English poet, literary critic and philosopher (1772–1834)
"Coleridge" redirects hither. For other uses, see Coleridge (disambiguation).
This article is about picture poet. For the composer, see Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (KOH-lə-rij;[1]) (21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834) was an English metrist, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who was a founder notice the Romantic Movement in England and a member of say publicly Lake Poets with his friend William Wordsworth. He also mutual volumes and collaborated with Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Physicist Lloyd.
He wrote the poems The Rime of the Antique Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major text work Biographia Literaria. His critical works were highly influential, same in relation to William Shakespeare, and he helped introduce Teutonic idealist philosophy to English-speaking cultures. Coleridge coined many familiar explicate and phrases, including "suspension of disbelief".[2] He had a main influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson and American transcendentalism. Throughout his adult life, Coleridge had crippling bouts of anxiety and depression; it has been speculated that he had bipolar disorder, which had not been defined during his lifetime.[3] He was physically unhealthy, which may have stemmed from a bout of arthritic fever and other childhood illnesses. He was treated for these conditions with laudanum, which fostered a lifelong opium addiction.
Coleridge had a turbulent career and personal life with a diversification of highs and lows, but his public esteem grew afterwards his death, and he became considered one of the ascendant influential figures in English literature. For instance, a 2018 piece by The Guardian labelled him "a genius" who had progressed into "one of the most renowned English poets." Organisations much as the Church of England celebrate his work during get out events, such as a "Coleridge Day" in June, with activities including literary recitals.[4]
Main article: Early life walk up to Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Coleridge was born on 21 October 1772 imprison the town of Ottery St Mary in Devon, England.[5] Samuel's father was the Reverend John Coleridge, the well-respected vicar addict St Mary's Church, Ottery St Mary and was headmaster admonishment the King's School, a free grammar school established by Counterfeit Henry VIII in the town. He had previously been chieftain of Hugh Squier's School in South Molton, Devon, and pedagogue of nearby Molland.[6]
John Coleridge had three children by his premier wife. Samuel was the youngest of ten by the Cleric Mr. Coleridge's second wife, Anne Bowden (1726–1809),[7] probably the girl of John Bowden, mayor of South Molton, Devon, in 1726.[8] Coleridge suggests that he "took no pleasure in boyish sports" but instead read "incessantly" and played by himself.[9]
After John Poet died in 1781, 8-year-old Samuel was sent to Christ's Infirmary, a charity school which was founded in the 16th hundred in Greyfriars, London, where he remained throughout his childhood, revise and writing poetry. At that school Coleridge became friends siphon off Charles Lamb, a schoolmate, and studied the works of Poet and William Lisle Bowles.[10]
In one of a series of life letters written to Thomas Poole, Coleridge wrote: "At six age old I remember to have read Belisarius, Robinson Crusoe, impressive Philip Quarll – and then I found the Arabian Nights' Entertainments – one tale of which (the tale of a man who was compelled to seek for a pure virgin) made so deep an impression on me (I had skim it in the evening while my mother was mending stockings) that I was haunted by spectres whenever I was coach in the dark – and I distinctly remember the anxious remarkable fearful eagerness with which I used to watch the windowpane in which the books lay – and whenever the sheltered lay upon them, I would seize it, carry it get ahead of the wall, and bask, and read."[11]
Coleridge seems to receive appreciated his teacher, as he wrote in recollections of his school days in Biographia Literaria:
I enjoyed the inestimable outside of a very sensible, though at the same time, a very severe master...At the same time that we were perusing the Greek Tragic Poets, he made us read Shakespeare enjoin Milton as lessons: and they were the lessons too, which required most time and trouble to bring up, so considerably to escape his censure. I learnt from him, that Verse, even that of the loftiest, and, seemingly, that of description wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as hard as that of science; and more difficult, because more faint, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes...In our own English compositions (at least for the last leash years of our school education) he showed no mercy guard phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, bring down where the same sense might have been conveyed with compel force and dignity in plainer words...In fancy I can nearly hear him now, exclaiming Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and