12.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
Family and education
- youngest of 14 children of a country clergyman (the 10th who lived);
- a precocious and lonely child; lost his father (who loved him most) when he was nine;
- went to Christ’s Hospital in London (a good school, life-long friendship with Charles
Lamb) but he felt isolated;
- Studied in Cambridge but temperamentally not suited to academic discipline; when he
abandoned the university in 1794 he had no degree;
His early life was fundamentally determined by two intensive friendships:
- Robert Southey: plans of a Pantisocracy; marriage to Sara Fricker (Southey’s sister-in-
law) – the greatest misfortune of his life;
- 1797: Wordsworth became his neighbours: they were antithetical characters but both
needed the other:
Wordsworth Coleridge
slow but stubborn, consistent quick but soon tired: ‘there is no subject on
which he has not touched none on which he has
rested’ (Hazlitt)
liked physical exercise, athletic a bookworm, stout
understanding nature, reality introspection, reading
reserved in company liked to talk a lot
more lyrical in reciting poems (according to more dramatic (composed while walking on
Lamb composed while walking on a smooth uneven ground or breaking through the branches
path) of a copse-wood)
- Coleridge had a readiness to analyse himself which Wordsworth needed, while Coleridge
needed his friend’s discipline
- Coleridge selfless towards Wordsworth; Wordsworth did not encourage Coleridge’s
ambitions: Coleridge’s poetry disappeared into Wordsworth’s
- Coleridge’s great poems were written in the one and a half years while he was
Wordsworth’s neighbour (1797-98)
His later life
- 1798: he received an annuity of £150 on condition that he devotes himself entirely to the
study of poetry and philosophy;
- he goes to study philosophy in Germany (influence of Kant, Schelling, Lessing);
- on his return his poetry is virtually finished; his marriage being really bad his health
deteriorates, he takes to opium (laudanum);
- separates from his wife in 1806 and settles in London (found refuge in the household of
physician James Gillman): a lecturer (between 1808-1819), journalist (The Friend),
preacher, philosopher, critic: Biographia Literaria: Biographical Sketches of my Literary
Life & Opinions (1817)
Coleridge’s criticism (largely preserved in the Biographia and in some notes for his public
lectures)
- fancy vs. imagination: combination vs. creation
- both fancy and imagination are necessary in poetry but true genius manifests itself in
works of the imagination: imagination is the soul of genuine poetry (life giving, vital
power)
On the imagination (from Biographia Literaria):
‘It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; … It is essentially vital even as all
objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.’
the true poet: ‘diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends and (as it were) fuses, each into
each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the
name of Imagination’
‘[The Imagination] reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant
qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea with the
image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old
and familiar objects, a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order…’
- A work of imagination, a ‘legitimate’ poem is thus an organic whole
- Shakespeare: the epitome of true genius, of the imaginative poet
- Many other aspects of his criticism: allegory vs. symbol, about the Lyrical Ballads,
disagreement with Wordsworth’s ideas in the ‘Preface’
Coleridge’s poetry:
- two distinct groups: the daemonic/mystical group (‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’,
‘Christabel’, ‘Kubla Khan’); the conversational group: ‘The Eolian Harp’, ‘Frost at
Midnight’ (conversation poems); ‘Dejection: an Ode’, ‘To William Wordsworth’
