Coleridge's Poetry Research Articles

The lene clinamen in the Early Poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

For today's readers of Romantic poetry, ‘uncertainty'—with its implications for a post-Heisenberg philosophical worldview—carries a great deal of scientific baggage. If, then, we allow for the uncertainty principle and admit probability at the micro level of a poem, the issue of volition and determinism becomes less straightforward than it might appear on a conventional reading of Coleridge's poetry. The transitions that enable Coleridgean creative acts in the early poems identify a need to reconceptualize the vital Coleridgean principle of the lene clinamen. Etymologically, clinamen can be rendered as a swerve; lene (soft, mild, and soothing) is the root meaning of leniency. Coleridge's critical term lene clinamen has its roots in Lucretius' scientific poem, De rerum natura, where it is used in the service of an atomistic theory. Coleridge, in response, is writing his own distinctively scientific poems that model principles and hypotheses about the way the world is and how we understand it.

De la simple existencia: Antología poética by Wallace Stevens, and: La roca by Wallace Stevens, and: Poemas tardíos by Wallace Stevens, and: Ideas de orden by Wallace Stevens, and: Las auroras de otoño y otros poemas by Wallace Stevens (review)

Reviewed by: De la simple existencia: Antología poética by Wallace Stevens, and: La roca by Wallace Stevens, and: Poemas tardíos by Wallace Stevens, and: Ideas de orden by Wallace Stevens, and: Las auroras de otoño y otros poemas by Wallace Stevens Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan De la simple existencia: Antología poética. By Wallace Stevens. Translated into Spanish by Andrés Sánchez Robayna. Barcelona: Debolsillo, 2006. La roca. By Wallace Stevens. Translated into Spanish by Daniel Aguirre. Barcelona: Lumen, 2008. Poemas tardíos. By Wallace Stevens. Translated into Spanish by Daniel Aguirre. Barcelona: Lumen, 2009. Ideas de orden. By Wallace Stevens. Translated into Spanish by Daniel Aguirre. Barcelona: Lumen, 2010. Las auroras de otoño y otros poemas. By Wallace Stevens. Translated into Spanish by Jenaro Talens. Madrid: Visor, 2012. In the last few years, Spanish readers have been treated to an unusually rich selection of Wallace Stevens' writings, all made available in bilingual editions. The relatively small number of books that Stevens published during his lifetime turns the five collections of translations listed above into a substantial selection from his works. Not only can the Spanish reader now find translations of a sizable number of canonized poems, from "The Idea of Order at Key West" and "The Man with the Blue Guitar" to "The Auroras of Autumn" and "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour," he or she can also enjoy Spanish versions of Stevens' major prose writings, whether they be the essays collected in The Necessary Angel or epigraphs from "Adagia." That a poet's personal collection of aphorisms has been translated may itself be regarded as a meaningful indication of the stature he has achieved in a foreign country. There are several explanations for the interest Stevens has aroused in Spanish readers and, above all, poets. The most important one, it seems to me, is his defining concern with the relations between poetry and philosophy. Such a concern has been typical of an important strand in Spanish poetry during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Characteristically, Andrés Sánchez Robayna, one of the poet-translators under review here, entitled a talk he gave a [End Page 119] few years ago about a selection of twentieth-century Spanish poets, "Poesía y pensamiento" [Poetry and Thought]. In Spain, the cross-fertilization of these two spheres has resulted in a poetic lineage that has been most fruitful. Quite a few Spanish poets have looked to British romantic poetry, for example, as a philosophical poetry (see Eugenia Perojo Arronte's contribution to The Reception of S. T. Coleridge in Europe [London: Continuum, 2007]). Wordsworth's and Coleridge's poetry has been regarded among Spanish admirers as a form of secular meditation, with its own reflective pace and tone. Stevens' analogous interest in meditative poetry and substitutions for religion fits this mold particularly well. One of the first explicit references to the American poet's works appears in a collection of essays by José Ángel Valente (1929-2000) published in 1971 under the title Las palabras de la tribu [The Words of the Tribe]. Early in this book, Valente quotes from the introduction to The Necessary Angel: "One function of the poet at any time is to discover by his own thought and feeling what seems to him to be poetry at that time" (CPP 639). Valente, who spent four years as a Visiting Lecturer at Oxford University, kept up a sustained friendship with José Lezama Lima, the Cuban poet-editor who collaborated with Stevens' epistolary friend José Rodríguez Feo on the magazine Orígenes. In addition, Valente always acknowledged Louis Martz's The Poetry of Meditation (1954) as a fundamental source of inspiration. Martz, as we know, also published various essays on Stevens, and it seems plausible that Valente was familiar with at least some of this work as well. With Stevens, Valente may be said to have shared ideas about decreation, the role of the imagination in poetry, the ascendancy of romanticism, and the relations between painting and poetry. In recent decades, it is Sánchez Robayna who has written most extensively on Stevens. His interest in the American modernist is consistent...