organize, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? your Nurse's daughter, give orders mean! Pierian spring? Oh aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose!...Be that as it may, there was one custom of our master's, which I cannot pass over in silence, because I give attention to it ...worthy of imitation. He would often permit our tip exercises...to accumulate, till each lad had four or five match be looked over. Then placing the whole number abreast idea his desk, he would ask the writer, why this hand down that sentence might not have found as appropriate a basis under this or that other thesis: and if no fulfilling answer could be returned, and two faults of the precise kind were found in one exercise, the irrevocable verdict followed, the exercise was torn up, and another on the equal subject to be produced, in addition to the tasks invoke the day.[12]
He later wrote of his loneliness at school attach the poem Frost at Midnight: "With unclosed lids, already difficult to understand I dreamt/Of my sweet birth-place."[13]
From 1791 until 1794, Coleridge accompanied Jesus College, Cambridge.[14] In 1792, he won the Browne Yellowness Medal for an ode that he wrote attacking the slavegirl trade.[15]
In December 1793, he left the college and enlisted thrill the 15th (The King's) Light Dragoons using the false name "Silas Tomkyn Comberbache",[16] perhaps because of debt or because say publicly girl that he loved, Mary Evans, had rejected him. His brothers arranged for his discharge a few months later make a mistake the reason of "insanity" and he was readmitted to Redeemer College, though he would never receive a degree from depiction university.[citation needed]
At Jesus College, Coleridge was introduced to political and theological ideas then considered radical, including those of the poet Robert Southey with whom he collaborated on the play The Fall of Robespierre. Coleridge joined Poet in a plan, later abandoned, to found a utopiancommune-like group of people, called Pantisocracy, in the wilderness of Pennsylvania.
In 1795, description two friends became engaged to sisters Sara and Edith Fricker, with Sara becoming the subject of Coleridge's poem, The Eolian Harp. They wed that year in St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol,[17] but Coleridge's marriage with Sara proved unhappy. By 1804, they were separated. When Coleridge wrote to his brother he arranged all the blame on Sara: "The few friends who fake been Witnesses of my domestic life have long advised break through as the necessary condition of everything desirable for me..." Successive biographers have not agreed with Coleridge's negative view of say publicly wife he called his 'Sally Pally' when he first marital her.[18][19]
A third sister, Mary, had already married a third versifier, Robert Lovell, and both became partners in Pantisocracy. Lovell as well introduced Coleridge and Southey to their future patron Joseph Cottle, but died of a fever in April 1796. Coleridge was with him at his death.
In 1796, he released his first volume of poems entitled Poems on Various Subjects, which also included four poems by Charles Lamb as well translation a collaboration with Robert Southey[citation needed] and a work advisable by his and Lamb's schoolfriend Robert Favell. Among the poems were Religious Musings, Monody on the Death of Chatterton suggest an early version of The Eolian Harp entitled Effusion 35. A second edition was printed in 1797, this time including an appendix of works by Lamb and Charles Lloyd, a young poet to whom Coleridge had become a private
In 1796, he also privately printed Sonnets from Various Authors, including sonnets by Lamb, Lloyd, Southey and himself as come after as older poets such as William Lisle Bowles.
Coleridge notion plans to establish a journal, The Watchman, to be printed every eight days to avoid a weekly newspaper tax.[20] Rendering first issue of the short-lived journal was published in Stride 1796. It had ceased publication by May of that year.[21]
The years 1797 and 1798, during which he lived in what is now known as Coleridge Cottage, in Nether Stowey, Summerset, were among the most fruitful of Coleridge's life. In 1795, Coleridge met poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. (Wordsworth, having visited him and being enchanted by the surroundings, rented Alfoxton Park, a little over three miles [5 km] away.) Also The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge composed the lurid poem Kubla Khan, written—Coleridge claimed—as a result of an opium dream, in "a kind of a reverie"; and the pass with flying colours part of the narrative poem Christabel. The writing of Kubla Khan, written about the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan and his legendary palace at Xanadu, was said to have been straightforward by the arrival of "a person on business from Porlock" – an event that has been embellished upon in specified varied contexts as science fiction and Nabokov's Lolita. During that period, he also produced his much-praised "conversation poems" This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, Frost at Midnight, and The Nightingale.
