Major Works: Poetry: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (From Lyrical Ballads, 1798); "Frost at Midnight" (1798); "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" (1800); "Dejection: An Ode" (1802); "Christabel" (1816); "Kubla Khan" (1816); Criticism: Biographia Literaria (1815); "On Poesy or Art" (1818)," Shakespearean Criticism (1808-19)
Biographical Notes: Born the fourteenth child to a vicar and orphaned at eight, a gifted and precocious child comfortable in conversation with adults, Coleridge attended Cambridge but never received a degree. He was friends with a number of important Romantics, Wordsworth most notably. Like Wordsworth, he was inspired by the early French Revolution, and along with poet Robert Southey, Coleridge tried unsuccessfully to found a utopian commune in Pennsylvania (Pantisocracy). Like Wordsworth, too, he grew increasingly conservative as he aged. Coleridge lived on an annuity granted him so that he could pursue his genius however he wished, and he published poetry, gave lectures, and wrote essays influential well into the 20th century on various subjects in literary criticism, philosophy, psychology, religion, and art. His contemporaries described Coleridge as having an intense, inspiring presence and an immense personal charm. He was considered a genius and an even more powerful and gifted talker than he was a writer: the experience of hearing his brilliant thought and expression in casual conversation has been described as "hearing a great book talked." Coleridge took laudanum for chronic pain in the joints and nerves and struggled with opium addiction and its attendant guilt all his adult life. If Wordsworth is the poetic giant of the era, Coleridge was the intellectual giant of the Romantic period, the "great high Priest of the Imagination": Wordsworth and Coleridge are considered together the two "fathers" of English Romanticism.
His Poetry
Coleridge's poetry is notable for its colloquial language,
its specific imagery, which often translates into symbolic suggestiveness, its
technical experimentation, and its philosophical and psychological depth.
Most of his major poems fall into two categories:
"Conversation
poems": spontaneous, descriptive, meditative poems addressed to specific
friends or relatives in a personal, "conversational" tone. From
vivid description of instances of domestic life these poems move through a series
of naturally associated images—exact
but increasingly symbolic or suggestive images—which
lead to some significant insight or "message." Examples: "The
Eolian Harp," "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," "The
Nightingale," "Frost at Midnight."
Tales
of the imagination: longer narrative or visionary poems romantic or exotic
in setting and involving the "magic" of the supernatural: "The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "Christabel," and "Kubla
Khan," for instance.
A few random notes
An
important principle for Coleridge in poetry and art is "multëity
in unity," or the "unity of the manifold." He defined
the beautiful in nature and in art as "that in which the many, still seen
as many, become one" ("Principles of Genial Criticism").
Coleridge thought the greatest works in poetry, painting, and music combined
in perfect harmony all the separate parts of the work into a wonderfully, surprisingly
coherent whole, such as we see in the human body itself—all
the different parts and organs with their specific individual functions combine
in the magical whole of the human body. Constituent parts support and
explain one another: the images, actions, and characters in Shakespeare's plays,
for instance, or the lines, shapes, and colors in a painting. (In this
vein consider the symbolic suggestiveness of concrete imagery and the organic
flow of thought and association in the "Conversation poems.")
The
mind and the imagination: Coleridge differed from many of his
contemporaries who believed the "mind" consists of distinct, separate
"faculties." He saw the human mind as an organic unity of different
functions such as intellect, emotion, and physical sensation, all united under
the "completing power" of the creative imagination—another
sort of "multëity in unity."
In
addition, Coleridge explained that the "creative imagination" is the "shaping spirit of Imagination" (like Blake's "Poetic
Genius"), which does not passively receive sense impressions from a "dead"
external world but 1) actively creates experience in subjective interaction
with an external world in which all objects have a living spirit (primary imagination),
and 2) re-creates the world of the senses purely within the mind (secondary
imagination, as opposed to "fancy," or recollection).
Coleridge
thought great poets combined beauty and deep thought in their
work; he saw the greatest poets as philosophers and writers of verse.
He thought poetry a conscious blend of passion or spontaneous impulse and voluntary,
willed purpose.
Among
other things, Coleridge's criticism is important for its development of objective
critical judgment based not on external standards (as in neoclassicism), but
instead on the merits within the work according to its own "comparative dignity
and importance" and its own united, organic total effect. He believed
that works of genius create laws adhering to their own purposes: outside forms
and rules (dramatic unities, etc.) should not be imposed upon them (Shakespearean
Criticism). This new way of evaluating poetry allowed for new types
of poems which departed from traditions of the past to receive serious critical
attention and acceptance.
Coleridge
believed the aim of literary criticism should be to establish important principles
of new writing, not to provide rules for judging existing writings.
Biographia
Literaria is probably the single most significant
work of criticism by the most important critic in the first half of the 19th
century. Its comments on poetry in general and on Wordsworth in particular
are still meaningful and relevant today.