5 Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Dr Anjita Singh,

Module Structure:

4.1 Introduction

4.2 Biographic Sketch

4.3 Did you know

4.4 First Phase

4.5 Second Phase

4.6 Point to Ponder

4.7 Third Phase

4.8 Fourth Phase

4.9 Narrative Technique

4.10 Critic‟s Comment

4.11 Kubla Khan

4.12 Dejection: An Ode

4.13 Works Cited

4.14Test yourself

4.15 Self-assessment

4.16 References

4.1. Introduction

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, (21 October 1772-25 July 1834) younger of the two English poets called the older romantics with William Wordsworth is credited for laying the foundation of the Romantic Movement. Romanticism, which covers the last quarter of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, is a difference in attitude, a sharpened sensibility, an awakened imagination and a vein of individuality never felt before in poetry. In truth the Romantic poets were making a meditative retreat into the natural phenomenon as holding the key to an understanding of human experiences and problems.

The Romantic Movement was never a unified movement, nevertheless, created an alternative aesthetics of freedom and individualism, and fanned as it was by the revolutionary ideals of the French Revolution. The neo-classic preference for the perfect was replaced by a desire for the glory of the imperfect. A poet, a literary critic and a philosopher of supreme genius, Coleridge was perhaps one of those few who strove to bring into his writing a harmony between science, politics and religion which hitherto had in the main been at loggerheads. Of all the Romantics it was Coleridge who was the most vastly read and perhaps the only English poet who had an extensive knowledge of the German theologists.

4.2. Biographic sketch

Coleridge was the son of a Devonshire parson, born and brought up in the city of London, educated at Christ‟s Hospital and Cambridge and prompted by these circumstances to develop a greater intimacy with books and philosophy. As Grierson and Smith write “seeing nothing of nature but the sky and stars, and taking no such delight as Lamb took in the city crowds. He dreamed, and read and talked…”.(295) For Coleridge, knowledge was like a province to be traversed and conquered. Blessed with a brilliantly illuminating mind, Coleridge‟s greatest failure was his lack of resilience and his incapability to sustain the spasmodic sparks of inspiration that flashed across his mind and illuminated with amazing imagination some of his best poems. Critics and biographers have harshly judged him as no more than a weak-willed man ruined by an unconquerable addiction to opium. This opinion may be only partly correct as Coleridge‟s addiction stemmed from his dependence on laudanum to relieve him of the pain of physical illness. That he proved irresponsible towards his wife Sarah Fricker and family was also another of his personal tragedies as he found himself trapped in a loveless marriage. Coleridge was unwarily drawn into the whirlpool of unfavorable circumstances, which robbed him of his shaping spirit of imagination. Yet he counts strongly as one of the most musical of the English poets and for his supreme flights of imagination and remarkable versification is honored as the high priest of romanticism.

4.3.Did you know

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were also known as the Lake Poets or Lakers because they lived in the Lake District of Cumberland, though initially Francis Jeffrey used the term derogatorily in The Edinburgh review in1817

4.4. First Phase

While at Cambridge, Coleridge was so passionately stimulated by the fervor of the French Revolution that he abandoned his studies and enlisted himself in the Light Dragoons. This fervor however did not last beyond two months. On his return Coleridge came into the association of Robert Southey with whom he collaborated in the writing of a tragedy The Fall of Robespierre and also planned a Utopian commune called the Pant isocracy to be developed on the banks of the river Susquehanna in America, based on the ideal of equality as taught by William Godwin. Coleridge got engaged and married to Sarah Fricker, Southey‟s sister-in-law that proved later to be the greatest mistake of his life. Coleridge had begun publishing poems by 1794 and his early poems appeared in The Morning Chronicle. Ode on the Departing Year and ode on France, show him imbibing the spirit of the eighteenth century poets like Collins and Gray. He exhibited a mastery over this difficult lyrical form though he attempted sonnets in a simpler style too. Coleridge himself refers to these poems as “Effusions” and their ebullience (a word Coleridge himself used) was supplied by a mix of themes on love, politics and philosophy. However these poems, which Wordsworth described as “poems of Sentiment and Reflection”, lack the astonishing vitality of his later poems on which his fame chiefly rests.

