Coleridge's Poem Research Articles

Desire and subjectivity in S. T. Coleridge’s “Frost at midnight”

The present article is an attempt to offer a fresh critical reading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Frost at Midnight" based on the theoretical ideas of Jacques Lacan on desire and subjectivity. Coleridge's desire for a unified subjectivity lulls him into the dream of a bright future for his son, while the only ethical thing for him to do, from the psychoanalytical point of view, is to accept the split and, having traversed the fantasy and subjectified the cause of this split, to take responsibility for his unconscious mind. It is no wonder, then, that the poem begins and ends with the description of “frost’s secret ministry”; after all, the endless pursuit of desire qua the Other in search of a lost object which would complete the puzzle of one’s life is no pursuit at all; the act of moving in a circle of course means there is no actual movement or change in location.

On the naturalistic connotation of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner from the perspective of Christianity

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." is his most important and complete literary work, published in the first Lyric Ballads, started the English romantic poetry "supernatural" mystery theme. As one of the representative poets of the Romantic period, Coleridge's poems have been interpreted by numerous critics in various ways. Through their analysis, readers have a deeper understanding of his aesthetic thoughts, religious beliefs and critical theories. This paper will make a deep analysis from the subject of crime and punishment in Christian meaning, and at the same time from the perspective of ecocriticism analysis of the symbolic meaning and naturalism connotation of the poem.

Holiness and Horror: The Gendered Spectacle of Romantic Sleepwalking

Approaching the turn of the nineteenth century, somnambulism took various forms on the European stage as a morbidly fascinating window into the subconscious. Franz Mesmer's somewhat divisive theory of animal magnetism, or "mesmerism," was nevertheless taking hold in medical circles, and its often-female subjects were mirrored through portrayals of vulnerable sleepwalking heroines on the stage. But where there was vulnerability, there was also sublimity– more elevated manifestations of sleepwalking also emerged here, such as in the allegedly subconscious composition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan" (1797; 1816) and the divine, genderless power attributed to Joan of Arc in Friedrich Schiller's play Die Jungfrau von Orleans (1801). These and other portrayals of Romantic somnambulism provide a glimpse into the gendered subconscious as understood in the dramatic landscapes of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Europe. Ultimately, this research aims to uncover who is victimized and who is exalted by these somnambulistic states, and to unblur the lines between gendered presuppositions and medical realities.

‘Spain! Most Pleasant were my wanderings’: Robert Southey's Pedestrian and Mountaineering Writing in the Iberian Peninsula

This article explores Robert Southey's literary responses to his walking experiences in Spain as he recounted them in Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (1797). Published after a four-month visit to the Iberian Peninsula, Letters departs from previous travelogues in offering, apart from factual details, subjective impressions of the places visited both in prose and verse. Nonetheless, I argue, Southey adopts a more intimate and self-reflective mood when he relates his pedestrian excursions in verse, not only showing a deeper aesthetic engagement with the natural surroundings but also acquiring an inward look. Moved by the bodily exertion of walking and hill climbing in Spain, Southey produced a series of poems in which the fragility of memory, the feelings of isolation and distress and the related poetic incapacity are explored. Encompassing examples from Coleridge's and Wordsworth's poems, in this essay I read Southey's poems in Letters as aligned with and contributing to the then emerging Romantic pedestrian poetics, though at the same time showing their ideosyncracy derived from Southey's complex approach to the Other in ‘a land of strangers’.

Towards an Anti-Barthesian Reading of Poetry: "Kublakhan" as a Case Study

Samuel Taylor's Coleridge's poem "Kublakhan" was composed when the poet experienced an opium-influenced dream and after reading a book on Xanadu and the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan. The present study aims to analyze this genuine poem by means of Roland Barthes's theory of the author's death. It also refers to Sigmund Freud's principles of psycho-analytical criticism. It focuses on the interpretation of the dream in it as a kin way to make a literary analysis of it. The study significantly defies "The death of the author" theory, arguing that "Kublakhan" is a representation of Coleridge's id; hence a close reading of the poet's biography would help better to understand the scattered images of the poem. The study contends that “Kublakhan” is a reflection of Coleridge’s abandonment and self-defeat. It resembles his wish to fulfill his desire for personal success and self- confidence.

