Fears In Solitude Research Articles

The Literature of Fear in Britain Coleridge’s Fears in Solitude and the French Invasion of Fishguard in 1797

This essay reads Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 poem, Fears in Solitude, in the context of the letters, memoirs, pamphlets, prints and caricatures that were produced in Britain during the 1797-98 French invasion scare. The essay will explore the ways in which these written and visual products attempted to evoke, express and even suppress feelings of fear, anxiety and terror and aims to understand Coleridge’s ‘fears’ in the context of these feelings. In particular, the essay will examine how Coleridge’s poem responds to the heightened alertness following the Fishguard landing in February 1797. In Fears in Solitude, Coleridge is deeply ambivalent about his stance towards his own country and his attitude towards the French. Reviewers and scholars have long been debating the poem’s pro- or anti-war stance, and whether or not it is part of a contemporary alarmist discourse. Many broadsides, handbills and pamphlets published during this period warned about the horrors of a possible French invasion. They were funded by royalist associations with the sole aim of propagating fear across the nation. While these publications contributed to a widespread discourse of alarm, others, especially the visual culture of the period, challenged and ridiculed such fearmongering. Military and naval accounts and other first-hand narratives gave voice to the feelings pervading this time of psychological warfare, and explored the extent to which the horrors of war did come home intimately to affect the individual body and mind during this time. Read in the context of such contemporary texts, Coleridge’s poem emerges as an artistic discourse designed reflectively to manage his own and the nation’s fears instead of perpetuating the feeling itself.

The Literature of Fear in Britain Coleridge’s Fears in Solitude and the French Invasion of Fishguard in 1797

This essay reads Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 poem, Fears in Solitude, in the context of the letters, memoirs, pamphlets, prints and caricatures that were produced in Britain during the 1797-98 French invasion scare. The essay will explore the ways in which these written and visual products attempted to evoke, express and even suppress feelings of fear, anxiety and terror and aims to understand Coleridge’s ‘fears’ in the context of these feelings. In particular, the essay will examine how Coleridge’s poem responds to the heightened alertness following the Fishguard landing in February 1797. In Fears in Solitude, Coleridge is deeply ambivalent about his stance towards his own country and his attitude towards the French. Reviewers and scholars have long been debating the poem’s pro- or anti-war stance, and whether or not it is part of a contemporary alarmist discourse. Many broadsides, handbills and pamphlets published during this period warned about the horrors of a possible French invasion. They were funded by royalist associations with the sole aim of propagating fear across the nation. While these publications contributed to a widespread discourse of alarm, others, especially the visual culture of the period, challenged and ridiculed such fearmongering. Military and naval accounts and other first-hand narratives gave voice to the feelings pervading this time of psychological warfare, and explored the extent to which the horrors of war did come home intimately to affect the individual body and mind during this time. Read in the context of such contemporary texts, Coleridge’s poem emerges as an artistic discourse designed reflectively to manage his own and the nation’s fears instead of perpetuating the feeling itself.

Britannia, the Individual, and the Public Sphere: Thomson to Coleridge

Abstract In the eighteenth century Britannia became a vehicle for poets and other writers to reflect on the difficult place of the individual in the emerging public sphere. Writers of the first half of the century characteristically imagined the goddess in a domestic political sphere, persuading her “children” to exercise greater patriotism. She sways public opinion to effect improvement. Alone among writers of this period, James Thomson intuitively understood that no single voice had authority in the new politics and that all interventions were contingent. His 1729 Britannia ends with the goddess rushing off to Parliament and the powerless poet left behind in a bleak, coastal setting. Later in the century the importance of Britannia faded, but the patterns established in earlier texts continued. Anna Seward’s 1781Monody on Major Andrè retains some features of the tradition, but rather than move toward hope, in the manner of most earlier texts, it ends with Seward’s melancholy recognition of her own weakness. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 “Fears in Solitude,” which also retains some features of the tradition, is a sustained reflection on the individual’s limited influence in the public sphere.