4.5. Second Phase

A transformation came about in Coleridge, as man and poet after his meeting with Wordsworth in 1797 at Nether Stoway and led to one of the most intimate and enduring friendships between any two poets and a blossoming of Coleridge‟s genius. Coleridge became Wordsworth‟s greatest admirer and initially imbibed Wordsworth‟s love of nature, The Wordsworthian attitude is evident in the poems of the period like “Frost at Midnight” and “Fears in Solitude” Their friendship was a fruitful partnership symbolized with the publication of “The Lyrical Ballads” in 1798, which is understood to be abench-mark in the revival of romantic poetry. Coleridge‟s association with the Wordsworths (William and his sister Dorothy) was significant as it brought out the best of his creativity and resulted in poems like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, “Christabel” and “Kubla Khan”. The enchantment felt in the poems of the period could be a transfusion of Coleridge‟s personal emotions of the time. There may have been another simultaneous effect on Coleridge‟s mind that produced a hallucinatory state- the opium which he had started taking regularly to alleviate his physical and mental illness and which gradually crippled his imaginative powers. Coleridge‟s marriage to Sarah Fricker was a failure but friendship with Wordsworth brought into Coleridge‟s life a deep passion in the person of Sara Hutchinson who was a friend of Wordsworth and with whom Coleridge fell in love. But the dilemma of being in an unhappy marriage deeply affected Coleridge and added to his increasing dependence on opium, severely assaulting his mental peace and incapacitating his creative faculties.

4.6. Point to ponder

What gave wind to Coleridge‟s poetic flights? Was it idealism, love or opium?

4.7. Third Phase

In September 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge had travelled to Germany where Coleridge devoted himself to the study of philosophy at Hamburg and from here he gradually started turning awayfrom poetry to metaphysics. In 1802 Coleridge published his ode on Dejection, which is a summing up of his personal trials, and passions, his new found recourse in philosophy and metaphysics and in a way his departure from his earlier held mutual views on the role of nature with Wordsworth. By this time Coleridge had become fully addicted to opium and his creative energies had waned. He exiled himself from family and familiar people and spent two years at the wartime Civil Service at Malta during which time he wrote his confessional Notebooks. On his return he formally separated himself from his wife and for six months he stayed with Wordsworth and Sara Hutchinson. Coleridge turned to delivering lectures to distinguished audiences and the 18 lectures On Poetry and the Principles of Taste given at the Royal Institute express his developed attraction for this form. His lectures on Shakespeare published in 1907 in two volumes as Shakespearean Criticism are a hall-mark in developing the novel concept of „organic‟ form and „epiphenomena‟ which conveys the idea of a poet‟s work as the particular emanations of a single creative mind. Coleridge also came close to realizing his dream of a literary synthesis of a literary, moral and political paper in The Friend which ran for 28 issues and was published in book form in 1812.

4.8. Fourth Phase

At this time Coleridge came to a great crisis in his life in a break with the Wordsworth and Sara Hutchinson. He wrote a few poems like The Visionary Hope, The Suicide’s Argument and Time, Real and Imaginary, some political articles and re-worked his early play Osiris which was produced at Drury Lane as Remorse in 1813.Coleridge suffered a physical and mental breakdown in 1813 for which he had to be treated. In 1814 he wrote the commentaries added to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and his best work on literary criticism the Biographia Literaria,aptly described as “a kaleidoscope of philosophy, criticism and autobiography and one of the key texts of English Romanticism”. (Ousby 190) Coleridge had come to the end of his poetic career but he now flourished as a philosopher, lecturer and critic, expounding mature views on society, religion and culture All his reading and absorbing of knowledge in his younger age came into actual force now and his two Lay Sermons,(1816-17),his lectures on the History of Philosophy ,his General Course on Literature and Aids to Reflection are all systematic discourses on various branches of learning, concrete and scientific in approach .Coleridge is spoken of chiefly as a poet but as a matter of fact his literary acumen encompasses almost all established literary forms and he made valuable contributions to the field of criticism and philosophy. Through his works such as Biographia Literaria, Coleridge has anticipated a modern philosophical and psychological criticism of the arts.

4.9. Narrative technique

The poetic output of Coleridge is not extensive but the poems on which his fame rests have an element of transport not felt in the best of the English poets. Poems like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Christabel hypnotize and carry to a realm beyond common reality. Coleridge‟s metaphysical mind has given to these poems a dream-like atmosphere through flights of imagination and the association of the supernatural elements. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner an exquisite story revolving around the hallucinatory experiences of an old sailor is an almost perfect rendition of the ballad form. The moral deeply embedded in the near fantastical tale saves it from being a phantasmagoria. When Coleridge was writing these poems for the Lyrical Ballads there was an understanding between Wordsworth and himself that while Wordsworth took upon the task of making the ordinary seem strange and extraordinary by imaginative interpretation, it was Coleridge‟s task to make the supernatural and extraordinary seem natural by the force of the dramatic truth of the emotions depicted. Coleridge was able to execute this admirably by bringing into working what he called was “the willing suspension of disbelief “It is not that Coleridge did not regard the supernatural as supernatural ; it is that he regarded it as a normal part of the whole and was asking of his readers just this- that for the moment they should discard their cloak of disbelief which prevented them from accepting the world of faeries and spirits as a part of their own and enter the magical world of phantom ships and haunted figures with a readiness to believe.