One Candle, a Thousand Points of Light: The Xanadu Meme

I treat a single word 'xanadu', as a 'meme' and follow it from a 17th century book, to a 19th century poem (Coleridge's Kubla Khan), into the 20th century where it was picked up by a classic movie (Citizen Kane), an ongoing software development project (Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu), and another movie and hit song, Olivia Newton-John's Xanadu. The aggregate result can be seen when you google the word, you get 6 million hits. What is interesting about those hits is that, while some of them are directly related to Coleridge's poem, more seem to be related to Nelson's software project, Olivia Newton-John's film and song, and (indirectly) to Welles' movie. Thus one cluster of Xanadu sites is high tech while another is about luxury and excess (and then there's the Manchester Swingers Club Xanadu).

'Less Gross than Bodily': Materiality in Coleridge's Conversation Poem Sequence

'Less Gross than Bodily': Materiality in Coleridge's Conversation Poem Sequence

Silences and silence in 'creativity'

This reflective piece – written primarily to provoke discussion – raises some questions about and for the recent 'creativity agenda' in educational policy in England, suggesting that something fundamental is missing. The author argues that 'creativity' has characteristically been defined in recent policy discourse as a set of skills concerned with developing independent thinking, problem-solving and flexible working. 'Creativity' thus turns out to be intimately and explicitly allied to 'employability'. The author believes that creativity, on the contrary, is stimulated by the encouragement of vivid inner lifeworlds, a sense of imaginative interiority and a sensuously-felt subjectivity – as exemplified in S.T. Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan. She argues that these are part of pedagogic responsibility as well as a sine qua non for the work of the imagination. The author is writing in her role as poet (who also leads creative writing workshops, including for teachers), rather than as a researcher.

'Frost at Midnight' and the Poetry of Periphrasis

Coleridge's poem is here read as the text of an oblique theophany. The self-binding and simultaneity of frost is enacted in a diction characterised by a dense interlace of verbal echoes and by a rhythm of alternation in three aspects: contraction-expansion in perspective; linguistic register; and poetic mode. The style thus launched is later imitated largely in abstraction from its sacramental animation of all things, the exception being Hopkins, whose 'inscape' it prefigures. Coleridge's 'poetry of search' mutates with twentieth-century modernism into a 'poetry of statement' in which resonant image and textual allusion are free of the need to be realistically circumstantiated and which its readers are free to interpret with or against the grain of any periphrastic theology it might portend.

Astronomy at Stowey: The Wordsworths and Coleridge

As part of their daily activities in Stowey, the Word-worths and practiced astronomy. In Alfoxden journal, Dorothy records the appearance of The crescent moon, Jupiter, and (Woof 141) On late-night winter walks, often accompanied by William, Coleridge, Torn Poole and little Basil .Montagu. A storm on January 31, 1798, cleared to reveal first showing herself between the struggling clouds; afterwards Jupiter appeared (Woof 143); February 18, was sharp and cold upon which Dorothy observed the crescent moon, silvery line and thready bow, attended by Jupiter and Venus in their palest hues (Woof 146); and on the evening of March 6, she saw the shapes of the Central Stars (Woof 148). Her delight in celestial observation found its way into William's and Coleridge's poems. narrator of The Thorn carries his telescope up the mountain, while Coleridge's Mariner uses his spy-glass to make astronomical sightings that he had recently read about in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Reading the latest astronomical discoveries in learned journals and periodicals, together with closely watching-the heavens, ensured that some of the shared experience celebrated in Lyrical Ballads and Alfoxdert journal had its roots in collaborative star-gazing. On March 23, 1798, Dorothy records that came for dinner: Coleridge dined with us. brought his ballad finished. We walked with him to the miner's house. A beautiful evening, starry, the horned (Woof 150). Dorothy's language is strikingly imitative of The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere at precisely the point that it. owes most to professional astronomy. In that poem, depicts singular lunar phenomenon that was being debated in the 1790s: While clombe above the Eastern bar I horned Moon, with one bright Star I the tips (Butler and Green, 11. 201-03). _John Livingston Lowes has suggested that first got the idea of star atween or the tip of the moon from volume five of Henry Jones' two volume abridgement of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1700-1720), first published in 1721 (Cowes 41). sentence in question is in an article entitled An Extract of letters from Dr. C Mather, from New England, to Mr. Waller of the Royal Society, dated 1712: He says, there is Tradition among them, that in November 1668, Star appear'd below the Body of the Moon within the Horns of it (Jones V. ii. 161). Bristol Library Society, of which was member between 1795-98, had an edition of Jones' abridged volumes, which may well have consulted in the reading rooms (Bristol 65). Another likely source is the Philosophical Transactions for 1787 (vol. 77) that borrowed from the Bristol Library in 1795 (Wu 182-83). This contained William Herschel's account of viewing three volcanoes in the moon, one of which chews an actual eruption of fire, or luminous matter (Herschel 230), which would have stuck in Coleridge's mind. On the evening of March 23, 1798, the moon was beautifully horned, waxing crescent with 31% of its visible disk illuminated.' It was very starry night, and everyone will have been looking for star Almost the tips of the moon to attest to the Mariner's description, or at least for a star or two beside (258) it. This hunt might have gone on, appropriately, with the sea murmuring in the background, since Dorothy noted January 23. 1798, that sound of the Sea was distinctly heard on the tops of the hills at all seasons excluding summer (Woof 141). Even if, did not divulge the specific scientific material behind the lines (which is hard to believe considering they had perfectly. homed noon from of them) sharing their poems on walks over the Quantocks places poetry in dialogue with Herschelian astronomy. Herschel may modify or corroborate their sightings. …

