St Coleridge
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The premier poet-critic of modern English tradition, he was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and is known as the poet of the imagination. Poems like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan have inspired writers and musicians of the past and the present. SECTION SUMMARY 2 S.T. COLERIDGE • 1772: he was born in the remote Devon village of Ottery St. Mary, the tenth and youngest child of a school-master and vicar. Feelings of anomie, unworthiness, and incapacity started inside his family and persisted throughout a life of often compulsive dependency on others. • 1781: he was sent to Christ’s Hospital after the death of his father and in the London grammar school he would pass his adolescence training in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, at which he excelled, and in English composition. 4 S.T. COLERIDGE • 1791: he matriculated at Jesus College, Cambridge, and there he composed a mass of occasional poetry. He was strongly influenced by the ideals of the French Revolution and showed from the beginning a convergence between politics and poetry. • 1794: after the disillusionment caused by the Reign of Terror, he planned a utopian commune-like society, called Pantisocracy, in Pennsylvania, founded on shared labor and shared rewards, so he left Cambridge, without taking a degree, but the scheme eventually collapsed. 5 S.T. COLERIDGE 1795: he married Sara Fricker and had three children. In the same period he developed a close friendship with the poet William Wordsworth, with whom he collaborated in the 1797-1799 period to write Lyrical Ballads. His contributions to the volume included a meditative poem in blank verse, The Nightingale, as well as his masterpiece The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. 1799: he met Sara Hutchinson, with whom he fell deeply in love, forming an attachment that was to last many years. 6 S.T. COLERIDGE As time went by the collaboration with Wordsworth turned out to be a struggle for poetic primacy, and eventually meant loss of conviction for Coleridge. Having been provided, quite unexpectedly, a life annuity he travelled to Germany and, once back in England, he separated from his wife in 1806. 1808 onwards: he opted for a career as a critic and started a series of successful lectures among which some very significant ones on Shakespeare, highly influential in the critical perception we have of the Bard still today. “In the plays of Shakespeare, every man sees himself, without knowing that he does so.” 7 S.T. COLERIDGE 1816: he published Christabel with Kubla Khan and The Pains of Sleep in a single volume. 1817: after the publication of his autobiographical work Biographia Literaria, he moved into the house of Dr. James Gillman, a physician in Highgate, trying to cure his opium problem. He had become addicted to it to reduce the pain caused by his rheumatisms. 1834: he died after years of personal discomfort and disappointment. 8 HIS VISION of POETRY A reader seemingly by instinct, he grew up surrounded by books: romances and fairy tales instilled in him a feeling of “the Great” and “the Whole”, a lesson he never forgot. His conversations with Wordsworth during the years in the Lake District, “turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of imagination.” The first point may be described as Wordsworthian, the second as basically Coleridgean. 10 HIS VISION of NATURE Coleridge’s vision of Nature under- went a change with the passing of time: ❖ at first he saw it as hospitable to human response, benevolent, a providential resource against isolation, a companion to man; ❖ later this conviction was compromised by mounting fears and his poetry reflected his sense of vulnerability in the face of a threatening outside world; ❖ finally he gave a sort of neo-Platonic interpretation of it, as the reflection and projection of the perfect world of ‘ideas’ on the flux of time. 11 HIS VISION of IMAGINATION: from FANCY... Coleridge elaborated extensively on the idea of the imagination distinguishing, first of all 1. FANCY, a kind of mechanical and logical faculty which ❑ has no capacity to re-create, but only to combine images; ❑ allows the poet to use devices, like metaphors and alliterations, in order to blend elements into beautiful images. 13 …to PRIMARY & SECONDARY IMAGINATION 2. Imagination was, to him, the sovereign creative power which can be distinguished in a. PRIMARY IMAGINATION, common to all human beings, which is at once the power to ❑ produce images; ❑ give chaos a certain order; ❑ form concepts and produce communication. b. SECONDARY IMAGINATION, i.e. the poetic faculty, able to build new worlds as well as unify and reconcile opposites. 