‘A Radical causation’: Coleridge's Lyrics and Collective Guilt

This paper argues that the early lyrics of Samuel Taylor Coleridge explore the ethical work of collective guilt, a feeling with enormous Romantic and contemporary significance. Coleridge's lyrics formally model collective guilt while making a cautious case for its social value. By reading ‘Fears in Solitude’ and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner through recent work in social psychology and the philosophy of ethics, I show how Coleridge creates causalities of feeling, affirming meaningful relationships of responsibility that go beyond personal guilt. I conclude that Romantic lyric offers an ideal form not only for illustrating how collective guilt works as a ‘structure of feeling’, but also for examining the emotion's potential to create positive social change.

Justice, Dissent, and the Sublime. Mark Canuel.

Previous articleNext article No AccessJustice, Dissent, and the Sublime. Mark Canuel.Terence Allan HoagwoodTerence Allan Hoagwood Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 43, Number 4Autumn 2012 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24065346 Views: 6Total views on this site © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Ben Brice, Coleridge and ScepticismColeridge and Scepticism. Ben Brice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. x+229.

<i>Ben Brice</i>, Coleridge and Scepticism<i>Coleridge and Scepticism</i>. Ben Brice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. x+229.

The Colonial Subtext of Anna Letitia Barbauld's "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven"

Previous articleNext article No AccessWordsworth-Coleridge Association 2009The Colonial Subtext of Anna Letitia Barbauld's "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven"Francesco CroccoFrancesco Crocco Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 41, Number 2Spring 2010 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24043602 Views: 40Total views on this site © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Coleridge and the Idea of Friendship, 1789-1804 by Gurion Taussig (review)

MLRy ioo.i, 2005 201 to distance Blake, satire being too exclusively negative, whereas Blake's intent is, ul? timately, to go beyond the corrosive to affirmativespiritual values. For Rawlinson, the heart of Blakean comedy is the 'carnivalesque', a kind of egalitarian, communally founded, celebratory social liturgy. (Rawlinson is at some pains to locate the origins of the carnivalesque in religion.) The question, for many readers, will be whether this understanding of the comic has enough in common with theirs for the book's argument to resonate. The upshot is that for long stretches little attention is given to the comic in the ordinary sense, or forthat matter even in Rawlinson's sense. His very long chapter on An Island in theMoon goes into considerable detail about what he believes is happening , but his focus is less on the comic, even in the limited sense of the carnivalesque, than on the implications for society of the characters' faulty 'readings' (which seems to mean interpretations). How much has this got to do with comedy? And throughout the book, Rawlinson's own method of 'reading' is questionable. His typical method is to substitute freely in discursive equations, as it were, drawing equivalences from pictorial or textual references in far-distant locations in Blake's oeuvre, too often in an unconvincingly strained way. This, of course, is a method that Blake critics use all the time, but Rawlinson pushes it to almost unexampled lengths. This book could have used more practical planning and better execution. There is a chapter on Blake's designs that cries out for illustrations. (Plenty of books that cost less than ?40 manage to include pictures.) Rawlinson and his editors consider it adequate to referto a work by page number in the Erdman edition without naming the work. And I counted some three dozen or more errors of spelling, punctuation, grammar, and typography. University of Arkansas, Fayetteville Brian Wilkie [Professor Wilkie, a regular contributor to MLR, died on 14 December 2003.] Coleridge and the Idea of Friendship, 1J8Q-1804. By Gurion Taussig. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2003. 376 pp. ?50. ISBN 0-87413-741-1. A recurring theme in Taussig's original and carefully argued study is the contest, in Coleridge and his contemporaries' writings, between 'transcendent and empiricist notions of friendship'(p. 53)?thatis, between the 'spiritual'view of friendship as ideally imitating God's love forhumanity, and the Hobbesian view that All Society [. . .] is either forGain, or forGlory, not so much forlove of our Fellowes, as forlove of our Selves' (pp. 28-29, 229). Needless to say, Coleridge's own allegiance was primarily to the firstof these views, involving a 'fervor' which tended to elevate friendship 'from a mundane to a spiritually charged mode of interaction' (p. 29). At the same time, how? ever, this tendency was ambiguously connected, in the early part of his career, with an 'enthusiasticsensibility that threatened to disrupt conventional allegiances to fam? ily,state, and church' (p. 49); and part of Taussig's study traces Coleridge's gradual movement away from the view of friendship as the basis for 'a new kind of democratic relationship [. . .] that presupposes a fundamental equality between men based upon their common political rights' (p. 146). The ideal of transcending individual, private attachments in favour of iove of humanity' is evident, for example, in the pantisocratic Coleridge's description of his wifeas a woman whom 'I do not love?but whom by every tie of Reason and Honor I ought to love' (p. 137); yet even here, the force of individual feeling clearly threatens the rational ideal of universal friendship on which pantisocracy was based. A furthernotable case is Coleridge's decision to avoid excessive involvement with his friend (and 'friend of freedom'), John Thelwall, in favour 202 Reviews of preserving his and Wordsworth's ideal of rural retirement in the Quantock hills, which had been threatened by questions which the owner of Alfoxden raised about Thelwall'spresence there (pp. 203-04). Coleridge'scelebration, in 'Fears in Solitude', ofhis 'lowly cottage' in Nether Stowey, moreover, is interpretedby Taussig as seeking 'to demonstrate his sentimental integration within the landscape and affections of the...