In 1798, Coleridge and Wordsworth published a joint volume of 1 Lyrical Ballads, which proved to be the starting point championing the English romantic age. Wordsworth may have contributed more poems, but the real star of the collection was Coleridge's leading version of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It was the longest work and drew more praise and attention better anything else in the volume. In the spring Coleridge in the interim took over for Rev. Joshua Toulmin at Taunton's Mary Structure Unitarian Chapel[22] while Rev. Toulmin grieved over the drowning cessation of his daughter Jane. Poetically commenting on Toulmin's strength, Poet wrote in a 1798 letter to John Prior Estlin, "I walked into Taunton (eleven miles) and back again, and performed the divine services for Dr. Toulmin. I suppose you ought to have heard that his daughter, (Jane, on 15 April 1798) in a melancholy derangement, suffered herself to be swallowed lustre by the tide on the sea-coast between Sidmouth and Bere [sic] (Beer). These events cut cruelly into the hearts admire old men: but the good Dr. Toulmin bears it materialize the true practical Christian, – there is indeed a gash in his eye, but that eye is lifted up disturb the Heavenly Father."[23]
Coleridge also worked succinctly in Shropshire, where he came in December 1797 as relief to its local Unitarian minister, Dr. Rowe, in their faith in the High Street at Shrewsbury. He is said access have read his Rime of the Ancient Mariner at a literary evening in Mardol. He was then contemplating a employment in the ministry, and gave a probationary sermon in Extraordinary Street church on Sunday, 14 January 1798. William Hazlitt, a Unitarian minister's son, was in the congregation, having walked break Wem to hear him. Coleridge later visited Hazlitt and his father at Wem but within a day or two warning sign preaching he received a letter from Josiah Wedgwood II, who had offered to help him out of financial difficulties better an annuity of £150 (approximately £13,000 in today's money[24]) bawl year on condition he give up his ministerial career. Poet accepted this, to the disappointment of Hazlitt who hoped curry favor have him as a neighbour in Shropshire.[25]
From 16 September 1798, Coleridge and the Wordsworths left for a stay in Germany; Coleridge soon went his own way and spent much take away his time in university towns. In February 1799 he registered at the University of Göttingen, where he attended lectures next to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and Johann Gottfried Eichhorn.[26] During this reassure, he became interested in German philosophy, especially the transcendental grandeur and critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and in the bookish criticism of the 18th-century dramatist Gotthold Lessing. Coleridge studied European and, after his return to England, translated the dramatic trilogy Wallenstein by the German Classical poet Friedrich Schiller into Country. He continued to pioneer these ideas through his own censorious writings for the rest of his life (sometimes without attribution), although they were unfamiliar and difficult for a culture submissive by empiricism.
In 1799, Coleridge and the Wordsworths stayed separate Thomas Hutchinson's farm on the River Tees at Sockburn, away Darlington.
It was at Sockburn that Coleridge wrote his ballad-poem Love, addressed to Sara Hutchinson. The knight mentioned is rendering mailed figure on the Conyers tomb in ruined Sockburn sanctuary. The figure has a wyvern at his feet, a leaning to the Sockburn Worm slain by Sir John Conyers (and a possible source for Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky).[a][b] The worm was supposedly buried under the rock in the nearby pasture; that was the "greystone" of Coleridge's first draft, later transformed review a "mount". The poem was a direct inspiration for Bathroom Keats' famous poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci.[29]
Coleridge's early point of view debts, besides German idealists like Kant and critics like Author, were first to William Godwin's Political Justice, especially during his Pantisocratic period, and to David Hartley's Observations on Man, which is the source of the psychology which is found creepycrawly Frost at Midnight. Hartley argued that one becomes aware panic about sensory events as impressions, and that "ideas" are derived next to noticing similarities and differences between impressions and then by assignment them. Connections resulting from the coincidence of impressions create linkages, so that the occurrence of one impression triggers those relatives and calls up the memory of those ideas with which it is associated (See Dorothy Emmet, "Coleridge and Philosophy").
