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OverviewHe is remembered as an English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher. His Lyrical Ballads, written with William Wordsworth, heralded the English Romantic movement, and his Biographia Literaria (1817) is the most significant work of general literary criticism produced in the English Romantic period.
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Arts: Humanities: Literature: Poetry: Poets: Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)
Arts: Humanities: Literature: Poetry: Poets: Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
. . . so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Coleridge's attempts to learn this "language" and trace it through
the ancient traditions of mankind also led him during this period to return
to the visionary interests of his schooldays: as he ransacked works of
comparative religion and mythology, he was exploring the possibility that
all religions and mythical traditions, with their general agreement
on the unity of God and the immortality of the soul, sprang from a universal
life consciousness, which was expressed particularly through the phenomena
of human genius.
While these speculations were at their most
intense, he
retired to a lonely farmhouse near Culbone,
Somersetshire, and, according to his own account,
composed under the influence of laudanum the
mysterious poetic fragment known as "Kubla Khan."
The exotic imagery and rhythmic chant of this poem
have led many critics to conclude that it should be read
as a "meaningless reverie" and enjoyed merely for its
vivid and sensuous qualities. An examination of the
poem in the light of Coleridge's psychological and
mythological interests, however, suggests that it has,
after all, a complex structure of meaning and is
basically a poem about the nature of human genius. The
first two stanzas show the two sides of what Coleridge
elsewhere calls "commanding genius": its creative
aspirations in time of peace as symbolized in the
projected pleasure dome and gardens of the first stanza;
and its destructive power in time of turbulence as
symbolized in the wailing woman, the destructive
fountain, and the voices prophesying war of the second
stanza. In the final stanza the poet writes of a state of
"absolute genius" in which, if inspired by a visionary
"Abyssinian maid," he would become endowed with
the creative, divine power of a sun god--an Apollo or
Osiris subduing all around him to harmony by the
fascination of his spell.
Coleridge was enabled to explore the same
range of
themes less egotistically in "The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner," composed during the autumn and winter of
1797-98. For this, his most famous poem, he drew
upon the ballad form. The main narrative tells how a
sailor who has committed a crime against the life
principle by slaying an albatross suffers from torments,
physical and mental, in which the nature of his crime is
made known to him. The underlying life power against
which he has transgressed is envisaged as a power
corresponding to the influx of the sun's energy into all
living creatures, thereby binding them together in a
joyful communion. By killing the bird that hovered near
the ship, the mariner has destroyed one of the links in
this process. His own consciousness is consequently
affected: the sun, previously glorious, is seen as a
bloody sun, and the energies of the deep are seen as
corrupt.
All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.
The very deep did rot; O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
Only at night do these energies display a sinister beauty.
About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white.
After the death of his shipmates, alone and becalmed, devoid of a sense
of movement or even of time passing, the mariner is in a hell created by
the absence of any link with life. Eventually, however, a chance
sight of water snakes flashing like golden fire in the darkness, answered
by an outpouring of love from his heart, reinitiates the creative
process: he is given a brief vision of the inner unity of the universe,
in which all living things hymn their source in an interchange of
harmonies. Restored to his native land, he remains haunted by what he has
experienced but is at least delivered from nightmare, able to see the ordinary
processes of human life with a new sense of their wonder and mercifulness.
These last qualities are reflected in the poem's attractive combination
of vividness and sensitivity. The placing of it at the beginning of Lyrical
Ballads was evidently intended to provide a context for the sense of wonder
in common life that marks many of Wordsworth's contributions.
While this volume was going through the press,
Coleridge began a complementary poem, a Gothic ballad entitled "Christabel,"
in which he aimed to show how naked energy might be redeemed through contact
with a spirit of innocent love.
Early in 1798 Coleridge had again found himself
preoccupied with political issues. The French
Revolutionary government had suppressed the states of
the Swiss Confederation, and Coleridge expressed his
bitterness at this betrayal of the principles of the
Revolution in a poem entitled "France: An Ode."
At this time the brothers Josiah and Thomas
Wedgwood, who were impressed by Coleridge's
intelligence and promise, offered him in 1798 an
annuity of 150 as a means of
subsistence while he pursued his intellectual concerns.