On Literary Fractures

Each spake words of high disdain And insult to his heart's best brother: They parted--ne'er to meet ... A dreary sea now flows between, But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder, Shall wholly do away, I ween, The of that which once hath been. --S. T. Coleridge, Christabel (Coleridge's Poetry and Prose, 173) (1) What makes these lines from Christabel describing the fractured friendship of Sir Leoline and Sir Roland de Vaux so moving? Is it that they voice the incomparability of being friends in youth such that, once whispering tongues poison truth, the two exist like cliffs which had rent asunder, permanently bereft since never either found another/To free the hollow heart from paining (173)? Or is it their assurance that the marks of that which once hath been are beyond the power of natural or human agency to eradicate? Is it related to how these lines assumed a life of their own in the complicated composition and publication history of this poem--existing in print while the narrative of Christabel and Geraldine still was only circulating orally among friends? Does the life that sustains these lines independently from Christabel depend on readers' awareness of the actual fractured friendship between two of the greatest English poets, whose poetic collaboration represents the pinnacle of creative synergy and thus whose falling-out threatens to depress aesthetic energy and investments in it? Alternatively, does the life of these lines stem from their being embedded within one of the penetrating poetic accounts of how for speaking beings attachment is a need as foundational as mother's milk? (2) These questions as prompted by the moving nature of these lines underlie my broader interest in the affect and ethics of friendship as rethought by writers whose close friendships were intimately tied to their efforts to be friends of man in the early 1790s. In part, mine is a literary historical inquiry into the fate of engaged writing in the post-bliss climate of 1800-1820, a concern with how various fractured friendships affected the revisions once-radical writers made to their beliefs in the efficacy of resolve as linked to personal and political reform and the capacity of fiction to inspire both. In part, my inquiry engages with contemporary affect studies, especially the tendency to posit the value of affect as residing in its separation from, and precedence over, speech, not simply as a developmental reality (Massumi, 25-27, 35; Clough 2-3, 17-21). The quarrel between Wordsworth and Coleridge is the famous example of a fractured friendship that not only affected both men's concepts and experiences of hope but also reverberated throughout the circle of their writing acquaintances and, I would argue, intensified the period's preoccupation with remorse. My focus here is on an only slightly less famous fractured friendship of the post-1790s, that between William Godwin and Thomas Holcroft. I choose it because this friendship and fracture center on linkages among affect, fiction, and reform and because the lines from Christabel bespeak it in asserting that part[ing], ne'er to meet again! and the indelibility of their tie. Part of what also draws me to the Godwin-Holcroft fracture, certainly in comparison to that between Wordsworth and Coleridge, is how little probing commentary it has received. Biographers usually mention a rupture, though initially they ascribed it to exchanges over Godwin's Faulkener (Brown, 206; Woodcock, 188), until Frederick Rosen's 1968 essay correctly identified Fleetwood as the culprit, an ascription maintained ever since (Marshall, 260, St. Clair, 277). But they usually accept at face value both the definitiveness of the rupture and their death-bed reconciliation as if neither poses a contradiction to the other or is itself riven with ambiguity. The reconciliation not only has the last word but remains the only word that is used to characterize their relationship as most intimate friend[s] or closest friend[s] (Grylls, 54; Marshall, 72). …