Coleridge was critical of the literary taste of his contemporaries, lecturer a literary conservative insofar as he was afraid that say publicly lack of taste in the ever growing masses of belletristic people would mean a continued desecration of literature.
In 1800, he returned to England and shortly thereafter settled with his family and friends in Greta Hall at Keswick in interpretation Lake District of Cumberland to be near Grasmere, where Poet had moved. He stayed with the Wordsworths for eighteen months, but was a difficult houseguest, as his dependency on opiate grew and his frequent nightmares would wake the children. Put your feet up was also a fussy eater, to the frustration of Dorothy Wordsworth, who had to cook. For example, not content shrink salt, Coleridge sprinkled cayenne pepper on his eggs, which of course ate from a teacup.[30] His marital problems, nightmares, illnesses, hyperbolic opium dependency, tensions with Wordsworth, and a lack of bend forwards in his poetic powers fuelled the composition of Dejection: Implication Ode and an intensification of his philosophical studies.[31]
In 1802, Poet took a nine-day walking holiday in the fells of rendering Lake District. Coleridge is credited with the first recorded hangout of Scafell to Mickledore via Broad Stand, although this haw have been more due to his getting lost than a purposeful new route. He coined the term mountaineering.[32]
Main article: Coleridge and opium
In 1804, he travelled to Sicily and Malta, working for a time as Acting Public Secretary of Malta under the Laical Commissioner, Alexander Ball, a task he performed successfully. He ephemeral in San Anton Palace in the village of Attard. Purify gave this up and returned to England in 1806. Dorothy Wordsworth was shocked at his condition upon his return.
From 1807 to 1808, Coleridge returned to Malta and then cosmopolitan in Sicily and Italy, in the hope that leaving Britain's damp climate would improve his health and thus enable him to reduce his consumption of opium. Thomas De Quincey alleges in his Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets that it was during this period that Coleridge became a full-blown opium addict, using the drug as a substitute stake out the lost vigour and creativity of his youth. It has been suggested that this reflects De Quincey's own experiences make more complicated than Coleridge's.[33]
His opium addiction (he was using as much makeover two quarts of laudanum a week) now began to deaden over his life: he separated from his wife Sara hem in 1808, quarrelled with Wordsworth in 1810, lost part of his annuity in 1811, and put himself under the care loosen Dr. Daniel in 1814. His addiction caused severe constipation, which required regular and humiliating enemas.[34]
In 1809, Coleridge made his without fear or favour attempt to become a newspaper publisher with the publication sell like hot cakes the journal entitled The Friend. It was a weekly reporting that, in Coleridge's typically ambitious style, was written, edited, squeeze published almost entirely single-handedly. Given that Coleridge tended to aptly highly disorganised and had no head for business, the revise was probably doomed from the start. Coleridge financed the gazette by selling over five hundred subscriptions, over two dozen be in opposition to which were sold to members of Parliament, but in fit together 1809, publication was crippled by a financial crisis and Poet was obliged to approach "Conversation Sharp",[35] Tom Poole and amity or two other wealthy friends for an emergency loan extract continue. The Friend was an eclectic publication that drew come across every corner of Coleridge's remarkably diverse knowledge of law, logic, morals, politics, history, and literary criticism.
Although it was habitually turgid, rambling, and inaccessible to most readers, it ran provision 25 issues and was republished in book form a distribution of times. Years after its initial publication, a revised beginning expanded edition of The Friend, with added philosophical content including his 'Essays on the Principles of Method', became a well influential work and its effect was felt on writers have a word with philosophers from John Stuart Mill to Ralph Waldo Emerson.
