Learner Resource 3: literary contexts
1. Match the relevant literary contextual information to the 15 selected poems named for Coleridge. Some context boxes will match with
more than one poem, and some poems will match with more than one context box.
2. For each pairing of poem and contextual information, explain how the latter helps to understand the text.
You may need to research further using the links from the ‘Context’ section of the Delivery Guide’.
In 1798, Coleridge collaborated with
William Wordsworth to publish a
volume of poetry called Lyrical
Ballads. This volume would
revolutionise the way that poetic
diction and quotidian subject matter
would be viewed in English poetry
The publication in 1765 of Thomas
Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English
Poetry signalled an important move
away from Neo-Classicist poetry in
favour of the ballad form and
antiquarian subject matter.
In 1802, William Wordsworth wrote
the first part of his short philosophical
poem, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality
from Recollections of Early
Childhood’. He gave a copy of this first
part to Coleridge and went on to
complete the poem in 1804.
The ‘fragment’ or incomplete poetic
text became fashionable in German
and British texts from the latter part of
the eighteenth century. Many poems
were published as fragments from this
period until the early nineteenth
century.
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Coleridge
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During the most fertile collaborative
period with the Wordsworths (17971802), Coleridge lived primarily
around Stowey and the Lake District.
Most composition of his major poetry
began in these areas whilst walking
and talking.
The Gothic genre gained popularity
from 1764 with the publication of
Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto.
Coleridge read English and German
Gothic texts, and was a particular fan
of Schiller’s 1781 play, Die Räuber
[The Robbers].
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Coleridge and Wordsworth took the
eighteenth-century concept of the
topographical or ‘loco-descriptive’
poem (a poem on a specific
landscape) and developed blank
verse philosophical meditations on the
relationship between man, society,
and nature.
In 1807, Wordsworth shared the first
long version of his autobiographical
masterpiece, The Prelude with
Coleridge, which he completed in
1805. Both Coleridge and Wordsworth
had a tendency to revise and publish
texts compose much earlier.
After the publication of ‘Christabel’ in
1816 and Sibylline Leaves in 1817,
Coleridge published little major poetry,
seeing his role more as a literary critic
and a philosopher. His most famous
volume of criticism, Biographia
Literaria, was published in 1817.
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Copyright © OCR 2015