“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. …

The Reception of Hartley Coleridge's Poetry, from 1833 to the Present

The Reception of Hartley Coleridge's Poetry, from 1833 to the Present

Elinor Shaffer and the Genesis of Coleridge's Non-Existent The Fall of Jerusalem

IN her ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School of Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770–1880 Elinor Shaffer wrote: J.L. Lowes's imposingly wrong-headed book The Road to Xanadu has for forty years stood in the way of comprehension of Coleridge's poetry. … his theoretical account of Coleridge's imaginative process is … egregiously [wrong] … we cannot accept his tale of how the ‘hooks-and-eyes’ of half-remembered phrases of charmingly exotic old folios arranged themselves into a great poem. … It was Lowes, not Coleridge, whose imagination worked on bits and scraps. … [Lowes's] jocose antiquarianism … belongs to what Philippe Sollers called the ‘needle-work class’ of literary criticism.1 had in fact blacked the margins of another copy of the work (bound together with the second volume) with comments for which Coleridge's friends would gladly pay in blood drops. For these notes on Eichhorn's interpretation of the Book of Revelation illuminate Coleridge's poetic plans … for the ‘last possible’ epic, The Fall of Jerusalem.2 quis adorare audeat – si non sit veré Deus verus The merit of this exposure and of all sound comment on the Apocalypse is due to Coccëius, long before Janus and Heumann. How can it have happened, that Eichhorn should have made no mention of Joannes Coccëius, born Aug. 1603, died 1669—the first rational Commentator on the Apocalypse and to whom the merit of the first exposure of Ireneus's fiction respecting the Nicolaitans is due?—His views respecting this grand prophetic Drama, the Cassandra of the Christian Lycophron, in general, & of the 7 Churches in particular, are so strikingly coincident with those of Eichhorn, as to render the Latter's Silence respecting his great Predecessor subject of regret.

An Old Editor Remembers: VPN/VPR at Toronto, 1973–85

In the summer of 1962, I moved from the Durham Colleges in the University of Durham (as they were then called), where I had been working on an MA. dissertation on the poetry of Coleridge, to University College, London, in order to start on my doctorate. I only had the vaguest idea about what I wanted to do but I was interested in exploring Victorian criticism of contemporary poetry: John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, that kind of thing. I was given Isobel Armstrong, the youngest faculty member in the Department, as my supervisor and I could not have been more fortunate. In the early 1960s Isobel was at the beginning of a very distinguished career: she had already written an attractive little book on the poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough (1962), and she would later publish The Major Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations in 1969 and an anthology of Victorian criticism of poetry, Victorian Scrutinies, in 1972. At some point, Isobel directed my attention to Victorian periodicals as a largely unexplored resource and she suggested that I write to Professor Walter E. Houghton of Weilesley College for information about authorship of anonymous articles. Walter was initially rather suspicious and was worried that I wanted to appropriate his research, but things were smoothed over and Walter not only gave me what I wanted but asked me to do the section on the British and Foreign Review for the second volume of the Weilesley Index and made me into an assistant editor. I have very fond memories of staying with Walter and Esther in their home in Weilesley and of sipping parfaits on a long summer evening on the terrace of the Weilesley Faculty Club. The Weilesley Index must have been one of the last scholarly projects of its kind put together without the help of a computer. Walter was no Luddite, but he had taken advice that he would be much better off doing things the old-fashioned way, with hand-written slips.