From 1810 to 1820, Coleridge gave a series of lectures in London and Bristol – those assertion Shakespeare renewed interest in the playwright as a model letch for contemporary writers. Much of Coleridge's reputation as a literary critic is founded on the lectures that he undertook in description winter of 1810–11, which were sponsored by the Philosophical Foundation and given at Scot's Corporation Hall off Fetter Lane, Flex Street. These lectures were heralded in the prospectus as "A Course of Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, in Illustration waning the Principles of Poetry." Coleridge's ill-health, opium-addiction problems, and moderately unstable personality meant that all his lectures were plagued look after problems of delays and a general irregularity of quality punishment one lecture to the next.
As a result of these factors, Coleridge often failed to prepare anything but the loosest set of notes for his lectures and regularly entered lift extremely long digressions which his audiences found difficult to range. However, it was the lecture on Hamlet given on 2 January 1812 that was considered the best and has influenced Hamlet studies ever since. Before Coleridge, Hamlet was often denigrated and belittled by critics from Voltaire to Dr. Johnson. Poet rescued the play's reputation, and his thoughts on it in addition often still published as supplements to the text.
In 1812, he allowed Robert Southey to make use of extracts yield his vast number of private notebooks in their collaboration Omniana; Or, Horae Otiosiores.
In August 1814, Coleridge was approached make wet John Murray, Lord Byron's publisher, about the possibility of translating Goethe's classic Faust (1808). Coleridge was regarded by many trade in the greatest living writer on the demonic and he uncontroversial the commission, only to abandon work on it after shake up weeks. Until recently, scholars were in agreement that Coleridge under no circumstances returned to the project, despite Goethe's own belief in representation 1820s that he had in fact completed a long rendition of the work. In September 2007, Oxford University Press sparked a heated scholarly controversy by publishing an English translation be alarmed about Goethe's work that purported to be Coleridge's long-lost masterpiece (the text in question first appeared anonymously in 1821).[36]
From 1814 top 1816, Coleridge rented from a local surgeon, Mr Page, play a part Calne, Wiltshire. He seemed able to focus on his go and manage his addiction, drafting Biographia Literaria. A blue slab marks the property today.[37][38]
In April 1816, Coleridge, with his habituation worsening, his spirits depressed, and his family alienated, took abode in the Highgate homes, then just north of London, precision the physician James Gillman, first at South Grove and late at the nearby 3, The Grove.[39] It is unclear whether his growing use of opium (and the brandy in which it was dissolved) was a symptom or a cause stare his growing depression. Gillman was partially successful in controlling rendering poet's addiction. Coleridge remained in Highgate for the rest signify his life, and the house became a place of legendary pilgrimage for writers including Carlyle and Emerson.
In Gillman's living quarters, Coleridge finished his major prose work, the Biographia Literaria (mostly drafted in 1815, and finished in 1817), a volume equalized of 23 chapters of autobiographical notes and dissertations on diverse subjects, including some incisive literary theory and criticism. He support a considerable amount of poetry, of variable quality. He obtainable other writings while he was living at the Gillman homes, notably the Lay Sermons of 1816 and 1817, Sibylline Leaves (1817), Hush (1820), Aids to Reflection (1825), and On picture Constitution of the Church and State (1830).[40] He also produced essays published shortly after his death, such as Essay trench Faith (1838)[41] and Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (1840).[42] A number of his followers were central to the Oxford Relocation, and his religious writings profoundly shaped Anglicanism in the mid-nineteenth century.[43]
Coleridge also worked extensively on the various manuscripts which transformation his "Opus Maximum", a work which was in part witting as a post-Kantian work of philosophical synthesis.[44] The work was never published in his lifetime, and has frequently been overlook as evidence for his tendency to conceive grand projects which he then had difficulty in carrying through to completion. But while he frequently berated himself for his "indolence", the scuttle list of his published works calls this myth into concern. Critics are divided on whether the "Opus Maximum", first promulgated in 2002, successfully resolved the philosophical issues he had antediluvian exploring for most of his adult life.[45]
Coleridge died expect Highgate, London on 25 July 1834 as a result locate heart failure compounded by an unknown lung disorder, possibly joined to his use of opium. Coleridge had spent 18 eld under the roof of the Gillman family, who built arrive addition onto their home to accommodate the poet.[46]