Alarmism, Public-Sphere Performatives, and the Lyric Turn: Or, What Is“ Fears in Solitude” Afraid of?

Alarmism, Public-Sphere Performatives, and the Lyric Turn: Or, What Is“ Fears in Solitude” Afraid of?

Joseph Johnsons's World: Ancestral Voices, Invisible Worms, and Roaming Tigers

In October, 2001, only a few miles north of the burning debris that had been the World Trade Center, two conferences, one focusing on rationality, the other on ecology, bravely, some might say blindly explored the survival of Enlightenment ideals at the start of the new millennium, the beliefs, civilities, and excesses of rational beings and their environments. Speakers at both conferences acknowledged the gifts and blessings that humans had once found in themselves, in nature, and in culture, and those they didn't. Although 9/11 was clearly a subtext, it never entered either conversation. However, like others to whom the event was literally unspeakable, I had begun to hear in new ways, to understand the ghostly language of Wordsworth's lamentable time in Book X of Prelude, and of Coleridge's harrowing Fears in Solitude, the crash of onset, the undetermined conflict. Texts obscured for many years by political and philosophical readings revealed urgent new themes, new to me, of fear, futility, he lplessness, and confusion. I began to recognize the terror, the mystery of evil, the ancestral voices, the roaming tigers, and the invisible worms that the Romantic generations experienced. I realized during these Enlightenment conferences that, along with the visionary and political awakening, Romanticism recorded the experience of those who lived, as we do, in great peril from one thing or another, in England, the Continent, and America from about 1770 to 1830 and beyond. Many who knew fear as an aesthetic or literary experience, limited to gothic novels or to the Arabian Nights, encountered it unbidden, encountered the physical and emotional boundaries that human beings are periodically forced to cross. Moreover, from such fear, especially of invasion, of indifferent powers, of false accusation and unjust tribunals, nature--then and now--offered no refuge. new post-Enlightenment geology, astronomy, chemistry, anatomy, biology, all the natural histories of the 1790's revealed a natural world that was equally menacing, moving with blind oblivious tendencies, as Wordsworth said, a natural world that was larger, older, and more mysterious than anyone had ever conceived, and in which human beings were an afterthought, random victims of disease, weather, or, as Malthus, one of Johnson's authors, argued, victims of their own appetites, hostilities, and competitive instincts. To the political crisis, emotional turmoil, and intellectual challenge, our moment and theirs responded with new communities--geographical, ideological, ethnic, economic, theological, even linguistic communities. Gradually, individuals were connected, whole populations identified, and communities defined by the conflicts they engaged in, by what they were opposed to, and by the relationships they made almost exclusively through publishing. Newspapers, journals, reviews, and books served those generations, from 1770 to 1815, just as the internet serves ours. Information and knowledge spread quickly but fitfully, and what was published was often confused with what happened, with what people knew or believed with what was true. Their colonial expansion was our space exploration; their electricity was our quantum physics, their photosynthesis, our DNA. Because of publishing and the dissemination of contemporary knowledge, like us, they walked in both light and shade, with access to information that could save or destroy, and with an understanding that seemed as limitless as the capacity for cruelty and suffering. In his role as a catalyst of people and of ideas, someone who brought into being those creative oppositions on which progress depends, someone who knew what mattered and found the right people to express it for him, Joseph Johnson was an ancestral voice, a publisher for critical and unstable times, then and now. I first began thinking about Joseph Johnson in 1970, when Paul Zall sent Wordsworth Circle one of his many installments in a series we inexplicably called The Cool World of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which was neither cool and only tangentially about Coleridge. …

