Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
Family and education
- youngest of 14 children of a country clergyman (the 10th who lived);
- a precocious and lonely child; lost his father (who loved him most) when he was nine;
- went to Christ’s Hospital in London (a good school, life-long friendship with Charles Lamb) but he felt
isolated;
- Studied in Cambridge but temperamentally not suited to academic discipline; when he abandoned the
university in 1794 he had no degree;
His early life was fundamentally determined by two intensive friendships:
- Robert Southey: plans of a Pantisocracy; marriage to Sara Fricker (Southey’s sister-in-law) – the
greatest misfortune of his life;
- 1797: Wordsworth became his neighbours: they were antithetical characters but both needed the other:
Wordsworth
slow but stubborn, consistent
liked physical exercise, athletic
understanding nature, reality
reserved in company
more lyrical in reciting poems (according to Lamb
composed while walking on a smooth path)
-
Coleridge
quick but soon tired: ‘there is no subject on which he has
not touched none on which he has rested’ (Hazlitt)
a bookworm, stout
introspection, reading
liked to talk a lot
more dramatic (composed while walking on uneven
ground or breaking through the branches of a copsewood)
Coleridge had a readiness to analyse himself which Wordsworth needed while Coleridge needed his
friend’s discipline
Coleridge selfless towards Wordsworth; Wordsworth did not encourage Coleridge’s ambitions:
Coleridge’s poetry disappeared into Wordsworth’s
Coleridge’s great poems were written in the one and a half years while he was Wordsworth’s
neighbour (1797-98)
His later life
- 1798: he received an annuity of £150 on condition that he devotes himself entirely to the study of
poetry and philosophy;
- he goes to study philosophy in Germany (influence of Kant, Schelling, Lessing);
- on his return his poetry is virtually finished; his marriage being really bad his health deteriorates, he
takes to opium (laudanum);
- separates from his wife in 1806 and settles in London (found refuge in the household of physician
James Gillman): a lecturer (between 1808-1819), journalist (The Friend), preacher, philosopher, critic:
Biographia Literaria: Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life & Opinions (1817)
Coleridge’s criticism (largely preserved in the Biographia and in some notes for his public lectures)
- fancy vs. imagination: combination vs. creation
- both fancy and imagination are necessary in poetry but true genius manifests itself in works of the
imagination: imagination is the soul of genuine poetry (life giving, vital power)
On the imagination (from Biographia Literaria):
‘It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create;… It is essentially vital even as all objects (as objects) are
essentially fixed and dead.’
the true poet: ‘diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and
magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination’
‘[The Imagination] reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with
difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of
novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects, a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order…’
-
A work of imagination, a ‘legitimate’ poem is thus an organic whole
Shakespeare: the epitome of true genius, of the imaginative poet
Many other aspects of his criticism: allegory vs. symbol, about the Lyrical Ballads, disagreement with
Wordsworth’s ideas in the ‘Preface’
Coleridge’s poetry:
- two distinct groups: the daemonic/mystical group (‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ‘Christabel’,
‘Kubla Khan’); the conversational group: ‘The Eolian Harp’, ‘Frost at Midnight’ (conversation
poems); ‘Dejection: an Ode’, ‘To William Wordsworth’
…it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least
romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to
procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes
poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of
novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's
attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; (from
chapter XIV of Biographia Literaria)
From ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound! (from Part I)
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony. (from Part IV)
The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea. (from Part II)
O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide wide sea:
So lonely 'twas, that God himself
Scarce seeméd there to be. (from Part VII)
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)
The second generation of the Romantics – different historical experience: they did not experience the
greatness of the French Revolution just the aftermath (Napoleon);
Byron’s life and personality are at least as fascinating as his poetry: an antithetical character:
- he was a beautiful person but half lame from his birth;
- he was an athlete, but struggling with a tendency to grow fat;
- an idol of women and of sexuality but in fact passive towards women (sodomistic and
fundamentally homosexual);
- a man of adventure but temperamentally melancholic;
- a revolutionary character but in fact he was passive in politics;
- the great champion of Greek liberty but he in fact despised the Greeks and died, rather
unromantically, of fever at Missolonghi;
- in literature he was considered the highest of high romantics but his poetic creed was a neoclassical one.