Faith may produce defined as fidelity to our own being, so far sort such being is not and cannot become an object loom the senses; and hence, by clear inference or implication erect being generally, as far as the same is not interpretation object of the senses; and again to whatever is thoroughbred or understood as the condition, or concomitant, or consequence disregard the same. This will be best explained by an technique or example. That I am conscious of something within precipitate peremptorily commanding me to do unto others as I would they should do unto me; in other words a express (that is, primary and unconditional) imperative; that the maxim (regula maxima, or supreme rule) of my actions, both inward extort outward, should be such as I could, without any untruth arising therefrom, will to be the law of all unremitting and rational beings. Essay on Faith
Carlyle described him at Highgate: "Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill, in those years, looking down on London and its smoke-tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle...The practical intellects of the world did not much heed him, or raffishly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer: but to the rising booze of the young generation he had this dusky sublime character; and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt play in mystery and enigma; his Dodona oak-grove (Mr. Gilman's house strict Highgate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or jargon."[47]
Coleridge interest now buried in St Michael's Church, Highgate, London. He was originally buried at the Old Highgate Chapel, next to representation main entrance of Highgate School. Coleridge could see the into the open door of the then new St Michael's Church from his last residence across the green, where he lived with a doctor he had hoped might cure him (in a scaffold owned by Kate Moss until 2022).
When it was revealed Coleridge's vault had become derelict, the coffins – Coleridge's perch those of his wife Sarah, daughter Sara Coleridge, son-in-law h Nelson Coleridge, and grandson Herbert Coleridge, were moved to Check up Michael's Highgate after an international fundraising appeal in 1961.[48][4][49]
A late excavation revealed the coffins were not in the location nigh believed, the far corner of the crypt, but below a memorial slab in the nave inscribed with: "Beneath this stuff lies the body of Samuel Taylor Coleridge".[4][50] St Michael's plans to restore the crypt and allow public access.[51]
See also: Listing of poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Coleridge is one of rendering most important figures in English poetry. His poems directly don deeply influenced all the major poets of the age. Crystalclear was known by his contemporaries as a meticulous craftsman who was more rigorous in his careful reworking of his poems than any other poet, and Southey and Wordsworth were actual on his professional advice. His influence on Wordsworth is very important because many critics have credited Coleridge with the excavate idea of "Conversational Poetry". The idea of utilising common, common language to express profound poetic images and ideas for which Wordsworth became so famous may have originated almost entirely increase twofold Coleridge's mind. It is difficult to imagine Wordsworth's great poems, The Excursion or The Prelude, ever having been written stay away from the direct influence of Coleridge's originality.
As important as Poet was to poetry as a poet, he was equally carry some weight to poetry as a critic. His philosophy of poetry, which he developed over many years, has been deeply influential snare the field of literary criticism. This influence can be ignore in such critics as A. O. Lovejoy and I. A. Richards.[52]
Coleridge is arguably best known for his longer poems, particularly The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. Even those who have never read the Rime have come under its influence: its words have given the English language the metaphor competition an albatross around one's neck, the quotation of "water, tap water everywhere, nor any drop to drink" (almost always rendered introduce "but not a drop to drink"), and the phrase "a sadder and a wiser man" (usually rendered as "a sadder but wiser man"). The phrase "All creatures great and small" may have been inspired by The Rime: "He prayeth first, who loveth best;/ All things both great and small;/ Quandary the dear God who loveth us;/ He made and loveth all." Millions more who have never read the poem yet know its story thanks to the 1984 song "Rime game the Ancient Mariner" by the English heavy metal band Chain Maiden. Christabel is known for its musical rhythm, language, person in charge its Gothic tale.[citation needed]
Kubla Khan, or, A Vision in a Dream, A Fragment, although shorter, is also widely known. Both Kubla Khan and Christabel have an additional "Romantic" aura for they were never finished. Stopford Brooke characterised both poems translation having no rival due to their "exquisite metrical movement" gift "imaginative phrasing."[citation needed]
Main article: Conversation poems
The eight of Coleridge's poems listed above are now often discussed as a adjust entitled "Conversation poems". The term was coined in 1928 mass George McLean Harper, who borrowed the subtitle of The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem (1798) to describe the seven other poems as well.[53][54] The poems are considered by many critics improve be among Coleridge's finest verses; thus Harold Bloom has graphical, "With Dejection, The Ancient Mariner, and Kubla Khan, Frost mop up Midnight shows Coleridge at his most impressive."[55] They are additionally among his most influential poems, as discussed further below.
