Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1) His Biography:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who lived from 21st October 1772 to 25th July 1834 founded the Romantic Movement in England with his friend William Wordsworth and was a member of the Lake Poets. Additionally, he collaborated and shared books with Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Charles Lloyd. Along with the significant literary work Biographia Literaria, he also wrote the poems: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan. His critical writings, particularly those on William Shakespeare, had a significant impact and aided in the dissemination of German idealism philosophy among English-speaking societies.
Many well-known phrases and words were created by Coleridge, such as “suspension of disbelief”. Ralph Waldo Emerson and American transcendentalism were greatly influenced by him. It has been hypothesized that Coleridge had bipolar disorder, which had not yet been identified during his lifetime because he suffered from terrible episodes of anxiety and sadness throughout his adult life. He may have had rheumatic fever and other ailments as a child because of his poor physical condition. He was given laudanum as a treatment for these ailments, which led to a lifelong opium addiction.
2) Main Works:
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
The adventures of a sailor who has just returned from a protracted sea voyage are described in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The mariner stops a man who is heading to a wedding and starts telling him a story. As the mariner’s tale develops, the Wedding-Guest’s emotion shifts, as seen by the language usage, from amusement to impatience to terror to fascination. Depending on the tone of the poem, Coleridge employs narrative devices like personification and repetition to evoke a sense of peril, the paranormal, or calm.
Christabel:
In Christabel, a woman named Christabel serves as the main character. She meets Geraldine, a stranger who claims to have been kidnapped from her home by a group of violent guys.
Kubla Khan:
The poem’s style is very dissimilar from Coleridge’s other works. Khan’s pleasure dome, which was constructed next to a holy river that was supplied by a potent fountain, is described in the poem’s first stanza. The poem’s second stanza expresses the narrator’s reaction to the entrancing qualities and effects of an Abyssinian maid’s song, which prevent him from acting on her inspiration until he could hear her voice again. Together, they provide an analysis of the differences between creative power that is at odds with nature and creative power that is in tune with it. The speaker describes seeing a woman playing the dulcimer in the third and last verse, saying that if he could bring back her melody, he could fill the pleasure dome with music. He ends by using religious ecstatic language to describe how a hypothetical audience would respond to the song.
Opus Maximum:
The Opus Maximum is filled with a variety of things. “My Thought are like Surinam toads,” he said in a letter from 1818, “as they crawl on, little Toads vegetate out from back & side, grow quickly, & draw off the attention from the mother Toad”. Evans contends that the book’s seemingly haphazard structure reflects Coleridge’s conviction that arguments for God cannot be proven using the tools of Understanding but must instead draw their substance from readers’ own minds through the power of Reason, and that the work is rhetorically constructed to accomplish this.
In general, the argument is neo-Platonic. Coleridge had figured out “the sublime secret of believing by “the reason” what the “understanding” has been obliged to fling out” as Carlyle sarcastically observed. Coleridge maintained that the limitations imposed by Kant on metaphysical reasoning only applied to arguments based on Understanding and did not apply to arguments based on Reason.
Logic:
Although Coleridge had long intended to publish a book on logic, it wasn’t until the 1820s that his idea began to take shape. He wanted to create a book that would be useful for young men who were preparing to enter public and professional life. The subjects Coleridge addresses vary from education to the mind’s liberation from the senses.
3) Main Themes:
Political thinking:
Coleridge also had political ideas. Over the years, Coleridge transformed from a political radical and supporter of the French Revolution, to having a more conservative perspective of society, something akin to Edmund Burke. Although the latter generation of Romantic poets viewed Coleridge’s later views as cowardly treachery, it was a valuable source for J. S. Mill’s developing radicalism.
Three ideas in Coleridge’s thinking, in Mill’s opinion, are particularly insightful: First, Coleridge insisted on an institution’s “Idea” rather than any potential errors in its actual implementation, or its “Social Function” in later language. Coleridge used an imaginative reconstruction of the past (Verstehen) or of foreign systems in order to grasp meaning from within a social matrix as opposed to from the outside. Second, Coleridge examined the prerequisites for social stability, which he called Permanence in a polity as a counterbalance to Progress. He emphasized the significance of a shared public sense of community and national education. Sociological jurisprudence was achieved as a result of Coleridge’s insightful use of the organic metaphor of natural growth to illuminate the historical evolution of British history as embodied by the common law tradition.
The Transformative Power of the Imagination:
Coleridge thought that a powerful, active imagination could serve as a tool for getting through challenging situations. Imaginative flights, in which the speaker temporarily leaves his immediate surroundings in favour of a fully made-up experience, are the only source of energy in many of his poems. It is both liberating and startling to utilize the imagination in this way since it promotes utter disregard for the limitations of space and time. These emotional and cerebral leaps are frequently highly rewarded.
In “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” (1797), Coleridge makes perhaps his most famous use of imagination. The speaker uses a sharp poetic mind to participate in a journey that he cannot physically take. The speaker imagines himself on a wonderful stroll over the countryside, and when he “returns” to the bower, he finds lots of things to enjoy from inside the bower itself, including the leaves, trees, and shadows. The ability to imagine makes the prison a perfectly pleasant place.
The Interplay of Philosophy, Piety, and Poetry:
In his poems, Coleridge explored the tensions between religious piety and philosophy. According to some critics, Coleridge’s interest in philosophy was merely an effort to comprehend the creative and intellectual drives that propelled his poetry. Coleridge connected his creative and intelligent forces to God, spirituality, and worship in order to prove that they were organic and originated from the natural world. But in Coleridge’s writing, poetry, philosophy, and piety clashed, causing conflict and disarray both on and off the page.
