PAPER NO.103
LITERATURE OF ROMANTICS
TOPIC:
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
NAME:PANDYA
MAYURI.M
ROLL NO.25
BATCH
–M.A.2021-2023
SUBMITTED
TO-S.B GARDI DEPARMENT OF ENGLISH MAHARAJA KRISHNAKUMAR SINHJI BHAVNAGAR
UNIVERSITY
Samuel
Taylor Coleridge
“Common
sense in an uncommon degree is
What
the world calls wisdom”
-S.T.Coleridge
BORN: 21 October 1772
DIED: 25
July 1834
Samuel
Taylor Coleridge is a widely celebrated poet, philosopher and critic. He was
born in England in the late eighteenth century. Coleridge was one of the
priests of the English Romantic Movement. He had a rich romantic imagination,
and was the master of narrative verse, supernaturalism, witchery of language,
and exquisite verbal melody. In his poems, he created a world of magic,
mystery, and awe. His poetry is replete with characteristics such as the love
of liberty, interest in the supernatural and the mysterious, the revolutionary
zeal, the medieval imaginative faculty, and new experiments in verse. Moreover,
we also find simplicity of diction, humanism, love for nature, and expression
of melancholy in Coleridge’s poems.
Coleridge’s
poetry, like other romantic poets, is highly rich, sensuous, and pictorial. In
fact, his fondness for the weird and the unusual romantic themes makes him,
inevitably, the purest of the Romantics. Besides, the chief contribution of
Coleridge to poetry is his subtle appeal for the supernatural to the Romantic
sense. He had intense imaginative power and also possessed a talent of creating
hallucinatory reality and communicating moral truths through his works.
Early life:
Samuel
Taylor Coleridge was born on October 21, 1772 at Ottery St. Mary in Devonshire,
where his father, John Coleridge, was a vicar and schoolmaster. His father was
an easy-going country parson who was remarkable for his knowledge of books. His
mother, Ann Bowden Coleridge, was his father’s second wife. Young Coleridge was
very close to his father as compared to his mother. Whereas, his relationship
with his mother was distant and, sometimes, Coleridge had to provoke her to
gain her attention.
Samuel
Taylor Coleridge was the youngest of the fourteen children of his parents. His
surviving siblings included seven brothers—John, William, James, George,
Edward, Luke, and Francis Coleridge—and a sister named Ann Coleridge. From his
father’s first marriage, he had four sisters named Elizabeth, Mary, Florella,
and Sarah Coleridge.
In his
childhood, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a dreamy and indolent boy. Instead of
taking interest in boyish sports, he loved to lie in the sun and read fairy
tales. By his excessive reading of such stories, he succeeded in thoroughly
alarming himself by all kinds of magical possibilities. Before he was five, he
had read the Bible and The Arabian Nights and remembered considerable portions
of both books. By the age of six, Coleridge had also read books like Robinson
Crusoe. He was a sensitive, introspective, extraordinarily precocious, highly
imaginative, and somewhat lazy child.
When
Coleridge was eight years old, his father died. He felt extremely distressed at
the loss of a person with whom he shared the most intimate relationship. At
that time, his elder brothers had started earning and they successfully took
the charge of their younger siblings. But no one of them exercised a wise and
direct influence upon Coleridge.
After the
death of his father, Coleridge was sent to the Charity School of Christ’s
Hospital, London. As a poor and neglected boy, Coleridge remained in this
school for seven or eight years. During these years, he hardly ever went home,
and experienced awful loneliness, especially during holidays when most of his
friends were away. When his brothers, George and Luke, moved to London, the
situation became better for him. He gradually got intimate with Luke, but once
again felt alone and sad when the latter returned to Devon.
Coleridge’s
youthful reputation as poet was based on a few short poems in the Cambridge
Intelligencer and the Morning Post, on the play The Fall of Robespierre and on
other poems, such as, Religious Musings, circulated among friends. His literary
and social interest in Bristol introduced him to Joseph Cottle, a bookseller
and publisher. In 1796, Coleridge published his first volume, Poems on Various
Subjects, for which he got 30 guineas from Joseph Cottle.
During this
period, Coleridge was beset by a continual conflict which in a sense these
events represented: the struggle with what he called ‘’bread and cheese’’, the
efforts to be a practical husband, father, and professional man. The conflict,
acute enough in the economic conditions of the wars against France, was not lessened
on the professional literary side by the shifting intellectual currents and
values of the period after the French Revolution.