Historical controls in ALS trials

In Coleridge's poem “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the lost crew laments their plight: > Water, water, every where, > > And all the boards did shrink; > > Water, water, every where, > > Nor any drop to drink. This famous verse could also describe the current state of clinical research in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). While for years the landscape was more like a “desert,” we now have an “ocean” of potential ALS therapies moving into clinical trials. Unfortunately, the rarity of ALS and the historically low enrollment rate in ALS trials1 will challenge efficient completion of these, prolonging our “thirst” for better disease-modifying therapies. New types of ALS trials, especially those that would be more resource-efficient or attractive to patients with ALS, may provide a “rescue.” Along such lines, Miller and associates2 herein report the third lithium trial failing to slow disease progression in ALS. The most interesting aspect of this phase II screening study was the use of historical controls; the authors matched their subjects, all of whom received lithium, against 249 placebo controls from the minocycline in ALS trial (MINO).3 This design feature may allow a smaller sample size. Also, by ensuring that every patient receives drug, it likely makes the …

Wordsworth, Mill, and the Force of Habit

When spirit of young John Stuart Mill finally broke, was reading Wordsworth that helped mend it; and new thing that Wordsworth brought to Mill's life was chiefly realisation that things could feel new. Mill's upbringing, as designed and implemented by his father, was an extraordinary experiment in moral philosophy--an extraordinarily rigorous and thoroughly conceived course of Benthamism (Mill, Autobiography, 36). crisis that finally arose, when Mill was twenty, grew from growing conviction that, in Alan Ryan's words, had been (Ryan, 33) rather than growing up as a person should; and feeling of his being manufactured expressed itself in a sense of stifling restriction, as though scope of human intelligence had been narrowed down to a fraction of its full richness and possibility: For now I saw, or thought I saw, what I had always before received with incredulity--that habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away as indeed has when no other mental habit of cultivated, and analysing spirit remains without its natural complements and correctives (Mill, Autobiography, 75). A good part of malaise lay in awareness that freedom and spontaneity of mind had become reduced to merely habitual: salutary influence exerted by reading Wordsworth was example he offered of a mind freed from burdens of being customary. In Autobiography Mill describes a range of beneficial effects exerted by Wordsworth's poetry, but among most telling is his praise for the very culture of feelings: the delight which these poems gave me, proved that with culture of this sort, there was nothing to dread from most confirmed habit of analysis. foremost in Mill's recollection, dwelt both upon Wordsworth's awareness of a lost freshness of youthful enjoyment and upon emotional intelligence with which he sought a compensation for that loss; and, as though in emulation, Mill's spirits also began to revive, at once diminished by experience but finally undefeated by it: The result was that I gradually, but completely, emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it (Autobiography, 81; 82). Mill compares his lot to Coleridge's state of Dejection (A grief without a pang, void, dark and, drear: Dejection: An Ode. 1.21: Coleridge, 393; Mill, Autobiography, 74); and may well have been thoughts of Coleridge's poem that encouraged Mill to think about his collapse in terms of stifling habit of his remorseless intellectualism: And haply by abstruse research to steal From my own nature all natural Man-- This was my sole resource, my only plan: Till that which suits a part infects whole, And now is almost grown habit of my Soul. Dejection: An Ode, 11.89-93) But Mill's antipathy towards habitual in his Autobiography connects as well with a much wider instinct about habit and custom that repeatedly stirs in his writings. Disabling mind by enslaving to conformity with habitual practice or assumption appals all of Mill's progressive instincts. The despotism of custom is everywhere standing hindrance to human advancement (Liberty, 70). Bui more than just politically un-progressive, to lapse into habitual is to diminish a fuller humanity, which for Mill is importantly related to capacity to make choices rather than have other people make one's choices: He who does anything because is custom, makes no choice (On Liberty, 59). Custom destroys liberty and, with that, individuality: for, as Mill says elsewhere in On Liberty, individuality should assert itself, so that [w]here, not person's own character, but traditions of customs of other people are rule of conduct, there is wanting one of principal ingredients of human happiness, and quite chief ingredient of individual and social progress (Mill, On Liberty, 57). …