14 A NECESSARY COMPARISON WORDSWORTH COLERIDGE CONTENT: incidents and CONTENT: supernatural situations from common life events and characters AIM: to present ordinary things AIM: to give pleasure by in an unusual but truthful way, lending ordinary things making them interesting the charm of novelty LANGUAGE: a selection of LANGUAGE: archaic, elegant, language really used by men refined in a formal writing style IMAGINATION: gives a IMAGINATION: idealises the certain colouring to reality real and realises the ideal with presenting it in an unusual way its creative power 16 A (very) short visual intro to the poem General intro (1) Along with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment is one of Coleridge’s most famous poems, haunting and enduring, though the poet himself did not like it! Composed in 1797, he only published it in 1816. The story of its composition is also one of the most famous in the history of English poetry. As the poet explained in the short preface, he had fallen asleep after taking “an anodyne” prescribed “in consequence of a slight disposition” (i.e. opium). General intro (2) Before falling asleep, he had been reading a story in which Kubla Khan commanded the building of a new palace. While he slept, the poet had a fantastic vision and composed some two or three hundred lines of poetry. Waking after about three hours, the poet seized a pen and began writing furiously; however, after the first three stanzas of his dreamt poem, he was interrupted by a “person on business from Porlock,” who detained him for an hour. General intro (3) After this interruption, he was unable to recall the rest of the vision or the poetry he had composed in his opium dream. It is thought that the final stanza of the poem, thematizing the idea of the lost vision through the figure of the “damsel with a dulcimer” and the milk of Paradise, was written after the interruption. Summary (1) The speaker describes the “stately pleasure-dome” built in Xanadu according to the decree of Kubla Khan, in the place where Alph, the sacred river, ran “through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea.” Summary (2) Walls and towers were raised around “twice five miles of fertile ground,” filled with beautiful gardens and forests. A “deep romantic chasm” slanted down a green hill, occasionally spewing forth a violent and powerful burst of water, so great that it flung boulders up with it “like rebounding hail.” Summary (3) The river ran five miles through the woods, finally sinking “in tumult to a lifeless ocean.” Amid that tumult, in the place “as holy and enchanted / As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted / By woman wailing to her demon-lover.” Summary (4) Kubla heard “ancestral voices” bringing prophesies of war. The pleasure-dome’s shadow floated on the waves, where the mingled sounds of the fountain and the caves could be heard. “It was a miracle of rare device… A sunny pleasure- dome with caves of ice!” Summary (5) The speaker says that he once saw a “damsel with a dulcimer,” an Abyssinian maid who played her dulcimer and sang “of Mount Abora.” He says that if he could revive “her symphony and song” within him, he would rebuild the pleasure-dome out of music. Summary (6) All who heard him would cry “Beware!” of “His flashing eyes, his floating hair!” The hearers would circle him thrice and close their eyes with “holy dread,” knowing that he had tasted honeydew “and drunk the milk of Paradise.” Commentary (1) Right from the first lines the poem is immersed in an oriental, exotic atmosphere. The descent from the pleasure gardens of section 1 into the dark, awe-inspiring abyss of section 2 is a descent into an enchanted world of unimaginable forces and contrasts, a metaphor for the unbuilt monument of imagination. Commentary (2) In section 3 the magic element dominates: the poet wishes he could sing as beautifully as the Abyssinian maid while in actual fact he has already done so… The final image of the poet as prophet or magician is in line with Coleridge’s idea that poetry is composed in a trance-like, mystical state. Commentary (3) The chant-like, musical incantations of the poem result from Coleridge’s masterful use of iambic tetrameter and alternating rhyme schemes. After the second stanza, though, the poem becomes especially evocative when the meter suddenly tightens; the resulting lines are terse and solid, almost beating out the sound of the war drums (“The shadow of the dome of pleasure / Floated midway on the waves...”). Curiosity The mysterious “person from Porlock” is one of the most notorious and enigmatic figures in the poet’s biography; no one knows who he was or why he disturbed the poet or what he wanted or, indeed, whether any of Coleridge’s story is actually true.