Samuel Taylor Coleridge.doc

Samuel Taylor ColeridgeA major 19th-century English lyrical poetPoint of view 1. Philosophically and critically, Coleridge opposed the limitedly rationalistic trends of the 18th-century thought. He courageously stemmed the tide of the prevailing doctrines derived from Hume and Hartley, advocating a more spiritual and religious interpretation of life, based on what he had learnt from Kant and Schelling. He believed that art is the only permanent revelation of the nature of reality. A poet should realize the vague intimations (微妙的启示) derived from his unconsciousness without sacrificing the vitality of the inspiration. 2. Politically, Coleridge was first an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution. He even designed his Pantisocracy as a society where everyone would be equal to anyone else. But in his later period, he was a fiery foe of the rights of man, of Jacobinism. He insisted that a government should be based upon the will of the propertied classes only, and should impose itself upon the rest of the community from above. Major works Coleridges actual achievement as poet can be divided into two remarkably diverse groups: the demonic the conversationalThe demonic group includes his three masterpieces: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khan. Mysticism and demonism with strong imagination are the distinctive features of this group. The poems are set in a strange territory of the poets memory and dream, where events are reigned beyond the control of reason. Unifying the group is a magical quest pattern which intends as its goal to reconcile the poets self-consciousness with a higher order of being associated with divine forgiveness.The Rime of the Ancient Mariner told an adventurous story of a sailor. By neglecting the law of hospitality, the mariner cruelly shot an albatross which flew to the ship through thick fog. Then disaster fell onto the ship. The breeze died down; the ship stopped; the hot tropical sun shone all day long. The other sailors died of thirst one after another, while the mariner alone was alive, being tortured all the time with thirst and the horror of death. Only when the mariner finally repented and blessed for the water snake did the spell break and the ship was then able to go back home. The story moves on through a world of wonder, from mysterious preface to inevitable close. Each incident stands out clear and vivid; each corresponding change in the soul of the mariner is registered. The whole experience is an ordeal of oppressive weariness. The mariners sin was that in killing the albatross he rejected a social offering, he obliterated something that loved him and represented in a supernatural way the possibility of affection in the world. Of course, the mariner finally recoverd from the isolation joyfully; but the joy came only from his own changed attitude and his willingness to lock differently on the world. From this poem, we can infer that Coleridge believed the universe as the projection not of reasoned beliefs but of irrational fears and guilty feelings. He had created the kind of universe which his own inexplicable sins and their consequences might have suggested to him . His religious conflicts enforced him to describe the universe in his work as the Christian universe gone mad.Christabel uses a freer version of the ballad form to create an atmosphere of the Gothic horror at once delicate and sinister. The tale is an old one of a serpent disguised as a beautiful lady to victimize an innocent maiden. The standard trappings of Gothic horror - the remote castle and the wood, the virgin Christabel in peril and the subtly wicked Geraldine - dramatize a confrontation with evil through disturbing suggestions of the sexual, supernatural and fantastic elements of dream. The moaning of the owl and the crowing of the cock, together with response of the dog to the regular strokes of the clock, produce the effect of mystery and horror in the dead night. Opposed to the nightmarish are images of religious grace and the spring of love that had gushed from the poets heart. It has been said that the thing attempted in Christabel is the most difficult in the whole field of romance, and nothing could come nearer the mark. The miraculous element, which lies on the face of The Ancient Mariner, is here driven beneath the surface.Kubla Khan was composed in a dream after Coleridge took the opium. The poet was reading about Kubla Khan when he fell asleep. The images of the river, of the magnificent palace and other marvelous scenes deposited in his unconsciousness were expressed into about two or three hundred lines. But when he was writing them down, a stranger interrupted him and the vision was never recaptured. Only 53 lines survived.The conversational group Among this group, Frost at Midnight is the most important. The poem is an intimate record of his personal thoughts in a midnight solitude on his infant son Hartley. In the surroundings of sea, hill and wood, Coleridges mind moves backwards and forwards in time and space from the interior of the cottage to nature and from his own boyhood to that imagined for Hartley amid a world of sublime physical and spiritual freedom. Dejection: An Ode is also an intimate personal piece in which Coleridge utters his innermost thoughts and sentiments. Generally, the conversational group speaks more directly of an allied theme: the desire to go home, not to the past, but to what Hart Crane beautifully called an improved infancy. Each of these poems verges upon a kind of vicarious and purgatorial atonement, in which Coleridge must fail or suffer so that someone he loves may succeed or experience joy. Coleridge is one of the first critics to give close critical attention to language, maintaining that the true end of poetry is to