Ecology without Politics?

Ecology without Politics? Catriona Sandilands (bio) The Ecological Thought. Timothy Morton. Harvard University Press. http://www.hup.harvard.edu. 184 pages; cloth; $39.95. In the final paragraph of Ecology without Nature (2007), Timothy Morton, having spent 200 pages arguing against the idea of Nature that informs most ecocriticism, makes a plea for politics. Specifically, he argues that "ecological criticism must politicize the aesthetic," by which he means not only getting rid of a consumerist, aestheticized Nature that is "over there," but also avoiding the opposite temptation to "join the nonhuman," thereby collapsing aesthetic distance but remaining caught in our own assumptions. We need instead to hold "our mind open for the absolutely unknown that is to come." Ecological politics, for Morton, thus involves acknowledging that we have the choice to hang out in the muck and muddiness of uncertainty—or more precisely, that we must begin ecological criticism from the obligation (shades of The Communist Manifesto [1848]) to "constantly and ruthlessly reframe our view of the ecological." The Ecological Thought is, by Morton's own admission, the "prequel" to Ecology without Nature. Although written accessibly to appeal to a more-than-ecocritical audience (the interested scholar can follow the trail of endnotes), there is no question that the book demands of its readers a ruthless reframing of ecological views. He begins with an argument familiar to readers of Ecology without Nature: that the modern era, even as it developed the possibility of ecological thought, has made that thought impossible to achieve because of our reliance on ideas of (external) nature, wilderness, and the like. The more we struggle to preserve Nature, the less we see what's really going on in the world of human encounter and connection with other beings. What we need is something entirely different: not just ecological thinking, but "the ecological thought," which is, as he writes, "the thinking of interconnectedness" itself, meaning both thinking about it and thinking from it. And the rest of the book spells out, employing an eclectic range of ideas and thinkers (Charles Darwin to Buddhism, Blade Runner [1982] to William Blake), what that thinking means, why it's a better view of nature than Nature, and what the consequences might be of the radical openness that he understands as integral to this ecological thought. The book is divided into three main chapters: "Thinking Big," which introduces two key ideas in the work, the mesh and the strange stranger; "Dark Thoughts," which expands on these concepts and reacquaints us with Morton's "dark ecology," a critical counterpoint to the "bright green" optimism in which he sees so much contemporary environmentalism unfortunately mired; and "Forward Thinking," which involves neither apocalypse nor prelapsarian fantasy nor posthuman deconstruction, but rather thinks "how to care for the neighbor," the absolute Others with whom we are inextricably interconnected. To suggest that these chapters present a mounting, linear argument would be, however, to misrepresent the book entirely: appropriate to the interconnected world Morton is describing—the mesh—the book does not offer so much a clear starting and ending point as it does a palimpsest of paths designed to disorient conventional environmental thinking in favor of a radical ecological uncertainty. Morton's case for the relevance of Darwin's evolutionary story of "proliferation, randomness, contingency, and useless display" thus joins up with Emmanuel Levinas's insistence on our "infinite obligation to others" (the kernel of Morton's idea of the strange stranger) and both weave through "a discussion of time…a detour through Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, then return." Time-lapse photography meets algorithms (with a little glimpse into monster movies) to explore an understanding of daffodils not as independent living beings but as little, moving compositions of formal processes, the same ones that produce human beings: "material organization turns out to be sets of formal relationships, not squishy stuff." And an interesting discussion of ecological art includes, among other things, fractal geometry, Virginia Woolf, John Cage, and noir film. I am less concerned than some readers might be with the slightly dizzying quality of these collected trains of thought, partly because I think it is appropriate to the...

“Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door!”: Boundaries and Thresholds in Mary Coleridge’s Poetry

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge tucked her manuscript of into a letter to Lucy Violet Hodgkin on March 21, 1893 (1): Home again in company of this Witch. What do you think of her? Is she very bad? or not so very bad? metre's all wrong any way.'' (2) letter is filled with episodes that exemplify sort of boundaries Coleridge manipulates even in her questions about poem-whether witch is morally reprehensible or dangerous in a deliciously alluring way that makes her badness palatable or even desirable. For Coleridge, witch's badness originates in her transgressive plea: Oh, lift me over threshold, and let me in door! poem's modified dramatic monologue form accentuates central moment when boundary transforms into a threshold-when two speakers inhabit house together. Coleridge revisits these transgressive moments repeatedly in her poetry: in The Other Side of a Mirror, moment occurs when speaker whispers, 'I am she!' (1. 30); in Master and Guest, it is when speaker invites inside man who stood in shadow of door (1. 4), a man who later tells her, You have kissed a citizen of Hell, / And a soul was doomed when you were born (11. 19-20). In On a Bas-relief of Pelops and Hippodameia, moment happens when waves cut [the stone] more smoothly than knife (1. 6); in Wilderspin, it occurs when speaker cries, broke web for ever, / I broke my heart as well. / Michael and Saints deliver / My soul from nethermost Hell! (11.33-36). (3) In each case, what seemed a barrier--between individuals and between objects--melts into a threshold for interpenetration. Building upon previously unexamined archival material, in particular letter that envelopes The Witch in one of its earliest forms, I would like to offer a new reading of poem that re-envisions Coleridge's poetic project through lens of her personal experiences. In On a Bas-relief of Pelops and Hippodameia, force of art shapes forms of couple through joint work of sculptor and sea. Coleridge describes art as a process in which stone, the least like to life (1. 2), becomes A perfect ... rescued from deep (1. 14). Only by succumbing to processes of evolution and devolution, which happen in tandem, and by allowing external forces to reshape original form, can object become at length / a perfect thing (11. 13-14). In The Witch, composed two years before On a Bas-Relief, (4) woman's cry, as she begs for entrance to house, captures a related struggle: Oh, lift me over threshold, and let me in door! (11. 7, 14). Like bas-relief, The Witch carries etchings of history, becoming A perfect thing through Coleridge's textual memory, which reveals text as a site of struggle between past and present and self and other, re-creating poetic identity. Furthermore, Coleridge's letters reveal that her poetry results from her experiences in a network of relationships she has created. She constantly modifies, re-creates, and negates her poetic identity through masks like Anodos and through poetic re-writings that her network produced. As we shall see, The Witch results from such re-writings. Although in her edition of Coleridge's poetry Theresa Whistler gives poem's composition date as 1892, manuscript in letter in 1893 is first version in existence, as far as I am aware. Only two other versions of poem are extant; one, in a black notebook titled Fancy's Followings by Vespertilio, and other in one of two volumes of red notebooks titled Verses by Vespertilio. Neither notebook is dated, but both contain Robert Bridges's editorial comments. Bridges appears to have seen Coleridge's poems for first time in 1894 when Hodgkin left out for Bridges to find a white notebook of poetry that Coleridge gave her (Whistler, p. …