The Philosophy of Shipreck: Gnosticism, Skepticism, and Coleridge's Catastrophic Modernity

Drawing on critiques of modernity by Blumenberg, Arendt, C. Taylor, and Heidegger, this essay examines the Gnostic underpinnings of modernity's conception of knowledge. Skeptical in its origination, modern specialized, disciplinary inquiry construes knowledge as the open-ended accumulation and inventorying of "information." Connecting these macro-historical shifts to classical Liberalism's disavowal of Aristotelian ends and norms in favor of an unspecified, infinitely deferred social and epistemological utopia, Coleridge's poetry (esp. his Rime) and later prose grasp modernity as a psychological and metaphysical disaster that unwittingly echoes the essential incompatibility of eidos and physis first flagged by ancient Gnosticism.

On Coleridge as Translator of Faustus: From the German of Goethe

Abstract The recent publication of Faustus from the German of Goethe, Translated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford University Press, 2007), edited by Frederick Burwick and James McKusick, has given rise to some controversy concerning whether Coleridge was properly identified as the translator. In this short essay I select a few telling facts from the comprehensive collection of evidence supporting Coleridge's role as translator. In addition to a sampling of the phrases from Coleridge's own poetry that are echoed in his translation, and of the references in his notebooks on rendering German words, this essay also briefly summarizes evidence from external sources. In our edition of Faustus from the German of Goethe, Translated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford University Press, 2007), James McKusick and I brought together a comprehensive collection of evidence supporting Coleridge's role as translator. The edition has triggered a reaction by some commentators unwilling to countenance the introduction into Coleridge's oeuvre of such a significant work and the necessary adjustments to our understanding of his biography that such a discovery must generate. The cumulative and corroborative weight of the evidence, nevertheless, indicates that the work is Coleridge's. The absence of any counter evidence makes the case even stronger. The absence of any counter evidence makes the case even stronger. The internal evidence alone has prompted careful readers to recognize Coleridge's hand. Over 800 verbal echoes from Coleridge's other writings recur within the translated text. Mephistopheles's monologue on the ascent of the Brocken (3940-55), which deviates from the reliance on blank verse, reveals a mastery of the tetrameters of Christable. During the period of the translation from May, 1820, to September, 1821, Coleridge in his notebooks ponders the meaning of German words and phrases that occur in Goethe's Faust. Further documentary evidence is found in the letters of the publishers and the contemporary reviews. In the following paragraphs, I shall endeavor to sharpen the debate by refining a few salient examples, first of Coleridge's self-echoing phrases, then of his notebook references, and I conclude with a summary of evidence from external sources. ********** On Sunday, October 28, 1827, Coleridge wrote to James Gillman to let him know that his return from his voyage was eagerly awaited. Coleridge had strolled down to the Custom House on the Thames for news of Gillman's anticipated arrival. Standing on the landing stairs, Coleridge watched a steamer turning on the river and went on to describe the pulsing energy manifest in the swirling mists: we have had & have a steady deliberate soft thick soaking Rain, which yet does not sufficiently disburthen the Atmosphere of it's ever contracting and dilating, ascending and descending aqueous vapor, as to quiet the gusty winds or to smooth the white breakers. (Letters 6.706). Coleridge uses here words and phrases that also belonged to Faustus from the German of Goethe published six years earlier by Thomas Boosey. Sources for Goethe's description of the Sign of the Macrocosm have been identified among the copperplate engravings to the works of Jacob Boehme and Johannes Kepler and other pansophic accounts of universal harmony. In Goethe's image, golden buckets, like the paddles of a water-wheel, are seen as scooping up the heavenly powers and forever ascending and descending as the wheel resolves (Goethes Faust 499). The English translation provides natural description rather than mechanical and alchemical symbols: How divinely Are all things blended! how each lives and moves But with the rest! how heav'nly powers descend, And re-ascend, balancing reeling worlds (447-50) As is typical throughout the translation, departures from Goethe's words and images coincide with a turn to those which are familiar in Coleridge's poetic idiom. …

Theodore Watts-Dunton's Aylwin (1898) and the Reduplications of Romanticism

This essay examines Theodore Watts-Dunton's fascinating, best-selling, but now neglected, novel "Aylwin (1898)," focusing on the work's links with the poetry of Coleridge, its specific treatment of looking and the gaze as affected by trauma, and its complex structure of repetition and transmission. The article proposes that by such means and through its prefigurement of what Frank Kermode identifies in the work of modernists as the 'Romantic Image' "Aylwin" reveals the lines of a Romantic genealogy that extends from Coleridge through Rossetti to writers such as Yeats, demonstrating the hidden continuity between Romantic and late Victorian literature and mapping the crucial transition from late Victorian literature to literary modernism.