give pleasure through the medium of beauty. The chapters of great importance in Biographia Literaria are his comments on Wordsworths theory of poetic style. He sings highly Wordsworths purity of language, deep and subtle thoughts, perfect truth to nature and his imaginative power. But he denies Wordsworths claim that there is no essential difference between the language of poetry and the language spoken by common people. In analyzing Shakespeare, Coleridge emphasizes the philosophic aspect, reading more into the subject than the text and going deeper into the inner reality than only caring for the outer form. Coleridge was esteemed by some of his contemporaries and is generally recognized today as a lyrical poet and literary critic of the first rank. His poetic themes range from the supernatural to the domestic. His treatises, lectures, and compelling conversational powers made him one of the most influential English literary critics and philosophers of the 19th century. Selected Reading Kubla KhanIntroduction Kubla Khan, the shortest and the most fragmentary of the three demonic poems, tells no tale but is simply a series of very picturesque descriptions, primarily of Kubla Khans pleasure dome and secondarily of an Abyssinian maid. Xanadu is Coleridges altered version for Xamdu which in Chinese means the upper or northern capital for Mongol Empire, after Kubla Khan, the first emperor of the Yuan Dynasty in China, first completed the conquest of China and had his lower or southern capital in Beijing whereas the Mongols of an earlier age under Genghis Khan had conquered huge territories in Asia and Europe.Summary The speaker describes the stately pleasure-dome built in Xanadu according to the decree of Kubla Khan, in the place where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea. Walls and towers were raised around twice five miles of fertile ground, filled with beautiful gardens and forests. A deep romantic chasm slanted down a green hill, occasionally sending forth a violent and powerful burst of water, so great that it flung rocks up with it like rebounding hail. The river ran five miles through the woods, finally sinking in tumult to a lifeless ocean. Amid that tumult, in the place as holy and enchanted / As eer beneath a waning moon was haunted / By woman wailing to her demon-lover, Kubla heard ancestral voices bringing prophesies of war. The pleasure-domes shadow floated on the waves, where the mingled sounds of the fountain and the caves could be heard. It was a miracle of rare device, the speaker says, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! The speaker says that he once saw a damsel with a dulcimer, an Abyssinian maid who played her dulcimer and sang of Mount Abora. He says that if he could revive her symphony and song within him, he would rebuild the pleasure-dome out of music, and all who heard him would cry Beware! of His flashing eyes, his floating hair! The hearers would circle him thrice and close their eyes with holy dread, knowing that he had tasted honeydew, and drunk the milk of Paradise. Form The chant-like, musical incantations of Kubla Khan result from Coleridges masterful use of iambic tetrameter and alternating rhyme schemes. The first stanza is written in tetrameter with a rhyme scheme of ABAABCCDEDE, alternating between staggered rhymes and couplets. The second stanza expands into tetrameter and follows roughly the same rhyming pattern, also expanded- ABAABCCDDFFGGHIIHJJ. The third stanza tightens into tetrameter and rhymes ABABCC. The fourth stanza continues the tetrameter of the third and rhymes ABCCBDEDEFGFFFGHHG. Commentary Along with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan is one of Coleridges most famous and enduring poems. The story of its composition is also one of the most famous in the history of English poetry. As the poet explains in the short preface to this poem, he had fallen asleep after taking an anodyne prescribed in consequence of a slight disposition (this is a euphemism for opium, to which Coleridge was known to be addicted). Before falling asleep, he had been reading a story in which Kubla Khan commanded the building of a new palace; Coleridge claims that while he slept, he had a fantastic vision and composed simultaneously-while sleeping-some two or three hundred lines of poetry, if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or conscious effort. Waking after about three hours, the poet seized a pen and began writing furiously; however, after copying down the first three stanzas of his dreamt poem-the first three stanzas of the current poem as we know it-he was interrupted by a person on business from Porlock, who detained him for an hour. After this interruption, he was unable to recall the rest of the vision or the poetry he had composed in his opium dream. It is thought that the final stanza of the poem, thematizing the idea of the lost vision through the figure of the damsel with a dulcimer and the milk of Paradise, was written post-interruption. The mysterious person from Porlock is one of the most notorious and enigmatic figures in Coleridges biography; no one knows who he was or why he disturbed the poet or what he wanted or, indeed, whether any of Coleridges story is actually true. But the person from Porlock has become a metaphor for the malicious interruptions the world throws in the way of inspiration and genius, and Kubla Khan, strange and ambiguous as it is, has become what is perhaps the definitive statement on the obstruction and thwarting of the visionary genius. Regrettably, the story of the poems composition, while thematically rich in and of itself, often overshadows the poem proper, which is one of Coleridges most haunting and beautiful. The first three stanzas are products of pure imagination: The pleasure-dome of Kubla Khan is