Coleridge tries in “The Eolian Harp” (1795) to bring the three powers together. Here, the speaker’s philosophical tendencies—specifically, his conviction that all living things are inhabited by an “intellectual breeze” that passes by and imbues them with consciousness—confront those of his orthodox wife, who disapproves of his unconventional viewpoints and exhorts him to follow Christ. While his wife slept peacefully, the speaker torments himself over his inner turmoil. He is torn between Christianity and a distinctive, personal spirituality that views nature as equal to God. The speaker praises God and Christ for having healed him from the spiritual scars caused by these unconventional viewpoints as the poem comes to a close by discarding the pantheist spirit.
Nature and the Development of the Individual:
The free-spirited, inventive soul of youth was extolled by Coleridge, Wordsworth, and other romantic poets, who found imagery in nature to represent it. Their theory held that being in nature was essential to the growth of a complete soul and feeling of personality.
Coleridge bemoaned the lost chances of his insulated, city-bound upbringing in several poems, notably “Frost at Midnight” (1798), which he wrote after his father’s death compelled him to attend school in London, far from the rural idylls of his youth. In this scene, the speaker’s little boy is sound asleep while he reflects on his life while sitting still by a fire. He thinks back to his time in boarding school when he would daydream and fall asleep by thinking about his rural home, and he promises his kid that he will never be cut off from nature the way he once was. In contrast to the speaker, the son will go through the seasons and learn about God by taking in everything that the natural world has to offer. The boy will have the chance to establish a relationship with God and the natural world, something that neither the speaker nor Coleridge himself had the chance to do. Coleridge believed that nature had the power to provide the joy, love, freedom, and piety that are essential traits for a deserving, mature person.
4) Coleridge and Romanticism:
In English literature, Coleridge was a co-founder of Romanticism. Coleridge is a thoroughly Romantic poet in terms of his vivid romantic imagination, suggestiveness, symbolism, love of nature, obsession with the remote, handling of the supernatural, medievalism, love of music, and the dreamlike character of his poetry.
His poetry is where romanticism really excels, and his poetry is “the most perfect, greatest manifestation of all that is the purest and most ethereal in the romantic spirit,” according to one critic.
Wordsworth’s contribution to Romanticism was to broaden the parameters of the mind and lift the formal curtain that separated Man from Nature. Coleridge, though, provided the movement’s intellectual side with its tangible beauty while giving this larger sphere its song.
Additionally, like Wordsworth, Coleridge battled valiantly against the artificial style of the past era in favour of a higher ideal of poetry. The key elements of Romanticism are simplicity of language, diversity of meter, flight of imagination, love of nature, and a humanistic and democratic viewpoint, and Coleridge had all these elements in spades.
His three most well-known romantic poems—The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan—clearly demonstrate the major artistic abilities of Coleridge as a romantic poet.
As a poet, Coleridge possessed a vivid romantic imagination, which is the key element of romantic poetry. His gaze wandered from the soil to the sky and back again. Both the normal and the supernatural were concepts and perceptions he was capable of. He placed a lot of emphasis on imagination both in theory and practice. In his Biographia Literaria, he also accorded imagination a level of significance never before seen. For him, the actual world was a place where things were fixed and certain. Only the poet’s inventiveness could make it deserving of praise.
Coleridge argued for the value of the individual intellect and the strength of imagination in the strongest possible terms, drawing inspiration from Schiller and Kant. He responded against the ideas of Locke and Hobbes, philosophers of the 18th century who had treated the human mind like a tabula rasa, or a blank slate. Coleridge favoured irrationality and imagination over reason.
5) Coleridge and Kant:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge understood Kant, yet in his Aides to Reflection, he equates intuition with Kant’s pure reason. Kant distinguished between understanding and reason, saying that although the pure reason was a “knowing” that was inherent in the way humans thought, understanding was a type of “knowing” that was created by thinking. Coleridge was drawing an alternative distinction between understanding and reason by reading Kant’s theory of pure reason as intuition. Coleridge continued to view intuition as a type of knowledge that is created by thought, but he interpreted pure reason to be everything that you know simply because you know it. And it was this understanding that the American Transcendentalists took as the core of their philosophy, especially Emerson.
6) Difference between Fancy and Imagination:
According to Coleridge, fancy is only “associative”, while imagination is the faculty connected to creation and the capacity to mold and bind. Fancy is dependent on and inferior to the imagination.
The types of imagination and fancy vary. Fancy is not at all a creative ability. Like the imagination, it combines what is perceived into lovely shapes; it does not fuse and integrate. The distinction between the two is equivalent to that between a chemical compound and a mechanical mixture.
7) His Legacy:
After experiencing years of personal agony, Coleridge passed away in 1834. He became a legend in his day, and friends and peers began to refer to him as the genius who failed. However, the failure was mostly down to early optimism that was dashed by illness and medication. Despite all, Coleridge may still be praised for being a revolutionary and, at his best, a potent poet with an enduring effect. His conception of poetry continues to serve as the benchmark for other English poets. Coleridge served as an inspiration to the significant generation that came after him in his capacities as a political thinker and a Christian apologist. The recent disclosure of his private notes has shown additional proof of his inquisitive spirit’s ongoing ferment and vibrancy.
8) Some Quotes:
Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom. ⁃ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Literary Remains, Vol. 1
Water, water, everywhere, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink. ⁃ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Silence does not always mark wisdom. ⁃ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poetry: the best words in the best order. ⁃ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean. ⁃ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