Sound, Silence, and Voice in Meditation: Coleridge, Berkeley, and the Conversation Poems

... interment of such a treasure in a dead language must needs be contrary to intentions of gracious Donor. Coleridge, The Statesman's Manual As James Engell reminds us, S. T. Coleridge considered himself a Berkeleian (110), yet elsewhere in Coleridge criticism we find more convincing denials: J. Robert Barth, for example, claims that we do not have to resort to a Berkeleian philosophy to find source of Coleridge's belief in a God who actively sustains creation (Symbolic 20), while Seamus Perry argues that Berkeleianism because, Even at his most rampantly idealist, he didn't deny that real existence of other things (34). Thomas McFarland tells us that Berkeley is specifically identified in Biographia as one of thinkers who had not provided [Coleridge] with 'an abiding place' for his 'reason' (158). Coleridge's Berkeleianism indeed impure, and, as Perry and McFarland would agree, nearly all Coleridge's work held in suspension idealist and realist tendencies; (1) furthermore, this tension a fundamentally Christian one, inherent in a religion that worships a figure conceived as fully God and fully man. From such a viewpoint, Coleridge, so frequently accused of pantheism, appears more orthodox than a pseudo-Gnostic (and, McFarland would argue, implicitly pantheist) Berkeley. In writings of J. Robert Barth we find a valuable theoretical perspective from which to view purpose of Christian poetry in general and of Coleridge's poetry in particular. We take as our starting point a concept drawn from Barth's study The Symbolic Imagination: Coleridge and Romantic Tradition: idea that Christian poetry essentially sacramental. That to say, as sacraments--particularly Eucharist--represent God's entrance into temporal world from transcendence (originally by Incarnation, reenacted by sacraments), so a Christian poetry properly conceived represents God's entrance into world through language. Barth ties this idea of sacramental poetry to Coleridge's concept of symbol, which articulates, however dimly, 'interpenetration' of two disparate and often seemingly very distinct realities, such as humankind and God. It by such language--poetic language--that chasm immanent and transcendent can be bridged (Symbolic 26). Most important to Barth the notion of sacrament--and symbol--as (40), an encounter that takes place on two planes, between poet and reader, for which poem setting and catalyst and between [the poet] and sacred--the numinous 'other'--whether discovered within or outside one's self (145). We may go farther; to conceive of poetry as an encounter poet and divine can be understood as continuation of revelation. The poet, therefore, becomes a sort of prophet (as indeed Romantics often imagined), recording that inspired, revealed truth in such a way that others can follow and experience their own sacramental encounters. We may, therefore, take as our guiding principle one central idea: truest poetry records an encounter with God. The symbol of conversation, representing God's incarnational and sacramental communion with humankind, central to poems here under study; conversation in Coleridge a sacramental act human and divine, mediated by nature-as-language and by poetic language. His use of sound--both as sound imagery within poem, and sound as music of poem's expression--correlates to symbolic colloquy of sacrament. This technique depends upon a conception of interdependence of spiritual and physical worlds: as God ground of all being, physical world depends upon active and sustaining power of divinity to animate it; spiritual, in turn, uses physical world as a language, expressing divinity through and within world it sustains. …