4.10. Critics Comment

Coleridge was a muddle-brained metaphysician, who by some strange freak of fortune turned out a few real poems amongst the dreary flood of inanity which was his wont.It is these poems which must be selected…William Morris

4.11. Kubla Khan

Kubla Khanis an unfinished poem written in 1797 and published in Christabel and OtherPoems in 1816.It has been subtitled by Coleridge as A Vision ina Dream: A Fragment because he regarded it as a part of something more but critics have considered it a complete poem and in spirit, a definition of Coleridge‟s poetry. It consists of fifty-four lines divided into two stanzas and by Coleridge‟s own account is a record of his dream- a daydream induced by the opium he was wont to take. In 1797 Coleridge was recuperating at a lonely farmhouse in the village of Purlock, and on that particular afternoon he sat down to read the book, Pilgrimage,by Samuel Purchas.Coleridge was greatly interested in travel literature and inspired by Purchas Pilgrimage he read up Oriental stories especially about Kubla Khan,grandson of Chengiz Khan the Mongol of the Yuan dynasty,who founded the city of Shang-tu which is immortalized by the Xanadu of Coleridge‟s poem.. As he was reading these exact lines: „Here the Kubla Khan commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden there unto. And thus ten miles of fertile garden were enclosed with a wall‟, he fell asleep in his chair and in sleep composed 200 to 300 lines of a poem which on waking up he began to write but being called away by some person from Purlock at that same time he unfortunately could not recall the rest. The magic of phrase and cadence in the poem does support this claim of the poet that during its composition his mind was closed to the prosaic reality of his worldly condition and he was indeed lost in the enchanted world of dream and poetry. The poem in an unconsciously fluid movement unravels both, an enchanted place in terms of magic and miracle as well as the frenzied state of the birth of poetry. What the poem projects is the coherent incoherence of a dream containing in itself the essence of Romantic poetry.

The first stanza of the poem begins with a description of the „stately pleasure dome‟ that Kubla Khan had commanded to be built in Xanadu, his summer capital. This palace with its towers covered ten miles of fertile ground and the walls (or boundaries) enclosed bright gardens, bearing fragrant blossom laden trees. The forests which dated back almost to the hills themselves enfolded „sunny spots of greenery‟. The location of this palace was on the banks of the river Alph, to which there is no actual geographical reference hence, purely a creation of the poet‟s imagination. This stanza introduces the first dichotomy which is an intrinsic part of the thematic structure of the poem-the open gardens bright with the warmth of the sun where beauty is abundant and the sunless sea into which the Alph falls through dark caverns that are beyond the measuring capacity of man.

In the second stanza, Coleridge enthralls by his near magical description of that awe-full „deep romantic chasm‟ under the cedarn cover‟of the ancient forest. The unions of the best elements of romanticism are in force here; the beauty of nature evoked by a vigorous imagination combine to produce mysticism of the highest order-

A savage place! As holy and enchanted

As ever beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon lover!