An Autumnal Blast, a Killing Frost: Coleridge's Poetic Conversation with John Thelwall

IDELY REGARDED AS AMONG HIS MOST SUCCESSFUL WORKS, COLE ridge's conversation poems have long been taken as typical of that broad transition in voice and vision that defines romanticism: from public genres to private, lyric modes, from the world of radical political activism to the solitary, transcendent realm of imagination. In this respect their collective title is perhaps somewhat misleading, for what poems like Lime Tree Bower and The Nightingale seem to record is not true dialogic utterance, but an intimate exchange among a coterie which often approaches the nature of soliloquy. This tendency is perhaps most evident in Frost at Midnight, a poem in which the words themselves at times seem to be merely accessories, external markers of a silent, spiritual com munion between Coleridge and his sleeping child (or his imagination, nature, God) which issues in a psychic and poetic transformation as invis ible, as effortless, as organic as the secret ministry of the frost. Such a poem appears as distant from the public debates and political divisions of its historical period as its quiet, sincere meditations are from the zealous exhortations and rhetorical excesses of Coleridge's lectures and more topi poems. Yet as Paul Magnuson has recently suggested, this least politi cal of Coleridge's poems1 has more in common with Coleridge's more partisan productions and activities than it appears, for it was published in a volume together with two explicitly political poems (Fears in Solitude and France: An Ode), which ensured that, whatever the circumstances of its composition, it would be received not as a personal lyric reflecting w

JOHN NEWTON AND COLERIDGE'S ‘FEARS IN SOLITUDE’

Journal Article JOHN NEWTON AND COLERIDGE'S ‘FEARS IN SOLITUDE’ Get access CHRIS JONES CHRIS JONES University of WalesBangor Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 41, Issue 3, September 1994, Pages 339–341, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/41-3-339 Published: 01 September 1994

''Fears in Solitude:'' Reading (from) the Dell

Previous articleNext article No AccessA SELECTION OF PAPERS FROM THE COLERIDGE SUMMER CONFERENCE 1990''Fears in Solitude:'' Reading (from) the DellPeter LarkinPeter Larkin Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 22, Number 1Winter 1991 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24042639 Views: 4Total views on this site © 1991 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Coleridge, the French Revolution, and 'The Ancient Mariner': Collective Guilt and Individual Salvation

S. T. Coleridge's 'The Rime of Ancient Mariner' was written against the background of the collapse of the poet's hopes for the improvement of mankind by political action, the ultimate failure of the French Revolution to distinguish itself from its oppressive Bourbon predecessors. The contribution of Coleridge's political beliefs to this poem has never been fully appreciated. Certainly 'The Ancient Mariner' has none of the political allusions which stud the contemporaneous 'France: an Ode' or 'Fears in Solitude' and this has led most critics to concur with E. M. W. Tillyard that the poem exhibits 'a total lack of politics'.' Yet given the circumstances which gave rise to 'The Ancient Mariner', this very absence of political content is itself political. As Carl Woodring puts it, if Coleridge's supernatural poems are poems of escape, 'politics form a large part of what they escaped from'.2 The importance of the French Revolution to 'The Ancient Mariner' can be seen in Coleridge's obsession with that other poet and disillusioned supporter of revolution, John Milton. During 1795-96 he fills the Gutch memorandum notebook with allusions and references to Toland's edition of Milton's prose works of 1698.3 Coleridge had Milton's career very much in mind when writing 'The Ancient Mariner'. Like himself, the poet of Paradise Lost had witnessed the complete wreck of his own hopes for a regenerated nation. In March 1819 Coleridge delivered a lecture on Milton and Paradise Lost which tells us a great deal about his own state of mind. Milton was: '. as every truly great poet has ever been, a good man; but finding it impossible to realize his own aspirations, either in religion or politics, or society, he gave up his heart to the living spirit and light within him, and avenged himself on the world by enriching it with this record of his own transcendent ideal'.4 Although ultimately Coleridge hoped that his own vengeance would be