Saving Chatterton: Imagining Historical Transmission in Coleridge

The figure of Thomas Chatterton appears in Romantic writing as tragedy of lost potential. (1) This image was so common by the mid-1790s that the representation shifted from the historical (the tragedy of Chatterton himself) to the rhetorical (the symbol of Chatterton as tragedy). In On Observing Blossom on the First of February, 1796, for instance, Coleridge introduces Chatterton to arouse sympathy with flower that bloomed soon and was doomed by the return of winter: .... shall I liken thee To some sweet girl of rapid growth Nipp'd by consumption mid untimely charms? Or to bard, the boy! (2) Together with the consumptive girl, in his too rapid growth, Chatterton is ahead of his proper time, the emblem of untimeliness. But even this allusion suggests another understanding of his untimeliness. If the comparison addresses the future, the phrase Bristowa's looks to the past--both the archaic name Bristowa and the title bard connote distant historical world. The passage leaves Chatterton divided, then, early and late; he reaches toward an archaic past and yet faces an unreachable future. This temporal uncertainty registers Coleridge's attempt to superimpose timelessness over tragic prolepsis. The next phrase, boy, associates the poet's untimeliness with the special (epiphanic or apocalyptic) experience that removes him from the ordinary temporal life. The distinction between poet in the wrong time and poet removed from time reflects an important parallel distinction between historical experience and imagination. If the wonder of Chatterton marks his untimeliness as transcendence of (or alienation from) temporality, he takes his place among other prominent figures in Coleridge's poetry such as the Ancient Mariner who illustrate the unsettling effects of imagination upon ordinary life. From this angle, Chatterton's story emphasizes the conflict between the life of the mind and life in time. Its tragic conclusion tells of an imagination alien to this temporal world and crushed by the inexorable processes of living; along the way, however, his experience testifies to the epiphanic power of imagination, opening the mind to superior reality. In either mood, however, imagination is opposed to historical life. What is most valuable about human experience is both grandly above the exigencies of temporality and doomed to fall back into the real, historical world. Literary criticism has generally been sympathetic to the divine and tragic experience of imagination. Although suspicious of the Romantic imagination, even new historicists have left unchallenged the distinction between imagination and historical experience embedded in the Chatterton story. Questioning the Romantic tendency to represent Chatterton as timeless, boy, McGann returns him to history, emphasizing his hard political edge: the real Chatterton was ambitious, confident, and politically motivated, and his writing was a means to very worldly ends; the only realms of gold he dreamed of were hard and current (236, 235). Similarly, citing the earliest descriptions of Chatterton written by men who knew him personally, Fairer calls him mature beyond his years, a public defender of liberty who actively pursued Wilkite connections (233-34). According to both critics, representations of Chatterton as wondrous boy promote imagination and deflect or deny real historical experience. By emphasizing the glory and tragedy of Chatterton's imaginative life, Romantic representations of the poet look away from the political and social circumstances that shaped both his life and the texts that represent it. In response to these distortions, historicist criticism proposes to set the historical record straight. Through such lens, then, Chatterton again becomes timely, in the sense that the poet himself and his representations in literature are restored to their proper historical circumstances. …

Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson, and Raimonda Modiano's Coleridge's Poetry and Prose

Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson, and Raimonda Modiano's <i>Coleridge's Poetry and Prose</i>

Coleridge's melancholia: an anatomy of limbo

This lively intellectual biography of the second half of Coleridge's life argues that the poet, in his mature work, reveals a brilliant though troubled genius for conveying the ambiguities of psychological limbo. Asserting that the later poetry is the key element of Coleridge's career, Eric G. Wilson proposes that this period of work reflects the poet's ability to imagine and dissect both sides of life's grand antagonisms - many and one, body and soul, fact and dream, flux and permanence. Trapped in a vague region between equally troubled and opposite states, the older Coleridge felt chronically incomplete, confused, dissatisfied. Yet, Wilson writes, this melancholy state brought him to the curious frontier where one achieves double vision, the capacity to perceive two sides of the world at once. Although this double refraction kept Coleridge from finding peace, Wilson contends that the psychic limbo became a muse - an inspiration to complete works on the impossibility of completion. In revealing the virtues of Coleridge's gloom, Wilson reassesses the trajectory of Coleridge's poetic career and discovers affinities between Coleridge and later Romantics who often criticized him. As a psychologist of limbo, Coleridge tests the spirit of Byron's meditations on the ruins of history and of Keats' broodings over the rifts between fact and fantasy. Wilson also finds a new place for Coleridge in the history of ideas, positioning him as an anxious precursor of Kierkegaard's dread and the abyss of Nietzsche, and offers a well-structured analysis of Coleridge's intellectual development in his later years. Though committed to Coleridge's poetry, this book is finally a philosophical meditation on the virtues of melancholy - its particular kind of creativity as well as its psychological depths. Exploring a tortured, luminous mind, Coleridge's Melancholia offers a primer on the search for the ancient ideal of soul.