Rudyard Kipling picked these three lines with two of Keats‟ famous lines on the magical casements and said, „Remember that in all the millions permitted there are no more than five-five little lines-of which one can say: “These are the pure magic. These are the pure vision. The rest is only poetry.” (Ridley,Fifteen Poets. 257). From this haunted chasm sprang forth „a mighty fountain‟. The images used in the description of the birth of this spring could be symbolic of the dynamic energy of birth and creation; the ceaseless turmoil and seething of the earth with pent up force, like a person panting under the pressure of a tremendous physical exertion, forcing out the stream of water and fragments of rock which rebounded like hail or „chaffy grain beneath the thresher‟s flail‟. This birth is of the same sacred river the Alph or perhaps a new stream that joins the river as it flows with its meandering, mazy motion through the woods and valleys before sinking in tumult through the measureless caverns into a dead ocean. Once again the poet brings in the same juxtaposition of antithetical images, the birth and death of the river, summing up in four lines its entire course from origin to end. The river itself appears to be dramatic, almost overshadowing the central character after whom the poem is named. Coleridge has subtly introduced into his tale of Kubla Khan a depiction of nature in all its amazing forms and colours and for a moment it almost seems that in the true Romantic spirit the poet has fallen under the spell of the splendour of nature. But the poet displays powerful control over his fantastic imagination and gently draws us back to Kubla Khan being prophesied impending war by voices of his ancestors heard in the uproar of the river falling into the ocean. This is a subtle reminder of the compulsions that bind man pulling him away from his fantasies. The second stanza ends with a summary of both stanzas finally reiterating that image and aspect which join it to the last stanza-the dome of pleasure, floating on the waves, situated between the fountain and the caves symbols of life and death, creation and destruction, is not any ordinary palace, it is a „miracle of rare device‟ a summer palace situated next to caves of ice! The last lines thrill with the mutually incongruous concepts- miracle (supernatural) vs. device (human planning) and sun vs.sunlessness.

In the third stanza Coleridge revives a dream he had of an Abyssinian maid singing on a dulcimer, yearning for her native landand he himself longs to be able to recall the symphony and song because that music would inspire him to recreate in his poetry that miraculous pleasure-dome of Kubla Khan ; „That sunny dome! those caves of ice‟. The moment in which he would gain this facility would be the moment of poetic inspiration and the state of frenzy into which the poet would gowith „his flashing eyes, his floating hair‟, would make him appear to be charmed by a spirit. Coleridge is speaking of the power of human imagination which transforms sense impressions into reality by the creative process; this is his celebrated theory of the Imagination wherein he states that poetry originates from within the poet by the principle of organic unity. The poet in frenzy is a fearsome sight to ordinary mortals and it would require them to perform acts of reverence and try to shield themselves from this apparent evil influence by weaving a circle round him thrice and closing their eyes in dread because the poet is actually one who has drunk the ambrosia of celestial inspiration.

Kubla Khanis written mainly in iambic tetrameter and pentameter with a few anapaests and trochees for effect

4.12.Dejection: An Ode

The ode on Dejection was published on 4 October 1802 after being revised from its original form which was titled “Letter to Sara Hutchinson” and had explicitly referred to „Sara‟. The date coincided with Wordsworth‟s wedding to Mary Hutchinson and Coleridge‟s own seventh marriage anniversary. The original poem which Coleridge says was of a private nature could not have been published because his attachment to Sara Hutchinson was not known overtly. In another draft the poem is addressed to Wordsworth, which was finally replaced by the vaguer „lady‟. The poem was, in matter of theme and structure, an answer to Wordsworth‟s triumphant lyric The Rainbow and Immortality ode and carries an unmistakable undertone of resentment at the contrasting states of the two poet‟s personal and public lives. Wordsworth had just officially solemnised his relationship with Mary Hutchinson and was in new-found happiness while Coleridge was on the verge of despair due to his disastrous marriage and futile love affair. While Wordsworth after a phase of sorrow and frustration had re-discovered beauty in nature and life, Coleridge distances himself from all his previous notions of a living relationship between man and nature. This change may be traced to his deep study of the German transcendental philosophies wherein the external world of nature is understood to be phenomenal and a reflection of the man‟s own thoughts. In form the poem is an ode which is a song meant to be sung at a public celebration but contradictorily Coleridge has used it to express intimate and private emotions perhaps to impress how genuine and crucial the feelings were to him.

Richard Holmes remarks how the final version of the ode is „cunningly shaped into eight irregular stanzas and the outpouring of grief is carefully controlled and led into a climax of joy and blessing‟. An extract from the Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence which tells of a heavenly phenomenon wherein the strange appearance of moon in double form is taken as presaging the coming of a storm, sets the mood of the poem. Coleridge takes his cue from here and says that if that poet could predict the weather by the appearance of the moon then a storm would surely break out this night because the moon is in a similar state. He yearns for the sounds of the storm to reawaken the awe he used to feel at it earlier and wants the force of the storm to “startle this dull pain and make it move and live”. The pain in his heart is one that is “stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned” as it has no natural outlet and the poet is unable to express it in words or sighs or tears. Coleridge‟s invocation of a „Lady‟ here hints at the cause of his heart-ache which has cast him into the throes of depression from which all the beauteous sights and sounds and fragrances of nature are unable to draw him out. His mind acknowledges the beauty of the myriad hues of the evening sky, the playfulness of the clouds and stars and the splendour of the moon in its “lake of blue” but his heart fails to be moved. In the third stanza Coleridge confesses that “my genial spirits fail”- the heaviness of his heart cannot be comforted by any of these external forms of nature because the source of happiness lies not in them but in his own heart. Coleridge expresses his aversion towards nature as an uplifting power and condemns nature as an “inanimate cold world” which merely reflects to every man his own inner feelings. The soul of man is the seat of all light and glory and the source of that joy which is the beauty-making power and which is given only to the pure of heart. His lady love he crowns as “pure of heart” who already knows that the power of joy is Life‟s effluence which gives to the purest “a new Earth and new Heaven”

