard vehicle for English poetic expression, and perhaps the most common approach among modern poets, most especially Frost, who indebted himself directly to Wordsworth.

Other Works and Legacy

Although known today primarily for his poetry, Coleridge also published essays and books on literary theory, criticism, politics, philosophy, and theology. He introduced Immanuel Kant to the British public in his lectures and "Thursday-night seminars" at Highgate. Coleridge's treatment of the German idealist philosophers in the Biographia Literaria has been subject to the accusation of plagiarism. It is known that he presents lengthy translations, particularly from Schelling, as his own work. de Quincey compares this to kleptomania, although Coleridge's defenders attribute it to his poor organization of notes rather than dishonesty.

He wrote both political commentary and hack journalism for several newspapers, especially during the Napoleonic wars. He translated two of Schiller's plays from the German and himself wrote several dramas (Zapolya had successful runs in London and Bristol). He also worked as a teacher and tutor, gave public lectures and sermons, and almost single-handedly wrote and published two periodicals, the Watchman and the Friend. During his life, he was famous as a conversationalist.

His letters, Table Talk, and range of friends reflect the breadth of his interests. In addition to literary people such as William Wordsworth and Charles Lamb, his friends included Humphry Davy the chemist, industrialists such as the tanner Thomas Poole and members of the Wedgwood family, Alexander Ball the military governor of Malta, the American painter Washington Allston, and the physician James Gillman.

Coleridge's contributions to fields ranging from philosophy to theology and biology continue to be studied, and Coleridge's immense talents as a poet place him in the pantheon of the Romantics despite his relatively small output. His eclectic and voracious intellect perhaps pushed him too far, and it is unfortunate that in his rather erratic life we do not have a more complete treatise on Coleridge's outlook. Still, his esteem among scholars of all fields continues to rise, and it is now generally acknowledged that Coleridge was much more than just a minor poet of the Romantic movement. It is in the continued reading of Coleridge that we find, more than any other thinker of his generation, the foreshadowing of contemporary thought.

Further reading

By Coleridge

  • The Collected Works in 16 volumes (some are double volumes), many editors, Routledge & Kegan Paul and also Bollingen Series LXXV, Princeton University Press (1971-2001)
  • The Notebooks in 5 (or 6) double volumes, eds. Kathleen Coburn and others, Routledge and also Bollingen Series L, Princeton University Press (1957-1990)
  • Collected Letters in 6 volumes, ed. E. L. Griggs, Clarendon Press: Oxford (1956-1971)

About and around Coleridge

  • Biography by Richard Holmes: Coleridge: Early Visions, Viking Penguin: New York, 1990 (republished later by HarperCollins) ISBN 0375705406; Coleridge: Darker Reflections, HarperCollins: London, 1997 ISBN 0375708383
  • Memoir by Thomas de Quincey: Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets ISBN 0140439730
  • Science fiction by Douglas Adams: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency ISBN 0671746723
  • Fantasy by Tim Powers: The Anubis Gates

Further viewing

  • Film directed by Julien Temple: Pandaemonium (the film is not truly historical, and quite damning to Wordsworth)


Resources


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