Romanticism and transcendence: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the religious imagination

Grounded in the thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, this text explores the religious dimensions of imagination in the Romantic tradition, both theoretically and in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge. J. Barth suggests that we may look to Coleridge for the theoretical grounding of the view of religious imagination proposed in this book, but that it is in Wordsworth above all that we see this imagination at work. Barth first discusses the relationship between and religion, arguing that the Romantic imagination - with the symbolic import of its very nature - has religious implications. He studies the role of religious experience in Wordsworth, using Prelude as a privileged source. After comparing the conception of humanity and God in Wordsworth and Coleridge, Barth considers the role of religious experience and imagery in two of Coleridge's central poetic texts, Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. Barth examines the continuing role of the Romantic idea of the religious imagination today and concludes this book by linking it with the thought of theologian Karl Rahner and literary critic George Steiner. Romanticism and Transcendence brings together literary theory, poetry and religious experience, areas that are inter-related but are not often seen in relationship. By exploring levels of Wordsworth and Coleridge's poetry that are often ignored, Barth provides a poignant understanding of how and why the imagination was so important to their sense of poetry. He also demonstrates how rich with religious value and meaning poetry itself can be. The interdisciplinary nature of this study should make it useful not only to Wordsworth and Coleridge scholars and other romantic specialists, but also to anyone concerned with the intellectual history of the 19th century and to theologians in general.

Coleridge's Poetry and Prose

Coleridge's Poetry and Prose

The Norton Critical Edition of Coleridge's Poetry and Prose

The Norton Critical Edition of Coleridge's Poetry and Prose. Un article de la revue Romanticism on the Net (New Texts and Textual Scholarship in British Literature, 1780-1830) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

‘Cannot choose but hear’: The Figure of Reassurance in Coleridge's Major Poetry

‘Cannot choose but hear’: The Figure of Reassurance in Coleridge's Major Poetry

Coleridge's Poetry in the Hands of Schoolchildren

Nineteenth-century England saw a proliferation of poetry written specifically for children. At the same time, main line poetry—that is, work written by poets acknowledged as the best in the language and written primarily for an adult audience—routinely was presented to children, under the assumption that the best English poets either had children in mind as a part of their general audience or wrote about subjects in which children would have some natural interest.1 School texts, in particular, sought to introduce children, from the youngest ages, to poetry that would prepare them for later, more mature appreciation and indeed for a life of moral self-reflection and right action. To this purpose, the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge answered admirably. In his preface to Lyra Heroica: A Book of Verse for Boys (1892), which includes Coleridge's Kubla Khan, along with works by Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Tennyson, and others, editor William Ernest Henley states: My purpose has been to choose and sheave a certain number of those achievements in verse which, as expressing the simpler sentiments and the more elemental emotions, might fitly be addressed to such boys—and men, for that matter—as are privileged to use our noble English tongue. As the critic William Walsh implies, Coleridge would have agreed with Henley's approach:

Coleridge's Later Poetry. Morton D. Paley.Coleridge's Progress to Christianity: Experience and Authority in Religious Faith. Ronald C. Wendling.

<i>Coleridge's Later Poetry</i>. Morton D. Paley.<i>Coleridge's Progress to Christianity: Experience and Authority in Religious Faith</i>. Ronald C. Wendling.