In stanza VI Coleridge reflects on the changing course of joy in his own heart. In youth hope brought him that joy which banished all distress because both happiness and grief to him at that stage were more fanciful than real. But now he laments the actual afflictions which have not only robbed him of his mirth but tragically have maimed the shaping spirit of his mind-his imagination. In the face of this loss, the only resort left to him was to steal “by abstruse research”, his natural self i.e. to absorb himself in philosophy and negate his senses to pretend that joy which is not actually his. With this resolution the poet turns his mind away from the “viper thoughts” that deject him and concentrates on the raging force of nature which in its differing moods evoke in his mind images of a mad musician, sometimes of an actor perfect in tragic nuances and sometimes of a poet‟s tale of an army in rout. The subsiding hush of the storm bring to his mind the whimpering and sobbing of the lost child in Otway‟s The Orphan. The last stanza of the ode turns the frame of mind away from despair to an optimistic pronouncement of blessings upon the lady in his poem. Sleep deludes Coleridge though it is past midnight and recognizing the healing effect of sleep, the poet hopes that his lady may never have to keep such a vigil, that this storm may bring into her life a beautiful new morning suffused with joy. Thus Coleridge has deftly transformed the very public form of the ode into a deeply personal expression of his inmost thoughts. He has structured the poem into three-part stanzas of turn, counter-turn and stand corresponding to the dance steps that generally accompany the rendering of a ballad. The poem is in iambic lines of trimeter and pentameter. The major theme of his poem other than his own emotional state is the motif of the power of nature and the responsibility of man to be independent of nature and generate and sustain his own happiness. The poem is uniquely ironical in that Coleridge is able to create a magnificent poem on his loss of creativity. Though insisting on the separation between man and nature, Coleridge gives metaphors of his feelings in images of nature.

Reference

• Abrams,M.H.A Glossary of Literary Terms.Bangalore:Prism Books Pvt.Ltd.1993.Print Barth, J. Robert. The Symbolic Imagination.New York: Fordham, 2001. Print Beer, John B.Coleridge the Visionary. London: Chatto and Windus, 1970.Print
• Berkeley, Richard. Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.Print
• Bloom, Harold. The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (Revised Edition). ISBN 978-0-8014-9117-7.1971
• Boulger, J.D. Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969. Print
• Daiches,   David.   A   Critical   History   of   English   Literature.Vol.IV.   New Delhi:AlliedPublishers,1969.Print
• Engell, James. The Creative Imagination Cambridge: Harvard, 1981.Print
• Grierson and Smith. A Critical History of English Poetry.Great Britain. Penguin Books 1962. Print
• Leadbetter, Gregory. Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination.Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.Print
• Lowes, John Livingston. The Road to Xanadu London: Constable, 1930.Print
• Magnuson,  Paul.  Coleridge  and  Wordsworth:  A  Lyrical  Dialogue.  Princeton: Princeton  UP,
• Mundra,J.N .and Mundra,S.C. A History of English Literature.Bareilly:Prakash BookDepot,1999.Print
• Ousby,Ian. Ed. The Wordsworth Companion to Literature in English.Hertfordshire Wordsworth Editions Limited,1994. Print
• Radley, Virginia L. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Twayne Publishers, Inc. ISBN 0-8057-1100-7.1966
• Richards, I. A.Coleridge on Imagination.London: Kegan Paul, 1934.Print
• Richardson, Alan. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind.Cambridge: CUP, 2001.Print
• Selincourt,Earnest   De.Wordworthian   And   Other   Studies.U.S.A   Russell and Russell,.1947.Print
• Toor, Kiran. Coleridge’s Chrysopoetics: Alchemy, Authorship and ImaginationNewcastle:Cambridge Scholars, 2011.
• Vallins, David. Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism: Feeling and Thought. London:Macmillan, 2000.Print