His life:
- he came from an aristocratic family, but was a déclassé (he unexpectedly inherited his great
uncle’s title at the age of 10)
- he was brought up by his neurotic mother and a governess (who seduced him);
- he went to good schools (Harrow), studied at Cambridge;
- grand tour of Europe (Spain, Greece, Albania) – a verse diary in Spenserian stanzas: published in
1812 as cantos I and II of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage;
- ‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous.’ great success in society;
- marriage: Annabella Milbanke;
- they separate: in 1816 Byron left England for good;
- Geneva: friendship with Shelley – Childe Harold (canto III);
- 1817: Venice (during this time he finished Canto IV and Manfred);
- from 1819 settled with the Countess Teresa Guiccioli (as a cavalier servante) until 1823 when he
went to Greece where he died in 1824;
His poetry includes verse tales after the success of Childe Harold I and II; verse drama: Manfred, Cain; –
in these the formation of the byronic hero;
satires: ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’ (1808), ‘The Vision of Judgement’ (1821), Don Juan
(1818-1824)
Don Juan
- unpopular at the time but Shelley recognized it as the great poem of the age;
- story: loose, often inconsistent, digressive structure; but the overall plot is suggestive of a grand
tour: an epic totality (another version of romantic epic, cf. Wordsworth’s Prelude);
o occasional parodies of epic conventions (‘Hail, Muse! Et caetera.’; Lambro, the pirate’s
return as Odysseus’s into his own house in disguise)
o epic totality: an omnium gatherum of contemporary life (in the digressions)
o it is a Romantic epic: the epic totality is achieved through the synthesizing presence of
the narrator’s personality (Byron is the real hero)
o technique: conscious use of form suggesting control (ottava rima – as contrasted with
blank verse and loose odaic forms), ironic distancing
***
The great object of life is sensation - to feel that we exist, even though in pain. It is this ‘craving void’
which drives us to gaming - to battle - to travel - to intemperate, but keenly felt pursuits of any description,
whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment. (letters, 6 Sep. 1813)
CCIV
If ever I should condescend to prose,
I’ll write poetical commandments, which
Shall supersede beyond all doubt all those
That went before; in these I shall enrich
My text with many things that no one knows,
And carry precept to the highest pitch:
I’ll call the work ‘Longinus o’er a Bottle,
Or, Every Poet his own Aristotle.’
X
His mother was a learnéd lady, famed
For every branch of every science known
In every Christian language ever named,
With virtues equall'd by her wit alone,
She made the cleverest people quite ashamed,
And even the good with inward envy groan,
Finding themselves so very much exceeded
In their own way by all the things that she did.
CCV
Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope;
Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey;
Because the first is crazed beyond all hope,
The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthy:
(Don Juan, Canto I)
XVI
…
To others' share let "female errors fall,"
For she had not even one – the worst of all.
The Byronic hero: ‘a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a
scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection.’ (Macaulay)
What makes the tales interesting is first a torrential fluency of verse, and a skill in varying it from time to
time to avoid monotony; and second, a genius for digression. Digression, indeed, is one of the valuable arts
of the story-teller. The effect of Byron’s digressions is to keep us interested in the story-teller himself, and
through this interest to interest us more in the story. (T.S. Eliot)
I
I want a hero: an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one;
Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,
I’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan –
We all have seen him in the pantomime,
Sent to the devil somewhat ere his time.
I would to heaven that I were so much clay,
As I am blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling Because at least the past were passed away And for the future - (but I write this reeling,
Having got drunk exceedingly today,
So that I seem to stand upon the ceiling)
I say - the future is a serious matter And so - for God’s sake - hock and soda-water!
(On the back of the manuscript of Canto I)