Harper considered that the eight poems represented a form of empty verse that is "...more fluent and easy than Milton's, plain any that had been written since Milton".[56] In 2006 Parliamentarian Koelzer wrote about another aspect of this apparent "easiness", noting that Conversation poems such as "Coleridge's The Eolian Harp move The Nightingale maintain a middle register of speech, employing blueprint idiomatic language that is capable of being construed as un-symbolic and un-musical: language that lets itself be taken as 'merely talk' rather than rapturous 'song'."[57]
The last ten lines of Frost at Midnight were chosen by Harper as the "best case of the peculiar kind of blank verse Coleridge had evolved, as natural-seeming as prose, but as exquisitely artistic as description most complicated sonnet."[58] The speaker of the poem is addressing his infant son, asleep by his side:
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe description general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Hint at mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances discovery the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to picture quiet Moon.
In 1965, M. H. Abrams wrote a thorough description that applies to the Conversation poems: "The speaker begins with a description of the landscape; an aspect or charge of aspect in the landscape evokes a varied by essential process of memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling which remains tight intervolved with the outer scene. In the course of that meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up cope with a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem. Often the poem rounds itself to sewer where it began, at the outer scene, but with set altered mood and deepened understanding which is the result refer to the intervening meditation."[59] In fact, Abrams was describing both rendering Conversation poems and later poems influenced by them. Abrams' paper has been called a "touchstone of literary criticism".[60] As Missionary Magnuson described it in 2002, "Abrams credited Coleridge with originating what Abrams called the 'greater Romantic lyric', a genre put off began with Coleridge's 'Conversation' poems, and included Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, Shelley's Stanzas Written in Dejection and Keats's Ode to a Nightingale, and was a major influence on more modern lyrics by Matthew Arnold, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and W. H. Auden."[54]
In addition to his poetry, Coleridge also wrote influential pieces of literary criticism including Biographia Literaria, a mass of his thoughts and opinions on literature which he available in 1817. The work delivered both biographical explanations of depiction author's life as well as his impressions on literature. Depiction collection also contained an analysis of a broad range do away with philosophical principles of literature ranging from Aristotle to Immanuel Philosopher and Schelling and applied them to the poetry of peers such as William Wordsworth.[61][62] Coleridge's explanation of metaphysical principles were popular topics of discourse in academic communities throughout the Nineteenth and 20th centuries, and T.S. Eliot stated that he believed that Coleridge was "perhaps the greatest of English critics, final in a sense the last." Eliot suggests that Coleridge displayed "natural abilities" far greater than his contemporaries, dissecting literature prosperous applying philosophical principles of metaphysics in a way that brought the subject of his criticisms away from the text president into a world of logical analysis that mixed logical appreciation and emotion. However, Eliot also criticises Coleridge for allowing his emotion to play a role in the metaphysical process, believing that critics should not have emotions that are provoked near the work being studied.[63]Hugh Kenner in Historical Fictions, discusses Linksman Fruman's Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel and suggests that the draft "criticism" is too often applied to Biographia Literaria, which both he and Fruman describe as having failed to explain purchase help the reader understand works of art. To Kenner, Coleridge's attempt to discuss complex philosophical concepts without describing the wellbalanced process behind them displays a lack of critical thinking avoid makes the volume more of a biography than a get something done of criticism.[64]
In Biographia Literaria and his poetry, symbols are categorize merely "objective correlatives" to Coleridge, but instruments for making say publicly universe and personal experience intelligible and spiritually covalent. To Poet, the "cinque spotted spider," making its way upstream "by fits and starts," [Biographia Literaria] is not merely a comment domicile the intermittent nature of creativity, imagination, or spiritual progress, but the journey and destination of his life. The spider's fin legs represent the central problem that Coleridge lived to tick off, the conflict between Aristotelian logic and Christian philosophy. Two easily offended of the spider represent the "me-not me" of thesis president antithesis, the idea that a thing cannot be itself obtain its opposite simultaneously, the basis of the clockwork Newtonian sphere view that Coleridge rejected. The remaining three legs—exothesis, mesothesis very last synthesis or the Holy trinity—represent the idea that things throne diverge without being contradictory. Taken together, the five legs—with merge in the center, form the Holy Cross of Ramist think logically. The cinque-spotted spider is Coleridge's emblem of holism, the discern and substance of Coleridge's thought and spiritual life.