He used his new independence to visit Germany with
Wordsworth and Wordsworth's sister, Dorothy. While
there Coleridge attended lectures on physiology and
biblical criticism at Göttingen. He thus became aware
of developments in German scholarship that were
little-known in England until many years later.
On his return to England, the tensions of his marriage
were exacerbated when he fell in love with Sara
Hutchinson, the sister of Wordsworth's future wife, at
the end of 1799. His devotion to the Wordsworths in
general did little to help matters, and for some years
afterward Coleridge was troubled by domestic strife,
accompanied by the worsening of his health and by his
increasing dependence on opium. His main literary
achievements during the period included another
section of "Christabel." In 1802 Coleridge's domestic
unhappiness gave rise to "Dejection: An Ode,"
originally a longer verse letter sent to Sara Hutchinson
in which he lamented the corrosive effect of his
intellectual activities when undertaken as a refuge from
the lovelessness of his family life. The poem employs
the technique of his conversational poems; the sensitive
rhythms and phrasing that he had learned to use in them
are here masterfully deployed to represent his own
depressed state of mind.
Although Coleridge hoped to combine a platonic love
for Sara with fidelity to his wife and children and to
draw sustenance from the Wordsworth household, his
hopes were not realized, and his health deteriorated
further. He therefore resolved to spend some time in a
warmer climate and, late in 1804, accepted a post in
Malta as secretary to the acting governor. Later he
spent a long time journeying across Italy, but, despite
his hopes, his health did not improve during his time
abroad. The time spent in Malta had been a time of
personal reappraisal, however. Brought into direct
contact with men accustomed to handling affairs of
state, he had found himself lacking an equal
forcefulness and felt that in consequence he often
forfeited the respect of others. On his return to England
he resolved to become more manly and decisive.
Within a few months he had finally decided to separate
from his wife and to live for the time being with the
Wordsworths. Southey atoned for his disastrous
youthful advice by exercising a general oversight of
Coleridge's family for the rest of his days.
Coleridge published a periodical, The Friend, from
June 1809 to March 1810 and ceased only when Sara
Hutchinson, who had been acting as amanuensis, found
the strain of the relationship too much for her and
retired to her brother's farm in Wales. Coleridge,
resentful that Wordsworth should apparently have
encouraged his sister-in-law's withdrawal, resolved
shortly afterward to terminate his working relationship
with William and Dorothy Wordsworth and to settle in
London again.
The period immediately following was the darkest of
his life. His disappointment with Wordsworth was
followed by anguish when a wounding remark of
Wordsworth's was carelessly reported to him. For
some time he remained in London, nursing his
grievances and producing little. Opium retained its
powerful hold on him, and the writings that survive
from this period are redolent of unhappiness, with
self-dramatization veering toward self-pity.
In spite of this, however, there also appear signs of a
slow revival, principally because for the first time
Coleridge knew what it was to be a fashionable figure.
A course of lectures he delivered during the winter of
1811-12 attracted a large audience; for many years
Coleridge had been fascinated by William
Shakespeare's achievement, and his psychological
interpretations of the chief characters were new and
exciting to his contemporaries. During this period,
Coleridge's play Osorio, written many years before,
was produced at Drury Lane with the title Remorse in
January 1813.
Late life and works.
In the end, consolation came from an unexpected
source. In dejection, unable to produce extended work
or break the opium habit, he spent a long period with
friends in Wiltshire, where he was introduced to
Archbishop Robert Leighton's commentary on the First
Letter of Peter. In the writings of this 17th-century
divine, he found a combination of tenderness and
sanctity that appealed deeply to him and seemed to
offer an attitude to life that he himself could fall back
on. The discovery marks an important shift of balance
in his intellectual attitudes. Christianity, hitherto one
point of reference for him, now became his "official"
creed. By aligning himself with the Anglican church of
the 17th century at its best, he hoped to find a firm point
of reference that would both keep him in
communication with orthodox Christians of his time
(thus giving him the social approval he always needed,
even if only from a small group of friends) and enable
him to pursue his former intellectual explorations in the
hope of reaching a Christian synthesis that might help to
revitalize the English church both intellectually and
emotionally.