Crossed Lines: The Vernacular Metaphysics of theAncient Mariner

Augustine holds that in relation to God, love has to precede knowledge. With the right direction of love, things become evident which are hidden otherwise. What is new is the modern sense of the place and power of the creative imagination. This is now integral part of the goodness of things ... (Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self) (1) I would endeavour to destroy the old antithesis of Words and Things, elevating, as it were, words into Things, and living Things, too. (Coleridge to William Godwin, 1800) (2) Lines, whether in poetry or geometry, are living things. Or at least so thought Samuel Taylor Coleridge: lines of both kinds, we learn from him, are works of the imagination, forces put into the world; any line is an act of length, and even the points between which a geometric line stretches are themselves not mere positions without magnitude but acts of the same order. (3) When explaining his ideas he often resorts to lines, and in particular when explicating his law of polarity--two forces of one power. (4) the great keystone of his metaphysical edifice--he resorts to crossed lines in what appears to be a forerunner of the intersecting-dichotomy diagram which was so beloved of some twentieth-century structuralist thinkers but which here escapes the realm of mere logical possibility and overlapping binary oppositions for something altogether more dynamic and ternary. We are not surprised, then, to find that in the poem which he himself described as a work of pure imagination (Warren 199) and which many later commentators have agreed is dominated by the archetype of the Fall and the Redemption, crosses are manifest (or latent) at all levels of verbal expression and all dimensions of referential allusion--that, in short, cruciform signage in Rime of the Ancient Mariner binds into a strong semantic bond both the representing and the represented. We may compare with this understated ubiquity of the its overt thematic dominance in a much earlier English poem: Swim, and at every stroke, thou art thy Cross; Mast and yard make one, where seas do toss; Look down, thou spiest out crosses in small things; Look up, thou seest birds rais'd on crossed wings; All the Globe's frame, and sphere's, is nothing else But the Meridians crossing Parallels. (Fausset 257) collocation of maritime, avian, and geographical motifs in these lines from John Donne's The Cross makes it a highly significant (and oddly overlooked) precursor text of Coleridge's poem. Whether the inspiration of Donne's lines was subliminal or conscious on the part of his latter-day champion, it is plain that both patterns of narrative and rhyme schemes in the Rime replicate the figure of the Cross, which is no less to be found in the smallest particulars of its individual words; and not only in the way that sounds and letters are disposed within and between them, but also in their known or poetically hypothesized etymologies. reading that follows will treat the poem as early staging-post on its author's route from Unitarian to Trinitarian belief--not in the sense of seeking out thematic allusions to the Holy Trinity but rather of presenting the latter as a condition of the poems intelligibility. Pace William Empson, there is no anachronism in so doing: in 1797-98 Coleridge was, by his own later admission, already a Trinitarian at the level of the speculative reason and only some seven or eight years short of embracing the Trinity in its practical and moral bearing upon his life (Barth Christian Doctrine 9). (5) Like that of Irene Chayes (only a year after Empson's), (6) this is a Coleridgean reading of early Coleridge, inasmuch as it applies to the Rime the elaborated clarities and energies of intellect which already shine through the lines of the poem's earliest version and at which the poet himself had largely arrived through the medium of his prose by the time of its most decisive (if not quite final) revision, published in Sibylline Leaves (1817). …

A Connection between Chatterton and Wordsworth in Two Coleridge Poems

Chatterton’s precocious display of talent, the scandal surrounding the cre ation of the so-called Rowley manuscripts, his premature death by suicide at the age of seventeen and a half in 1770 all conspired to turn him into the Romantic embodiment of young, misunderstood genius, the “marvellous Boy, / The Sleepless Soul that perished in his pride” (ll. 43 – 44) of Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence,” the dedicatee of Keats’s Endymion , the inspiration behind Shelley’s “Adonais.” 1 David Fairer points out that “ode-writers who wished to address a personified Fancy, Pity or Despair, found they could address Chatterton and thereby evoke all three.” 2 Over the course of his much longer life, Coleridge identified closely with Chat terton’s plight, and most biographical and critical studies about Coleridge dwell on his and others’ interpretation of him as someone whose preco cious promise did not lead to the results one might have expected of one so talented. Coleridge’s “Monody on the Death of Chatterton” has received rela tively little critical attention despite the fact that Coleridge worked on vari ous versions of this poem from 1785, when he was thirteen years old, until the year of his death, 1834. 3 I agree with I. A. Gordon that a “poem which for half a century continued to exercise an author of Coleridge’s abilities

Of Matter and Meter: Environmental Form in Coleridge's ‘Effusion 35’ and ‘The Eolian Harp’

In this essay, Timothy Morton explores ecological ways of reading Coleridge's poem ‘Effusion 35’, which he revised as ‘The Eolian Harp’. Previous criticism (such as M. H. Abrams's) has suggested that the Aeolian harp is a way of thinking about relationships between humans and nature, but how precisely should we define these? And do these definitions have anything to do with artistic form (as well as content)? Morton demonstrates that Coleridge conducts an experiment in environmental form, for which the Aeolian harp (or wind harp) provides a key. This popular household gadget was common in the eighteenth century, and several poets had written about it, notably James Thomson. Coleridge innovated in poetic form by making the Aeolian harp a figure for automation, and for the monitoring and recording of environmental processes. The poem thus anticipates, in an imaginary way, contemporary cultures of sound recording and reproduction. Using Marx, Morton demonstrates how the poem organizes meaning in a radically democratic way. ‘Effusion 35’ and ‘The Eolian Harp’ ultimately open our minds to the possibility of ‘ecology without nature’– a deconstructive, open-minded idea of ecology.