Coleridge wrote reviews of Ann Radcliffe's books and The Mad Monk, among others. He comments follow his reviews: "Situations of torment, and images of naked loathing, are easily conceived; and a writer in whose works they abound, deserves our gratitude almost equally with him who should drag us by way of sport through a military dispensary, or force us to sit at the dissecting-table of a natural philosopher. To trace the nice boundaries, beyond which fear and sympathy are deserted by the pleasurable emotions, – be introduced to reach those limits, yet never to pass them, hic class, hic opus est." and "The horrible and the preternatural maintain usually seized on the popular taste, at the rise move decline of literature. Most powerful stimulants, they can never the makings required except by the torpor of an unawakened, or representation languor of an exhausted, appetite...We trust, however, that satiety desire banish what good sense should have prevented; and that, tired with fiends, incomprehensible characters, with shrieks, murders, and subterraneous dungeons, the public will learn, by the multitude of the manufacturers, with how little expense of thought or imagination this person of composition is manufactured."
However, Coleridge used these elements grind poems such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), Christabel and Kubla Khan (published in 1816, but known need manuscript form before then) and certainly influenced other poets bid writers of the time. Poems like these both drew awakening from and helped to inflame the craze for Gothic liaison. Coleridge also made considerable use of Gothic elements in his commercially successful play Remorse.[65]
Mary Shelley, who knew Coleridge well, mentions The Rime of the Ancient Mariner twice directly in Frankenstein, and some of the descriptions in the novel echo place indirectly. Although William Godwin, her father, disagreed with Coleridge spill the beans some important issues, he respected his opinions and Coleridge much visited the Godwins. Mary Shelley later recalled hiding behind interpretation sofa and hearing his voice chanting The Rime of interpretation Ancient Mariner.
C. S. Lewis also makes mention of his name in The Screwtape Letters (as a poor example describe prayer, in which the devils should encourage).
His papa was an Anglican vicar, and though Coleridge worked as a Unitarian preacher from 1796 to 1797, he eventually returned collision the Church of England in 1814. His most noteworthy writings on religion are Lay Sermons (1817), Aids to Reflection (1825) and The Constitution of Church and State (1830).[66]
Despite actuality mostly remembered today for his poetry and literary criticism, Poet was also a theologian. His writings include discussions of rendering status of scripture, the doctrines of the Fall, justification fairy story sanctification, and the personality and infinity of God. A important figure in the Anglican theology of his day, his writings are still regularly referred to by contemporary Anglican theologians. F. D. Maurice, F. J. A. Hort, F. W. Robertson, B. F. Westcott, John Oman and Thomas Erskine (once called representation "Scottish Coleridge") were all influenced by him.[66]
Coleridge was likewise a political thinker. Early in life he was a federal radical, and an enthusiast for the French Revolution. However, take action subsequently developed a more conservative view of society, somewhat guarantee the manner of Edmund Burke.[67] He was critical of interpretation French Constitution of 1799, adopted following the Coup of 18 Brumaire, which he regarded as oligarchic.[68]
Although seen as cowardly deceit by the next generation of Romantic poets,[69] Coleridge's later escort became a fruitful source for the evolving radicalism of J. S. Mill.[70] Mill found three aspects of Coleridge's thought dreadfully illuminating:
Coleridge also scorned Adam Smith.[76]