One effect of the adoption of this basis for his
intellectual and emotional life was a sense of liberation
and an ability to produce large works again. He drew
together a collection of his poems (published in 1817
as Sibylline Leaves) and wrote Biographia Literaria
(1817), a rambling and discursive but highly
stimulating and influential work in which he outlined
the evolution of his thought and developed an extended
critique of Wordsworth's poems.
For the general reader Biographia Literaria is a
misleading volume, since it moves bewilderingly
between autobiography, abstruse philosophical
discussion, and literary criticism. It has, however, an
internal coherence of its own. The book's individual
components--first an entertaining account of
Coleridge's early life, then an account of the ways in
which he became dissatisfied with the associationist
theories of David Hartley and other 18th-century
philosophers, then a reasoned critique of Wordsworth's
poems--are fascinating. Over the whole work hovers
Coleridge's veneration for the power of imagination:
once this key is grasped, the unity of the work becomes
evident.
A new dramatic piece, Zapolya, was also published in
1817. In the same year, Coleridge became associated
for a time with the new Encyclopaedia Metropolitana,
for which he planned a novel system of organization,
outlined in his Prospectus. These were more settled
years for Coleridge. Since 1816 he had lived in the
house of James Gillman, a surgeon at Highgate, north of
London. His election as a fellow of the Royal Society
of Literature in 1824 brought him an annuity of
105 and a sense of recognition.
In 1830 he joined the controversy that had arisen
around the issue of Catholic Emancipation by writing
his last prose work, On the Constitution of the Church
and State. The third edition of Coleridge's Poetical
Works appeared in time for him to see it before his
final illness and death in 1834.
Evaluation.
Coleridge's achievement has been given more widely
varying assessments than that of any other English
literary artist, though there is broad agreement that his
enormous potential was never fully realized in his
works. His stature as a poet has never been in doubt; in
"Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
he wrote two of the greatest poems in English literature
and perfected a mode of sensuous lyricism that is often
echoed by later poets. But he also has a reputation as
one of the most important of all English literary critics,
largely on the basis of his Biographia Literaria. In
Coleridge's view, the essential element of literature
was a union of emotion and thought that he described as
imagination. He especially stressed poetry's capacity
for integrating the universal and the particular, the
objective and the subjective, the generic and the
individual. The function of criticism for Coleridge was
to discern these elements and to lift them into conscious
awareness, rather than merely to prescribe or to
describe rules or forms.
In all his roles, as poet, social critic, literary critic,
theologian, and psychologist, Coleridge expressed a
profound concern with elucidating an underlying
creative principle that is fundamental to both human
beings and the universe as a whole. To Coleridge,
imagination is the archetype of this unifying force
because it represents the means by which the twin
human capacities for intuitive, non-rational
understanding and for organizing and discriminating
thought concerning the material world are reconciled. It
was by means of this sort of reconciliation of opposites
that Coleridge attempted, with considerable success, to
combine a sense of the universal and ideal with an
acute observation of the particular and sensory in his
own poetry and in his criticism. (J.B.B. /Ed.)
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (1990),
covers his life up to 1804. Oswald Doughty, Perturbed
Spirit: The Life and Personality of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge (1981), is a comprehensive biography. E.K.
Chambers, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1938, reprinted
1978), gives a good account of the events of his life;
and W. Jackson Bate, Coleridge (1968, reprinted
1987), is a brief account. Other biographical studies
include Norman Fruman, Coleridge, the Damaged
Archangel (1971); and John Cornwell, Coleridge,
Poet and Revolutionary, 1772-1804: A Critical
Biography (1973). Among the studies of his poetry are
John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study
in the Ways of the Imagination (1927, reprinted
1986); Stephen Potter, Coleridge and S.T.C. (1935,
reissued 1965); G. Wilson Knight, The Starlit Dome:
Studies in the Poetry of Vision (1941, reissued 1971);
Stephen Prickett, Coleridge and Wordsworth: The
Poetry of Growth (1970, reprinted 1980); John B.
Beer (ed.), Coleridge's Variety: Bicentenary Studies
(1974); and J. Robert Barth, Coleridge and the Power
of Love (1988). The poet's politics are examined in
Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The
Radical Years (1988); and John Morrow, Coleridge's
Political Thought (1990).
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