Matilda Betham: A New Biography

Previous articleNext article No AccessMatilda Betham: A New BiographyElaine BaileyElaine Bailey Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 38, Number 3Summer 2007The Wordsworth-Coleridge Association Meeting, 2006 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24045139 Views: 1Total views on this site © 2007 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Coleridge's Art of Translation

Previous articleNext article No AccessColeridge's Art of TranslationFrederick BurwickFrederick Burwick Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 38, Number 3Summer 2007The Wordsworth-Coleridge Association Meeting, 2006 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24045133 Views: 2Total views on this site © 2007 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

"Driven as in Surges": Texture and Voice in Romantic Poetry

This paper seeks to entwine or find subject-rhymes between two topics: arrangement of in some Romantic lyrics and their thematization of poetic voice. For Shelley, Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and towards that which they represent, and of order of those relations, has always been with of order of relations of thoughts. Hence, he writes, the language of poets has ever certain uniform and harmonious of sound, without which it were not (Major Works, 678; initial relation--rather than relations--is reading in Mary Shelley's press copy). poet in his prose, as, for him, were Plato and Bacon, Shelley sandwiches found between and sound as if to verify his idea that relations of are close to being ground and foundation of perception of order of relations of thought. And way recurrence flowers out of near-rhyme between connected and affected mimics similar enactment of sound's relation with thoughts. William Keach has persuasively argued that Shelley poet whose sense of infinite potential meaning of poetry seen to depend upon inability of words ever completely to conduct and therefore to discharge mental energy they signify (Shelley's Style, 28). Shelley's use of shares in his intermittently explicit and possibly pervasive sense that, as Demogorgon famously puts it, a voice / Is wanting (Prometheus Unbound, 2. 4. 115-16). On one hand, does not merely echo sense; it gives sense possibility of entering an order. On other hand, it participates in construction of an artifice obliged at critical moments to depict its own inadequacy or disintegration. On one hand, Verse, in Leigh Hunt's words, alluding to Ben Jonson's The Sad Shepherd, that finishing, and rounding, and 'tuneful planetting' of poet's creations, which produced of necessity by smooth tendencies of their energy or inward working, and harmonious dance into which they are attracted round orb of beautiful (Hunt, An Answer to Question 'What Is Poetry?' 32). On other hand, poetry's perpetual Orphic engages always in struggle with a / Of thoughts and forms, which else and shapeless were. This last quotation from Prometheus Unbound (4. 414-16) suggests that rules throng, but enjambed alexandrine ushered in by throng implies that song fights an endless battle with, and yet enabled by, all that senseless and shapeless. Ted Hughes's Skylarks, meta-poetic response to Shelley's To Skylark, apostrophizes and sounds out bird's lyric voice thus: O song, incomprehensibly both ways-- / Joy! Joy! Help! (qtd from Collected Poems). Incomprehensibly both ways captures well Romantic lyric's fusion of self-trust and self-doubt. Indeed, Romantic lyric voice most sensitively registers such equivocality through its attitude towards its own music, its own arrangements of sound. Much Romantic poetry born out of its own despair, word which rhymes with all-sustaining air into which Shelley converts poetic strains of Prometheus Unbound (1. 756, 754). Indeed, very desire for poetic music may admit cultural disharmony. So, Shelley makes his skylark turn poet's answering song into A thing wherein we feel there some want (To Skylark, 1. 70). As though to deny any hidden want, Coleridge strives in Eolian Harp to blur difference between and silence: of Sea / Tells us of (11. 11-12; Coleridge's poems qtd from Ernest Hartley Coleridge ed.), he asserts, short is in stilly and distant enfolding an oxymoronic murmur whose closest neighbour silence into which progression of opening vowels finally ripens. …