Coleridge’s
personal problem was also aggravated to an extent by a progressive disease of
heart and lungs unrealized either by him or his family and friends. The autopsy
after his death, in July, 1834, showed that a progressive disease of heart and
lungs had made him appear neurotic or hypochondriac all his life. This physical
state, usually referred to in connection with his later life and death, may
well have been one of the governing facts of his life from about 1795.
Samuel
Taylor Coleridge met William Wordsworth in 1797 in the Village of Racedown in
Dorsetshire. It was a most memorable meeting and proved to be the beginning of
a memorable friendship. Wordsworth’s friendship helped to ripen Coleridge’s
poetic genius. Moreover, the sympathetic association of Wordsworth’s sister,
Dorothy, also had a pleasant effect upon Coleridge’s mind and health.
Coleridge’s
alliance with Wordsworth and his sister resulted in the form of Lyrical Ballads
(1798). Lyrical Ballads was a volume of poems on which the two poets had
collaborated. Its publication successfully marked the beginning of the English
Romantic Movement in English literature. The ultimate success of the Lyrical
Ballads had brought fame to both the poets.
In 1798,
Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Dorothy went to Germany to learn German and some of
the philosophy and literature of that country. But Coleridge returned to
England in 1799 after the death of his second son, Berkeley.
In 1799,
Coleridge went north at Wordsworth’s invitation and for the first time saw the
Lake District. It was on this journey that he first met Sara Hutchinson. He
fell in love with her, but the love proved painful. Because, although Coleridge
had long realized the imperfections of his marriage with Sara Fricker, he did
not believe in divorce. He, then, returned to London as a leader writer for the
Morning Post and to begin a translation of Schiller’s Wallenstein.
In the
beginning of the 19th century, Coleridge’s health broke down. To ease the pain
that tormented him, he took opium. It acted like a miracle. But the pain soon
returned when the drug lost its effect. As a result, Coleridge became a slave
to the drug. The tyranny of opium spread its dark shadow over the rest of
Coleridge’s life. From time to time, his health improved for a short period
but, on the whole, he felt wretched and miserable. His imagination, excited by
opium, flamed out at intervals, but his power of concentration grew weaker and
weaker. He had given some account of his state of his mind at that time in the
pathetic Ode to Dejection.
Coleridge’s
family and friends did break him at the habit for a time, but he suffered so
dreadfully. For him it was better to die than to endure his sufferings. His
trip to Malta and Italy didn’t have a positive impact on his health. Then,
urged on by his friends, he started a course of lectures in London, which
achieved much success.
“Poetry:
the best words in the best order.”
-S.T.Coleridge
COLLECTED
WORKS:
Lectures
1795 on Politics and Religion (1971)
The Watchman
(1970)
Essays on
his Times in the Morning Post and the Courier (1978)
The Friend
(1969)
Lectures,
1808–1819, on Literature (1987)
Lay Sermons
(1972);
Biographia
Literaria (1983)
Aids to
Reflection (1993)
Lecture on
Shakespeare (1849)
Ode to
France
Youth and
Age
Dejection
Love poems
Fears in
Solitude
Religious
Musings
Woks without
Hope
Hymn before
Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni
The Virgin’s
Cradle Hymn
MAJOR WORKS
· A DAY DREAM
· THE DEVIL’STHOUGHTS
· THE SUICIDE’S ARGUMENT
· THE WENDERINGS OF CAIN
· KUBLA KHAN
· CHRISTABEL
· THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER
· LYRICAL BALLADS
KUBLA KHAN
Samuel
Taylor Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan in 1797 and published it in 1816. He penned
down the poem on awakening from an opium induced sleep into which he had fallen
after reading a passage in Purchase’s Hakluytus Posthumus (Vol. I; p. 148). The
poem is a mystical fragment and considered unrivalled for pure music, power of
poetic diction, and imaginative suggestiveness. Moreover, the poem is also a
feat of supernaturalism and mystery. Coleridge has also used various sensuous
phrases and images in Kubla Khan. It is a poem of pure romance, in which all
romantic associations are concentrated within a short compass to create a sense
of mystery and awe.
In Xanadu
did Kubla Khan
A stately
pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph,
the sacred river, ran
Through
caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless
sea.
Resources:
https;//sparknotes.com.
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